tmpfs, speed up your day

Heres another oldie I transplanted, 

I don’t know about you but at work I do spend a fair enough time waiting for source to build. However I have a small trick that I’d figure to share. Building source in a <tmpfs> is extremely fast.   Your working strictly from volatile memory, never touching the spindle on your pc. This is a great solution for those with SATA hard drives “non-ssd”  and they have small portions of code they want to build rather quickly!  Anyways give this a whirl.Create a directory anywhere on the filesystem.#mkdir dir1

Now mount that directory into memory.

#mount -t tmpfs -o size=5g tmpfs dir1

What this command is instructing the OS to do is mount the directory we just created to tmpfs. If by any chance that specific job exceeds 5GB then it will die.

It’s very important that you don’t exceed your available free memory. If so, then you will start to cache off of the disk drive. Which can cause the build to take an extremely long time to complete. So be careful!

It’s a pretty nifty trick just thought I’d post.

— L8r

Backup, Backup, Backup

So this post was originally on my old blog and figure I’d just transplant it here, put it on the bottom of the list.

So, every day you wake up eat some food, go to school or work. Perhaps out to eat, come home relax or do some activites and of course use your laptop or computer. However your home system is probably one of the top 5 items in your life that people take for granted (Yea the internet is in there somewhere). When it comes down to it, computers are machines and eventually machines fail. When they fail, it’s usually sionara to your data. What does that mean?    That means all of your pictures, homework , games , videos … gone.  forever.   yes it’s happened to me and others. Yet as frequently as this does occur, the average home pc user still does not backup their data.

Well some people would argue and say ” Then why am I utilizing these windows backup images ”  well.. Windows Backup is great if you make a mistake and delete a system file or whatnot. The truth is the data is still at risk since it all lives on 1 hard disk.

Browsing through the web today I caught a glimps of the following link:

http://www.junauza.com/2009/01/7-best-freeopen-source-backup-software.html

I really advise everyone to take a look and adopt one of these methods to backup your hard drive to another location. All of which are 100% Free and opensource. Invest some of your money into a External Harddisk <www.newegg.com> they really are not that expensive!

The way I see it, why spend ($1200) on a fast new DSLR camera if your not going to protect the photos you shoot?

Personally I use rsync , theres nothing like good ol command line:

# rsync -KHpEAXogt <source>  <destination>

Copy everything and keep file permissions, user & group ownership etc, sym and hard links.

Enjoy!!