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I wanted to use the new Firewire drive for that, but somehow or other that is less than reliable. While I was working last night, every hour or so I'd do a complete backup onto it, which typically took 3-10 minutes. But as the backup set got bigger (it ended at 4.6G) I started having problems. By the time I got to the end and wanted to do the last omnibus backup, it took me five tries to succeed. What happens is that it gets part way (a different amount each time) through the backup and then the drive gets wedged with its activity light frozen on, and a "failure" thought balloon on some icon or other in the tray. At that point, the firewire drive disappears from "My Computer" and the only way to get it back is to power cycle it, after which it works fine. So after spending about three hours this morning setting up the user account, and changing all the settings for the UI (no, I do NOT want you to make sounds for every goddamned event that ever happens) I wanted to do another backup, and after three tries which failed, I gave up. So I hooked one of my old USB 1 drives up to it and I'm doing a backup on that now. The good news is that it's reliable. The bad news is that it is painfully slow. A backup which would take ten minutes on the firewire drive is good for two and a half hours on the USB 1 drive. On the other hand, it will actually finish the job. At the same time as I bought the firewire drive, I also bought a USB 2 drive and a USB 2 interface for Antares. That's working now, and it is beautiful. Another 80G for me, and tonight I'm going to do a backup of Antares onto it. Folks, throw away your tape drives; a big USB 2 HD is the only way to do backups. (Assuming, that is, that it's more reliable than the firewire drive. They're both from the same company.) I'm also going to experiment with "sharing" the USB 2 drive with Spica and see if I can do a fast backup across the net onto it, after the USB 1 backup finishes in about another 20 minutes. Back to Spica, there are still a couple of small nagging issues. I have a niggling networking issue yet to be resolved: Spica can see Antares but Antares can't see Spica. That's acceptable; that's how it was with Canopus, too, and I can do what I need to with only one-way mounts since traffic still goes both ways. But I want to get it fixed. More serious is what XP seems to be doing with the scroll wheel on my mouse. While Spica does have a touch pad, when I'm using it here on the bridge I prefer to plug a mouse into the USB port and use that. It's got a scroll wheel on it (which is essential; I can no longer use a computer mouse without one) and every time I log in, the #lines scrolled is set to "1", which makes it useless. I can alter it to my preferred "5" and it will stay that way until the next time I log out, then when I log in again it's set back to "1". I've tried changing it with the mouse applet, with TweakUI. I change it as administrator and as a normal user. Nothing seems to help: somebody out there wants me to scroll by 1's. I really wish I knew what to do about this; I can tell that this is going to grate on me worse than OS/2's lousy font rendering did. XP is enormously flexible, and even permits the hardcore like me to shut lots of stuff off. A lot of people are thrilled about the new "ClearType" antialiasing. I dunno. I turned it on and I don't like how it looks, at least with the fonts I use and on this display. All it seems to do is make all the characters look fuzzy. So I'm using the older antialiasing, which I'm used to. Still to be done is to start messing with redesigning the network here. I'm going to try stacking everything behind Regulus (the Linux server which hosts this site) on its second ethernet interface. So if access to USS Clueless is a bit intermittent over the next couple of days, you'll know why. I wanted to hold off on that until the weekend because my traffic levels are lower anyway and there will be less disruption of my loyal crew. Then I'm going to go spend some time reading this web site and see what other nifty stuff I can do to (er, "with") XP. (discuss) |
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