Veeam Endpoint Backup is my new favorite backup tool for workstations and laptops. It is a great alternative to Drive Image XML and to Ghost.
Pluses:
- Reliable background scheduler
- Both image based and file level restore
- Efficient differential backups
- No server required needed, just point at a drive or network share
Minuses
- Have to register at Veeam to download it, but since the registration is free, that’s not a big deal
Normally, to mount VMDK on Linux, you can follow these steps
But what if the VMDK in question contains GPT with NTFS inside? How do you find the offset and mount it?
#first losetup the raw disk
losetup /dev/loop0 ./file-flat.vmdk
#to find out offset do this
parted /dev/loop0
unit s
print
#find the start offset of the partition you're looking for and multiply by 512 (mine was 135266304 - yours will likely differ)
#use the offset to mount the actual partition
losetup -o 135266304 /dev/loop1 /dev/loop0
#now mount it
mount.ntfs-3g /dev/loop1 /mnt/vmdk
Remember when this happened? You needed to tell someone over the phone a complicated string like: Gb`’b4&^faQ?
The conversation probably went something like this:
Alice: Upper case G, lower case b, slanted single quote, non slanted single quote …
Bob: What the hell are you talking about?!?! What’s a slanted quote?!
Alice: Why don’t I beep it over to you. Ready?
Bob: <Gets his decoder ready> …. Ready!
Alice: <Presses a button><BeepSchrrrrrBeepBeep .. .modem kind of a noise>
Bob: ok got it <sees Gb`’b4&^faQ?>
You can also beep things over with https://beepitover.com
After a lot of head scratching and googling I finally discovered why my ceph performance was so slow compared to NFS when using iscsi tgs on my gateway. I was getting only 0.1 MB/s compared to 90 MB/s that I was getting through NFS. It turns out that ESXi had hardware acceleration (VAAI) turned on for it’s iSCSI initiator – apparently it’s something that isn’t compatible with tgt. To turn it off I followed these steps
Turning off VAAI
I didn’t even have to reboot, or reload any configuration. The effect was immediate jump in performance back to normal.
NIST, LANL and Albion College set two significant distance records for distributing “keys” (or codes) for quantum encryption.
Press release
Why does this matter?
– Will make it impossible for adversaries to “sniff” network traffic without being detected.
– Until now prototypes were specialized (read expensive) equipment. This technology is inexpensive so it could soon be mainstream.
– With the real possibility of quantum computing developing the point of making all SSL and VPN encryption methods obsolete, this technology is one piece of the puzzle in replacing current encryption technology with the next generation.
IT experiments and recipes for disaster