Kalles blog

It is the best backup software i have seen. Sadly i used up the 10 licenses immediately. Is is some kind of desktop application. That is good. Some other have a web application. A desktop application can show more information and update it faster. It is easy to add computers to the inventory. Lots of settings and information. It is easy to see what the software is doing and if there was any error. Backups are fast. You can restore files in different ways. It can backup volumes, files and VMs.

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

https://www.veeam.com/blog/backup-replication-community-edition-features-description.html

It is Debian without systemd. I don’t understand why anybody would want that. Systemd is good. Starting services with scripts is stupid. The scrips can do anything. It is hard for me to know what the scripts do. It is difficult to know if you have stopped all the things a script have started.

Dear Friends and Software Freedom Lovers, Devuan Developers are delighted to announce the release of Devuan Chimaera 4.0 as the project’s new stable release. This is the result of many months of painstaking work by the Team and detailed testing by the wider Devuan community.

https://www.devuan.org/os/announce/chimaera-release-announce-2021-10-14

I tried to copy a CA certificate from one CA to another CA. At first it looked i had succeeded. I wanted to issue certificates from both CAs with the same keys. After i installed the certificates i got SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER every time. I did a search with google about that error. It was simple if i did not have CA root certificate with same name in the subject as i had in issuer on the server certificate i would get that error. I checked that i had added the root CA certificate to the trusted certificates in Firefox. It was there and the subject was correct. After building a debug version of Firefox and running it in the Visual studio debugger i understood how Firefox finds CA certs. It calculates a hash on the subject field and look for a CA cert in the cert database with the same hash. It calculates the hash from everything in subject. Length, string type and oid. When i looked at both certificates i noticed a small difference. One had PrintableString as type and the other had UTF8String for common name. That will make the hash different.

I am only going to use it as backup. I bought the cheapest Seagate. Name of the drive is “Seagate Barracuda 4TB”. I started a backup and it was faster than expected. After a few hours when i checked if the backup was finished it had stopped with an error. The error message said that the drive had been removed. It was still visible in explorer. In the system log i could see that the drive had been removed. Strange because it was now connected. I restarted the backup and a few hours later the backup had stopped because the drive was removed. The backup had stopped nearly at the same place as before. That looked suspicious. I started too google about this Seagate drive. It is a SMR drive with an CMR cache. My guess is that the drive ran out of CMR cache after 400GB and got so slow that the SAS card thought it had been removed or failed. I connected it through USB2 instead. The the backup would finish OK but it was much slower. I will keep this drive but i will never buy a SMR drive again.

I got the hard drive working. I tried different SAS HBA cards. With an old LSI card i could talk to the drive. When i ran smartctl i noticed a line “Formatted with type 2 protection”. That means the drive is formatted with 8 extra bytes for each block. I says block size 4096, but is not true. The 8 bytes should be removed by some SAS card before the operating system sees the data. It confused Linux and Windows. After formatting the drive with sg_format -F /dev/sda it looks OK.