Well, it’s been off to a slow start, mostly my fault, due to tax filings, getting up to speed and that stupid cold that has been affecting people in the $DAYJOB arena. It feels like someone is randonly stuffing cotton balls into my head and then pulling them out. Foggy… Clear… (repeat). Did I ever mention that I hate colds? You are not ill enough to be unable to work, just slow and stupid - and they linger!

Anyway, back to the mentoring. As I mentioned, this is to help with a backup system. The environment, servers, clients and software were already chosen, so I had to get up to speed on it. If you have never heard of BackupPC, you might want to take a look. If you are running Debian (and derivatives), it’s an easy install. If you are RHEL based, it’s a little more complicated to get started. You better like perl, as that is the software used to build the system and the command line version works as advertised. It also comes with a GUI script that requires a little care and feeding to get working. I did manage to get it working and backing up a windows XP box, so the requirements for the site have been met at a basic level on my test bed. The next part is to get it working as expected on the mentee’s (this is an accepted backformation). The word could also be protégé or telemachus, but I like the derivative version.

Communication is via a shared google document which serves to document the process as we go, so that is something new for me. Kind of a shared log. I’m hoping that there will be an update later today so that I can really get started and get this puppy doing tricks.

It’s been fun so far, but no real work has yet been accomplished, mostly due to my taking more time to get up to speed than I wanted it to take. We should be able to blast forward now that I have an environment that should be similar to the test lab. If you are interested, stay tuned.