It seems just a few weeks ago that I posted about making regular backups of your computer. That’s because it was just a few weeks ago! Which makes me wonder whether the server at my office read the post too, and decided to test me.

As well as regular backups the server has two hard disks. They mirror each other in what’s known as a RAID array (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). If one drive should ever fail, the other drive will keep going and users wont notice a thing. Just as well I took the time to set it up as I had an alert email from my server saying:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:
Device: /dev/hda, 1 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors


Hmmm, not good. Checking the server over the network revealed the following horrible image:

OK, that may not look like a horror story to you, but believe me when I say that’s worse than any movie company could create on a multi-million pound budget. The key is the MD2… line, which has a (F) in it = Failed disk, and the next line to really push the dagger home [2/1] means only 1 of the two disks is working and the _U is there to make sure you see it. each U represents a disk (one for each disk in my server). the _ (underscore) means that disk isn’t working. It’s a little more complicated than that (the 2 disks are setup as 3 RAID arrays and each array uses two physical partitions, and only one of the partitions on one of the disks has got an error) but we’ll skip the detail here and do this instead:

Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Don’t panic Mr Manwaring! All is not lost because Steve did his homework on this stuff.
Firstly, the server is quite happy to run on one disk. The users wouldn’t even know there was a problem
Secondly, this gives me time to order a new hard disk and plan an evening to install it without interrupting any ones work.

It would be nice for that swap over to be a small job, taking just 30 minutes. However, last time the server disk failed it took 6 hours. This time it has taken me 4 hours – although that includes a few breaks to drink more coffee and have a sandwich. I started at 9pm just after my PHP course finished and I’m sitting here,with my laptop in the server cupboard watching an image from heaven:

One part of the disk is back to normal, another part is rebuilding while I type, and in a few hours the rebuild process will be complete and once again the business will be protected from a hard disk failure. What a lovely way to start a morning. I think I’ll go to bed now.

I have to tell you all about a really cool PDF creation program I discovered called YAFPC. YAFPC stands for “Yet Another Free PDF Creator” and it can be free as the core parts are all available as open source software.

However, the author has also created an ‘Appliance’ version. Which means you can run the server from a CD, Memory Stick, or even a VMWare* appliance and turn an old server into a PDF creator – used simply by users connecting to it’s virtual printers and printing documents in the normal way.

On you own PC you can use a piece of software called Ghostscript to do that. What the YAFPC appliance does though is act as a print server on your network so you only need to set it up once for all of your users to use. When you print to it, you have options to make it Email the PDF to you and/or put it in a folder you can see on your Windows network. What’s really clever is that it needs no configuration to know who to email, it works out your email address from your Windows Log-in name. Even the folder visible on the windows network is visible as the users name! It took me all of 10 minutes to turn an old PC into a working PDF creation server on our network. The total cost of this software is just $50 (USD) – about 30. Note, you are not paying for the open source parts of the software, just the bit that joins them all together on an operation system that will run from a CD all configured and ready to run.

There’s more though. You can set up as many virtual PDF printers as you like, so as well as a plain white A4 PDF printer I set up a Letterhead Printer – you can create a quote and it uses a PDF version of our letterhead as the background. Therefore when we email quotes to customers it still has the professional looking formatting and brand image we spent so long working on.
This PDF Quote was created using the YAFPC Network appliance. (PDF File – 730Kb). This is an amazing piece of software – well worth investigating if you want to create PDF’s in an office.

One thing to say about PDF’s in general. The format of PDF was created by Adobe but they published it as an open format which is why you don’t need Adobe software to read or create PDF’s. The PDF format is now more than just a way of creating a fixed document. Current Adobe PDF software will let you allow people to make comments on your document and send them back to you so you can combine comments in one view (without them changing your document of course). However, most people create a single fixed document

*VMWare is a program that lets you run other operation systems on top of your current operation system. Therefore you can have a server running Windows XP, and VMWare will let you host “Virtual Machines” that could be running Linux, Solaris, Windows XP, Windows 3.1, DOS – anything! You can also run as many Virtual Machines as you want, configuring them to use Virtual networks within the machine or have their own IP address on your network (all sharing the hosts network card). This is clever as it lets you use one piece of hardware to run multiple servers, saving buying more hardware and also letting you separate different server roles across virtual machines. EG you can have an Email Virtual Server and a Web Proxy Virtual server, so any problems with the web proxy server wont affect the Email Virtual server. Cool eh! Better still, VMWare are trialling a FREE version of their VMWare Server program which will let you use hundreds of ready built appliances for FREE! So YAFPC can run on the server you already have without you having to alter any configuration settings. You can also create your own Virtual Servers if you buy VMWare workstation (which I already have as it means I can test software without having to re-install windows every 3 months). One day, I’ll write more about how I use VMWare, it’s on that ever growing list of things to post about