Dean’s Pants

The hard drive on my Linux box failed today, which leaves me, for the moment, in a Mac-only household (well, just me): two iMacs, a MacBook, an Apple TV, and an iPhone.

While my attention as of late has been focused on development in Second Life (as it pays the bills), I had been resisting the urge to come to real terms with the “former” in “former system administrator”. I’m a developer now and will hopefully continue to be. Unfortunately, the Linux box was doing a few very important things. Most importantly, it was running backups on itself and my main iMac. That’s not something I can just ignore.

So now my choices are:

• Get a new hard drive and repair the Linux box. This is simply not going to happen. In terms of daily life and of long-term planning, Linux and system administration are just diversions, distracting me from honing my development skills.
• Run a virtualized Linux on the old iMac (or a new Mac Mini). If I were to ditch Gentoo, this might be easier, but for the reasons above, it’s not an option either. I don’t want to divert my resources.
• Run backups on the old iMac (or a new Mac Mini) from Mac OS. This seems feasible. Assuming MacPorts is still an active project and they have builds of rsnapshot (the best backup utility I’ve used), this should be a no-brainer.

One problem remains, though. The filesystem on the backup drive (an external USB 2.0 and Firewire 400/800 drive) is ReiserFS over LVM. I have no idea if Mac OS can handle these natively, so I may have to do some swapping around with a virtualized Linux just to get my backups out.

In any case, I guess I’ll be Linux-free by the time this is all over.