Arch Linux Backup Server, part 2

“Earlier this week I reviewed the Antec 300 case that houses my
new home fileserver. Now it’s time to talk about what’s inside.

“It’s rather minimalistic right now, running headless and using
a single 2-terabyte SATA hard drive. There are three desktop PCs
and one laptop that will backup to this machine. I don’t need a big
RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) array, though one of
these days I’ll move up to a RAID 1 array, using Linux software
RAID. Nice simple mirroring with no parity or striping
complications. This doesn’t need to be complicated because all I
want are plain, easily-recoverable copies of the data on all of my
home computers.

“Screen Better Than Minicom

“I like using a serial terminal emulator to run headless servers
because the serial console always works when Ethernet goes haywire.
Linux Planet author Akkana Peck clued me in to using GNU screen to
administer the server instead of Minicom. Screen has a number of
advantages over Minicom: there is no setup, and it draws 20 lines
at a time instead of Minicom’s one, which makes it a lot more
comfortable for editing configuration files. First set up your
server to accept a serial console connection, connect it to another
PC with a serial cable, and then connect like this:”

Complete
Story