Extra secure, automated, offsite backup with TrueCrypt and Dropbox

Posted on August 3rd, 2011 webmaster No comments          Print

I love Dropbox, it really does simplify my life.

If you’ve never used Dropbox before, you should definitely check it out as it’s a very painless way to synchronize files from multiple computers and supports all major operating systems, including mobile platforms (it’s free for up to 2GB).  Your data is stored offsite so if someone breaks in to your home, steals your computer and that external hard drive lying next to it where you store all your backups, getting your data back is as simple as getting a new computer, installing the Dropbox client software and re-synchronizing your files.  You can also get access to your files via their website, so you can pretty much access your files from anywhere.

It works really well for me as I do development work on two different machines: I have a laptop I normally keep at home and a netbook for travel or when I just want to do work somewhere else, like a bookstore or a coffee shop.  Most of the time I have internet connection where I’m working at so I just keep my project files in my Dropbox folder and when I go home and turn on my main laptop all the changes are automatically synchronized.  I also have an Android tablet/phone (Dell Streak) and there are times when I needed to transfer files to it so I just use Dropbox to do that as well.  Another big plus is they keep a one month change history of your files so you can revert back to previous versions or recover deleted files!

The connection between your computer and the Dropbox server is also SSL encrypted using 256-bit AES encryption so it’s safe from packet sniffing.  However, things like this happen.  The people maintaining the Dropbox servers probably also have full access to your files. So if you have really sensitive data you’d like to keep in Dropbox you would probably want to put another layer of security, and this is where TrueCrypt comes in.

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Windows Tip: Run applications in the background using Task Scheduler

Posted on July 21st, 2011 webmaster No comments          Print

I was working on a project a couple of weeks ago which involves Celery for processing tasks.  I wanted the Celery process to run in the background as a service but it didn’t come with a Windows service installer, we will have to write our own.  Since we were still just working on a proof of concept, I didn’t want to spend too much time on this at this point and then I realized I could probably just use the built in Windows Task Scheduler application.

The reason I wanted Celery to run in the background as a service was because one of the worker nodes we’re using is shared with another group.  They may need to reboot the machine at any time or log off my user session which would kill the Celery process.  I wanted the Celery process to automatically start when Windows starts, run silently in the background using a user account I specify, automatically restart the task on failure, and manage it remotely without fully logging in to the machine where it runs.

I was able to accomplish all of the above by simply using Task Scheduler.  Below are the settings I used. Read the rest of this entry »

How to compile and build Apache modules on Windows using Visual Studio

Posted on June 10th, 2011 webmaster 2 comments          Print

Over the weekend, I had to do a new build of the mod_xsendfile module since I put a custom fix for the issue I was having.  As it turns out, however, compiling Apache modules on Windows is not very straightforward at all (Linux, on the other hand, you just simply type apxs2 -cia some_apache_module.c).

After lots of Googling and trying different approaches, I finally got it to work by doing the following using Microsoft Visual Studio.  Note that I only tried this on the mod_xsendfile module but I’m assuming this will work for building other Apache modules as well:

You can download Microsoft Visual Studio Express for free here if you don’t have VS (I used VS 2008 Pro): http://www.microsoft.com/express/Windows/

1. Download the Apache 2.2 Windows installer: http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi

2. During the installation, select Custom setup type and make sure the Build Headers and Libraries option is marked to be installed.

3. If your module’s source contains a .vcproj file, simply open it up.  If not, just create a new project in Visual Studio.

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