Thursday, June 18, 2015¶

Avoiding locale warnings¶

When working on a customer’s server in an SSH terminal I often had warning messages like man: can't set the locale; make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct.

It seems that the culprit was the following line in my /etc/ssh/ssh_config file:

SendEnv LANG LC_*

I fixed my problem by uncommenting this line. Since my customers use different versions and configurations of Debian, they have different lists of locales installed.

Making daily snapshots¶

Here is my template of a bash script for making daily snapshots of a Lino database: bash/make_snapshot.sh

However, the current version is a time bomb: it creates a new zip file every day. I am still looking for a way of automatically tidying up these files using configurable rules similar to those used by logrotate:

create a new file every day at a specified time
for snapshots older than 1 week, keep only those made on Fridays
for snapshots older than 2 months, keep only the last of the month

Oops, the answer was given in a post by mark on serverfault.com: I can use logrotate for it. It’s only a question of configuration. Marks gives a comprehensive example and a short explanation of the options.

Here is how I configured it now in Eupen:

$ cat /etc/logrotate.d/snapshot
/var/backups/lino/mysite/snapshot.zip {
    rotate 50
    nocompress
    dateext
    dateformat _%Y%m%d
    extension .zip
    missingok
}

Here is how to test whether it seems to work:

$ sudo logrotate -d /etc/logrotate.d/snapshot

I also checked the timimg: the make_snapshot.sh cron job is run every morning at 2:00 while logrotate runs at 6:52. That sounds correct.

TODO:

This is not yet 100% of what we want. It just keeps an archive of the last 50 days and deletes older ones. That’s better than everything else we had until now, but actually we would like to keep one backup per week during a longer period, e.g. one year.