lumine.net

It's not often that I get excited about software these days but after the loss of a laptop drive over the holiday season, I was forced to reexamine my backup strategy which, up to that point, had been simply plugging in an external USB drive from time to time and using Apple's Time Machine to grab a snapshot of the contents of my drive.

Needless to say, I was caught out by a busy schedule and ended up losing about a week's worth of photos because I had forgotten to plug the drive in after a previous shooting session. As a result, I started to look for something to complement Time Machine and spent some time looking at the consumer offering from the folks at Crashplan.com.

I'm in the process of setting up a virtual, Ubuntu-based server on Virtuozzo and ran into a couple of issues. Apparently, there are some issues with using the Plesk interface to configure the firewall (doesn't work) and you have to resort to using the Virtuozzo module in the container manager GUI to first set the "Advanced firewall mode with default policy Accept" to set up the various chains with correct links specifically for the VZ container.

Once that's completed and you start to manually construct your iptables rules, don't forget to include an accept rule for TCP port 8880 in addition to the standard Plesk TCP port 8443. If you neglect this additional port, Plesk will throw a hissy fit and report that all hell has broken loose on your virtual server.

Bryce 5 is freely downloadable through September 6, 2006 at DAZ Productions. Long known for being the premier tool for creating production-quality 3D landscapes, it looks like DAZ is getting Bryce into as many hands as possible with the release of the new 5.5 version.