Wednesday 15th August 2012 10.45am

Woke up this morning to drop Megan into work and my phone didn't have an IP. Hmm, I thought. Turns out the cloud node had hanged itself which is the first time that ever happened. Moreover, it appeared to refuse to boot. I worried to myself that the end was nigh and all that work of all these months was gone …

Thankfully after returning from dropping Megan in on an extremely rainy morning, it does indeed boot - it just takes about five minutes to do so due to repeated network timeouts which I didn't know about as I never reboot (it access the net through a VM inside itself, but repeatedly times out before starting that VM). But it did still hang last night at just before 5am. Could have been the storm, though it's on a fully redundant UPS.

Anyway, now I have a ZFS pool with oodles of free space, this reminded me to get on with an automated backup solution. Proxmox will snapshot and backup VMs for you - including backing up the ZFS VM into itself while it's still running which is tres cool. That leaves backing up the host SSD. I guess a cron job doing a 'dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/IcyBoxZ/… bs=4096' is as good as any … I dunno, I remember some 'mondo' tool for automated system backups on Linux. I'll go investigate now.