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Monday, September 03, 2007

Save your'e YouTube movie for offline viewing

There are plenty of sites that allow you to save it locally, provided you want to look at hundreds of ads, pop-ups and trust that they don't do something to the original.
We'll on Linux it's quite easy.
Seems that when you open a YouTube movie in firefox it save the temp file in you're /tmp directory.
Do the following steps to save you're YouTube file.
1. Open it in Firefox and wait till the whole video played through. Don't close Firefox or navigate to another page/video. This will delete the file
2. Run "ls -ltr /tmp". There should be a file called Flash????? near the end.
3. To check if it's the right one run "vlc /tmp/Flash????
4. Copy it somewhere "cp /tmp/Flash???? /myvideofolder/videoname.avi"
Q.E.D

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

TSM restore on Windows

Background


I was asked by my client to do a Disaster recovery (DR) test for one of their servers.
No problem.
Steps would be:
1. Install the new machine with Win2000 to c:\wintemp directory
2. Install the TSM client v5+ also to non standard directory
3. Edit the dsm.opt file and add:
nodename originalserver
4. Start the GUI.
5. Pick the C: D:, etc. drives and hit restore button
6. Pick "Original Location" and restore.......Right.....WRONG!!!!!!!!
This restores to the original machine the backup was made from. NOT the local machine.
Add to this administrator passwords that are the same on both the DR and original server and you have a recipe for disaster.

This behavior is unique to windows platforms. No TSM client on any of the other platforms does this.
Don't make the same mistake I have and end up trashing a production machine.
Below is the official TSM client manual page where they casually tell you about this.

From the TSM Windows client manual pages:

The client stores files on the Tivoli Storage Manager server using the Windows UNC (Universal Naming Convention), not the drive letter. The UNC name is the network name for the file. The machine (system) name is a part of the UNC name. For example, if your machine name is STAR and you have a file named c:\doc\h2.doc, the UNC name is \\star\c$\doc\h2.doc.

When you restore files on the same machine from which they were backed up, you may use the local drive letter or the UNC name to refer to the file. For example, either of the following will restore c:\doc\h2.doc to its original location:

dsmc restore c:\doc\h2.doc

dsmc restore \\star\c$\doc\h2.doc

When you restore files on a machine with a different name, then you must use the UNC name to refer to the file. This is true even if you are restoring to the same physical machine, but the machine name has changed since the backup
occurred.

For example, if you back up c:\doc\h2.doc on machine STAR and you want to restore it to machine METEOR then
you must use the UNC name to refer to the file. You must also specify a destination restore location. This is because
the default behavior is to restore the file to its original location, which would be on machine STAR. To restore the file
to machine METEOR, you can run either of the following on METEOR:

dsmc restore \\star\c$\doc\h2.doc c:dsmc restore \\star\c$\doc\h2.doc \\meteor\c$\

Summary

TSM client restore options

· A misunderstanding of the TSM client options on the windows platform led to data being restored to the wrong server.

DR machine permissions

· The CM_DR machine was setup with the same Administrator password as the CM machine. This gave sufficient permissions to overwrite all files.

PS: If you want the whole Win2000 BMR procedures give me a shout and I'll send them to you.
They are howeverelativelyly old and need some updating, but it gives you the general idea.