I was having some trouble getting BackupPC to back up my MythTV’s operating system to my Microserver.  I kept getting aborts all the time from broken pipes and such.

After reading some more about what can be done with MythTV, I thought I’d take the plunge.  Previously, my Media Center was running Windows 7 Ultimate with Media Center.  I have two Hauppauge HVR-2200 PCI-Express dual tuners, and an nVidia 9500 GT graphics card with HDMI output.  I also have a huge pile of recorded TV in Windows Television (WTV) format, which was quite the obstacle because only Media Center can play that.

I came across a peculiar bug with my CentOS build, which apparently also happens with Fedora, RHEL and Debian, but mysteriously didn’t happen with my Ubuntu install.

Last week I was sent by my work to do the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) course, which was a compressed 4-day course (cramming in 8 days worth of content into half the time).  It was bundled with the RHCSA certification at the same time.

Since my Microserver keeled over and died and I didn’t have a good backup in place, I was in search of a quick and easy way to back up the USB key on a regular basis so I could recover easily.

A brief discovery…  If you use a script to back up your Microserver to a mount point somewhere in your filesystem, then your updatedb database will keep growing and growing without bound.  This is bad if you’re using a USB key for your root filesystem (I went from writing a 1.5Mb updatedb database once a day to writing a 60Mb one before I caught it).