Out with the old, in with the new.

On Friday at 6 PM EDT, my computer with components of varied ages all over 2.5 years did the unthinkable, died. I'm not really sure the entire process, the motherboards capacitors near the PSU plug were all blown and may have been leaking for a while and the PSU made a loud bang as I tried to see if it was broken. Using another PSU, I was able to boot the computer, but I had no USB nor fans working, I even replaced the broken CAPs to no avail. The PSU of course was dead, but it so happened to destroy two hard drives as well, both of the western digital first generation SATA 3.0. Luckily, I may be able to recover the data if it happens that only the boards are dead and the drives internals are fine.

Around 10 PM, I e-mailed my advisor with the situation and 1 hour later, he had a one line e-mail telling me to price out a machine and aim for less than 1K. Monday morning we ordered the machine, and Wednesday evening, I had a fully functioning system.

I will admit that it really sucks that I lost a lot of time, potentially lot's of data, and my own computer, but on the flip side, I am very happy to be blessed to have a considerate professor who recognizes my need for a high performance desktop computer. The machine is amazing, a new Core i7 920 with 6 GB of RAM. Even typing in commands at the terminal seemed faster than ever before.

As a lesson to this all, I have decided to employ a mechanism of maintaining the same (or nearly the same) home directory on all machines via rsync. When I work on a remote machine, I will begin my session with a pull from the desktop and when I finish, a push. To perform this, I've written to wrapper scripts to rsync, one called push and the other pull.

Push:
rsync -Cvauz --force --delete -e "ssh -i /home/name/.ssh/key" /home/name/ name@desktop:/home/name/

Pull:
rsync -Cvauz --force --delete -e "ssh -i /home/name/.ssh/key" name@desktop:/home/name/ /home/name/

C - uses a ~/.cvsignore, though I could just use an ignore file. By doing this, I can have files that aren't synced, like my mozilla firefox plugins and other cache files.

v - verbose, probably unnecessary
a - archive, keep owner, user, group, modification times, permissions, symbolic lnks, and devices, as well as recurse directories

u - update, skip files that are only newer on the receiver

z - compress files prior to transferring

force - overwrite files with directories and vice-versa

e ssh - how to execute the command

Notice the ending forward slash ("/"), that is necessary or it will actually copy the directory and place it at the destination (so you'd get /home/name/name)

Beyond backing up my data, changes to my configuration files will be moved around with little effort from myself.