For businesses it is obvious that the vast amount of data (at the time of writing this, tens and hundreds of gigabytes, if not terabytes) make high capacity tapes the medium of choice for backup.

Large data centers cannot live without tape libraries AND offsite tape storage and rotation, to cover against the case of a disaster.

Believe it or not, tape drives are also the best backup for a home system as well.

If you are interested in Linux and live in the Arab world you may be interested in the following web sites:

• An Evaluation of the use of Linux in business, government and education is a white paper by Kefah Eisa, in Arabic, and in PDF format.
• Various articles on Computer Arabization - A collections of articles on computers and Arabization, including a list of issues in dealing with Arabic on the Internet, and various methods of achieving it.

Introduction

In another article, I have discussed why tapes are still the most efficient form of backup. In this article, I detail how I used tapes in a Linux based home network for backup purposes, using a Seagate/Certance STT20000A IDE ATAPI Internal Travan TR-5 Tape drive. There are also several resources listed.

Read below for more ...

When upgrading Mandrake, e.g. from 9.1 to 10.0, make sure you delete the old hdlist.cz and synthesis.* files from the previous release, and use urpmi.addmedia to add the new release media (CD) to your machine.Here is a list of commands to do that:cd /var/lib/urpmi/# Cleanup the old media for URPMI.# Note: You could delete everything, or just choose to delete the ones that are on the old 9.1 CDs.

Take an average work day of a 'knowledge worker', someone whose main work day is around information. For example, a programmer, a stock broker, and other office workers.She probably has a cell phone, and an organizer. This is in addition to the land line she has on her desk. Of course she also has a desktop computer, or a laptop that she takes with her at home and on trips. On that computer, she must have email, e.g. Microsoft Outlook probably with immediate notification when a message arrives. She also has an Instant Messaging program, such as Yahoo Messenger, ICQ or MSN Messenger.

I had Mandrake Linux 9.1 running fineon a Dell Optiplex PIII-550 Mhz. The system had a Mitsumi CDR-2801TEon hdc, running with SCSI over IDE emulation.When the time came to upgrade toMandrake Linux 10.0 Final, I booted up CD1 and it loaded fine, untilthe stage where it tries to access the CD and mount it. At thispoint, the kernel halted with the following error:Kernel BUG at drivers/ide/ide-ops.c:1005!

My history with UNIX

This article describes how I came to know about UNIX, and later, Linux.

Part of this is personal, documenting to myself when I started using each of the aforementioned systems.

Part of it is quasi academic research using digital archeology techniques to dig up old mails, search old files and directories, and try to piece together the sequence of events on how the above happened.

As per Linus advice, I contacted Ted T'so in March 1992 for getting Linux on Floppies. Here is the e-mail.

This email is one attempt to reach someone for getting Linux by an alternate way, other than FTP.We did not have TCP/IP at the time, and our connection was X.25, and we paid by the byte.

Email to Drew Eckhardt, who later wrote the SCSI drivers for Linux.