So I’m upgrading the practices in the offices and because the staff skills are out of date, its my R&D and my home system admin that comes in and migrates us to linux and open source tools.
Right now we had a successful Disk2VHD or backing up a disk into a Virtual Hard Drive. VHDs are a better medium for saving since you can test the what you backed up, by loading it into a VM. I’m trying to change it from a monthly or probably a yearly backup to a daily backup using Task Scheduler.
We plan to use this system for our various Accounting Systems. It will take me hopefully by end of Feb to get it standardized.
Next is the implications of backing up with VMs. So we got our hands on some 2019 Microdesktops Dell 3080 with a I5-9000T series. They are about 8,000 passmark and upgradable to 16GB RAM. (I really need to buy another killawatt to measure their power draw.). The students and the new staff will learn to backup and restore, but to make it interesting – I will recommend them to create their own Bootable USB.
- This means they dont need to go through the install process, when they can just “flash” a default image on all the computers.
- That the PC they are using and its core components: the root-file-system (rootfs) and the user-file-systems (userfs) are now something they can store in a flash drive as they juggle multiple computers. This means they can take on more risky and destructive experiments, using the bootable usb or the VMs.
- Modular computing: now that the USB is a seperate computer it frees them up to do other things. They can borrow a PC or a PC missing an HDD and just use the usb.
- Riskier Experiments: example is Partitioning your hard drive and making a more modular work area. New Operating systems and different GUIs and different workflows. Experimenting with GPU drivers, optimizations, etc… you can break your system and restore to the lat working version.
- You can have a Special Desktop for various tasks: like a DISK meant to be exposed to the web, without any sensitive information.
- They will use back up and restore a lot if they perform the experiments.
Hopefully the Backup and Restore relevant and useful, this leads to Modular and Portable OSes.
The next level is playing with remote PCs, SSH, and Remote Desktop.
The next level is Dockers and VMs, maybe learn to use Proxmox.
Use a Docker of something they like: WordPress or Content Management Systems, Federated Servers, NextCloud, NAS, etc… Virtual PFsense.
Learning VLANS and VPNS with cheap smart switches and DIY firewall/routers with PFsense.
The next level is managing these all with various Orchastration and Management software
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