Bacula mail changer script (aka poor man’s autoloader)
I enjoy Bacula for automated home backups on DLT and DDS tape drives. Being used at home there’s no – obviously – big-dollar-company-manager to ask for an autoloader; and when the time of a tape change comes bacula lacks a simple way to request a manual tape change and just hangs up. So I managed to build a fake autoloader shell script, which, using emails, would emulate a real autoloader. This script, which I baptised mail-changer, features:
- email support
- periodic email resend when tape change is needed
- tape detection and check (if you’re supposed to insert tape 4 and you enter 5, the script will kindly refuse the tape, unload it and send a warning email message asking for the right one)
Some applications using I2C
Parallel and serial ports are disappearing from today’s pc making life harder for the people who wants to connect their home-made devices to a pc. The USB bus seems to be very appealing but it has the drawback of complexity while the I2C bus is very easy to implement and it’s widely supported by many devices, with the drawback of no direct pc connection (to be honest it’s used inside the pc, so somewhere on the motherboard there is a I2C bus, but yet I haven’t found any decent connection to the external world to use it – no, i won’t solder things on memory modules). Since the first way to start experimenting with I2C is building an I2C port, I’ve built a parport-to-i2c interface implementing the I2C schematic made by Kosma Moczek with the idea of replacing it with a more modern USB-to-I2C solution in the future.
So here it is the prototype of the parport to I2C interface:
