Jun 102011
 

I recently received the new keyboard I bought for my “Small closet home server” project. I opted for a “compact” keyboard but with normal sized keys on it. So the manufacture had to remove some keys.

This resulted in removing among others the numeric keypad. Unless you work in accounting/administration you probably don’t use those keys often. And the times that you dot need them you can use the ‘normal’ numbers part or use the function (Fn) key on your keyboard.

compact-keyboard

It costs only 18 US Dollars, and I bought it from DealExtreme: here is the link , some pretty good reviews. Please consider that most stuff on there site is cheap Chinese garbage ;) free shipping included (amazing, I think that the Government stimulates export or something in Honk Kong by paying the postal fee).

Really a bargain if you ask me. In fact I like the keyboard so much that after testing (With Chinese stuff you have to do your own QC) it’s still hooked up instead of my regular keyboard. The much better quality Cherry G80 3000L with MX blue keyswitches (tikker the tik), for the moment i use this no-brand 78 keyboard as my main one. It’s stylish!

The problem, it has 78 keys (vs normal 104 keys US layout ones) and no insert key to be found. lets fix this!

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Jun 082011
 
DPM2010 Console

I really like Microsoft’s disk based backup software:”Data Protection Manager 2010″. It doesn’t have the fancy features which the grown-ups like backup-exec, ARCserver do have. But these features where hard to manage and use anyway. DPM got all the basic functions and a simple layout and works. I have never looked back since i switched from those old fashioned (virtual) tape library backup solutions. I still think it’s a quick hack for them to create a (virtual) tape libary and say it’s a harddisk based backup solution. It needs a architecture changes under the hood to truly use the advantages of disk bases backups.

And for half the cost DPM is a no brainer if you prefer a simple, clean and workable backup solution for a medium sized company.

But we were having some troubles backing up the “system state” of a Windows 2008R2 though our Microsoft DPM 2010 backup server. Our DPM server reported the following error in its console (and eventviewer):

The replica of System Protection on dc1.******.local is inconsistent with the protected data source. All protection activities for data source will fail until the replica is synchronized with consistency check. (ID: 3106)
DPM cannot create a backup because Windows Server Backup (WSB) on the protected computer encountered an error (WSB Event ID: 517, WSB Error Code: 0x80070040). (ID: 30229)

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