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Today I built a few POS systems. They are little mini ITX form factor machines. Very cool. They have two hard disks in RAID (which means a little case modding to mount the second - which is good fun). Then you have to play oragami with the two IDE leads to fit them in the case and route them so they don't get severed or anything. I've got building these things down to a fine art now! The reason I was able to build, install an OS, update and patch the OS and configure a couple of necessary tweaks on two machines in a day in parallel with my normal work was because of a small script that I wrote and an internal repository that I built. The script is simple, it downloads the repository config files (.repo) and the keys for the repositories from our webserver that are configured for our internal mirrors. It then copies them to where they are needed, imports the keys (it's FC3 so you have to do it) and then starts a yum update to get all the goodies off Livna, KDE-Redhat and Fedora-Extras repositories for me. It's very quick on a LAN. Blindingly so in comparison to over-the-net updates.
Brad and I worked a little on the backup script together - It turns out I was writing the thing from entirely the wrong perspective! I had little info as to requirements so I guessed a lot of the requirements. I was writing from the perspective of this script running on cron on the backup server and it fetching the files from the source machines - Brad was thinking around the other way - which makes more sense. Multiple machines at once, only one key to share for ssh etc etc. There is a small list now that I have properly considered both ways of doing it. The thing must be decentralised.
Did nothing at all at home. Just vegetated, got a Kebab on the way home =) Yum!