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30. May 2012

Released: phpLiteAdmin 1.9.2 includes CSV import/export

Filed under: DBMS,PHP,phpLiteAdmin,Server Administration — Tags: , , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 15:54

As I wrote in March, I implemented CSV import and fixed export issues of phpLiteAdmin. This fixed phpLiteAdmin bug #71. I also wrote a small fix for bug #75. Today, new version 1.9.2 of phpLiteAdmin was released including both fixes. You can download it here.

I’d like to thank the phpLiteAdmin team for including my work and allowing me to join the team. I plan to address more issues of phpLiteAdmin in the future to push phpLiteAdmin a little further. There is still some more work to be done which I will have a look at once I find the time.

I recommend the new version to anybody using phpLiteAdmin (and also everybody who doesn’t yet ;-)). Please use the bugtracker in case you find any issues.

I hope some of you find the new features useful or are happy to see those bugs fixed.

Thanks again to the phpLiteAdmin team for the great tool and the opportunity to contribute to the project. Fortunately, I do not have to create a fork to improve the tool.

 

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14. May 2012

Mount clonezilla image to restore single file (browse)

Filed under: Linux,Windows — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 12:28

Clonezilla is a fine tool to backup/restore/clone partitions or drives. It is very powerful, can handle both Linux and Windows partitions and so on. If you do not know it, you should really give it a try. It is really free software (open source), which means it is also free to use for commercial purposes.

By the way, if you want to backup/restore images of Windows partitions/drives, I’d also recommend DriveImage XML which is also very powerful yet simple (only free for private use). Windows 7 has also built-in backup and imaging tools, which you can give a try. But this post is about Clonezilla.

One important feature that Clonezilla does not offer out of the box is browsing images to restore single files. You can only restore complete partitions or drives.

But there is a way around this, which is discussed in this forum thread, although not perfect as it requires lots of time and disk space as well.

The basic approach is to convert the whole image into a (probably huge) img-file that can be easily mounted. In the forum post linked above several different commands are discussed depending on your image file.
Here I’d like to show you what worked for me.

In my case, the file was compressed using gzip and it was an image of a linux partition (ext3). I used Ubuntu Linux to mount the image. The steps I took:

  1. Install partclone (sudo apt-get install partclone)
  2. Prepare an img-file somewhere where enough free disk space is available:
    touch /dir-to-new-image/partition.img

    You should have at least as much free disk space as the size of the image there.

  3. Convert the clonezilla-image into the img-file:
    sudo cat /dir-to-images/partition.ext3.ptcl-img.gz.*
    | sudo gzip -d -c
    | sudo partclone.restore -C -s - -O /dir-to-new-image/partition.img

    (This is one line. Note the minus after -s. I overlooked it when I tried this first.)
    This will take some time, dependent on how big the image and how fast your drive(s).
    There are other commands in the forum thread for NTFS images and other compression formats.

  4. Mount the img-file:
    sudo mount -o loop -t ext3 /dir-to-new-image/partition.img /mnt

Thanks a lot to all posters of the forum mentioned above for these hints, especially bfitzhugh, nutria007, ttguy and gaebriel!

P.S.: It’s always good to have a (recent) backup 😉 One drive of mine just crashed after about two years in operation, so I know what I am talking about…

Think about what pain it would be if the drive of your laptop / desktop would crash just right now. If you get a bad feeling thinking about this, you should make a backup now.

5. May 2012

TortoiseSVN painfully slow (Log)

Filed under: Windows — Tags: , , , , , , — Christopher Kramer @ 21:14

I had a problem with TortoiseSVN: Sometimes it behaved painfully slow. Especially when I wanted to view the log of CrazyStat’s svn repository, it took about 10 minutes (!) to show it. First I thought the problem was caused by the Sourceforge servers, but then I realized that other svn clients did not have the same problem. I tried several things and the solution finally was quite simple and even listed the the TortoiseSVN FAQ:

Browsing very slow in explorer and file/open dialog.

If you have mapped network drives which are not resolved, either because the drive is inaccessible, or you have not logged in, file browsing may become unresponsive while Windows tries unsuccessfully to access the drive. Either unmap the drive or ensure that it can be accessed

 

I first did not think that this was my problem as I did not experience slow browsing in explorer or file/open dialog. But after I unmapped all unresolved network drives, it worked great again.

By the way, I’d recommend TortoiseSVN to anybody who is searching for a windows svn client. I have not seen any other client that powerful yet simple.

I hope this might be helpful for somebody who has the same problem.