UNIX System Administration Handbook - Evi Nemeth [459]
26.5 PC BACKUPS
Backing up the data on desktop PCs can be a formidable problem, especially now that typical desktop storage capacity exceeds 20GB. There are a number of approaches to this problem, including industrial-strength network backup tools from vendors such as IBM and Seagate. Of course, there’s always the handy local tape drive approach. If you have the money and the patience, this is an area where commercial products really are head and shoulders above the rest.
See Chapter 10 for general information about backups.
But what about the rest of us? It is possible to back up a PC’s drive (all or part) to a UNIX server with the smbtar utility included in the Samba package. Unfortunately, this approach is very high maintenance and hence we don’t recommend it.
The best solution here seems to be not to back up PCs. Sites that get away without PC backups have carefully educated their users that all important files must be stored on a shared network drive. The individual PCs can then be configured identically (in terms of installed applications, desktop configuration, etc.) throughout the organization.5
If one PC fails, another can be swapped in with just a few minutes of work. Crazy? Maybe. Resource smart? Yes!
26.6 DUAL BOOTING
Thank goodness for geeks. It may have occurred to you to “make the most of your life” by harnessing the power of more than one operating system on your PC. Fortunately, it is possible to “dual boot,” meaning that you can choose one of several operating systems at boot time. Linux and Windows are a popular combo, especially among folks, like programmers, who must switch rapidly between environments. In some cases, it’s even possible to share the same filesystems among the installed OSes. Read all about setting up a dual boot configuration page 20.
26.7 RUNNING WINDOWS APPLICATIONS UNDER UNIX
Many versions of UNIX can run Windows applications ... kind of. It’s done in a variety of ways, but they all generally boil down to creating a “virtual machine environment” that, to the application, looks like good ol’ Windows. These virtual environments are typically a bit fragile, and they tend to work well only for mainstream apps.
Two notable packages for Red Hat let you run Windows software directly in the Linux environment. The commercial product VMware (www.vmware.com) turns your entire PC into a virtual machine with the ability to run multiple operating systems at once. Wine (www.winehq.com) provides a Windows API in the Linux environment, allowing you to run applications that don’t access any drivers.6
At the time of this writing, however, Wine is advertised by its creators as “not for regular use, try it if you’ll help fix bugs.”
Three packages for Solaris are worth considering. The most entertaining is SunPC, a product sold by Sun that provides an Intel-compatible processor on an SBus card to interpret the PC instructions. Third-party applications for Solaris include SoftWindows from FWB Software (www.fwb.com), a true Windows emulator, and NTRIGUE from Citrix (www.citrix.com), which needs a separate Intel system running NT to support it (it lets users run Windows-based applications on their Java desktops).
Sun has graciously released StarOffice, a Microsoft Office-like package for Solaris and Linux, free of charge. It includes basic business tools such as a spreadsheet, a word processor, and a simple database application. These tools can read and write files generated by Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. See
http://www.sun.com/products/staroffice
for more information.
26.8 PC HARDWARE TIPS
One of the really great things about PC hardware is that it’s usually inexpensive. Unfortunately, PC hardware doesn’t come to us from an alien planet where the motto is “You pay less, you get more!” Instead, as with most things here