January 2009 Archives

For a new rails (v2.2.2) project I upgraded my gems of RSpec (v1.1.12) and ZenTest (v3.11.0) but when I try to run autotest, it stalls out:

$ autotest
loading autotest/rails

Digging in google I found a solution, just do:

$ RSPEC=true autotest

Then autotest runs normally.
If you want, you can export the RSPEC variable in your ~/.bashrc file (this file determines the behavior of interactive shells):

$ export RSPEC=true

Start a new shell or just run:

$ ~/.bashrc

After that you can just run:

$ autotest

rdiff-backup is a great and simple tool to create remote incremental backups, this classic program is a must if you live in the command line and you like taking advantage of the unused disk space in your different drives.

Recently I had a problem installing it in a Ubuntu 7.10 box, from which I wanted to backup to Ubuntu 8.04:

Warning: Local version 1.1.14 does not match remote version 1.1.15.
Exception 'backup_set_globals() takes exactly 2 arguments (1 given)' raised of class '<type 'exceptions.TypeError'>':
  File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/rdiff_backup/Main.py", line 302, in error_check_Main
    try: Main(arglist)

It looks like it is a known bug when backing up. The packaged version seem quite old, so I decided to uninstall the packages in both machines, and commit a major sin: install from sources.

The lates version is 1.2.5, it is a very simple Python script, and here it is its instalation process:

$ wget http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup-1.2.5.tar.gz
$ tar -xvzf rdiff-backup-1.2.5.tar.gz
$ cd rdiff-backup-1.2.5/
$ sudo aptitude install python2.5-dev
$ sudo aptitude install librsync-dev
$ sudo python ./setup.py build
$ sudo python ./setup.py install
$ rdiff-backup --version

In just a matter of minutes you will find yourself having the same version of rdiff-backup installed and both machines and working flawlessly.