database

This is the first part of a multi-part tutorial describing how to configure the "perfect" Kodi media centre running on top of ubuntu server. Other parts of the tutorial may be found here:

• Introduction and Overview
• Part 1: Kodi installation and configuration
• Part 2: NFS file sharing
• Part 3: Auto-mounting hard drives with Udev
• Part 4: Remote administration with SSH
• Part 5: Transmission torrent client
• Part 6: VPN connection
• Part 7: Firewall configuration with UFW

This part of the tutorial deals with basic Kodi installation and network configuration for the server. It sets out some basic configuration to get the system to load Kodi straight away when it boots up, make the media database available to other Kodi clients on the network, enabling the power menu within Kodi's interface, and making sure automatic updates are enabled.

This is something I have been meaning to write up for a while: how to automate backups using cron and Drush, a commandline tool for Drupal. Drush makes creating backups of your Drupal website's database and files really easy, and I have written a script that calls Drush to create a backup, and then manages your existing backups so you don't use up too much space on your drive. Once a month, it will also create an encrypted copy of that day's backup file and email it to an external email address. Personally, I think that daily backups from a month ago aren't useful to me any more - if I was going to revert to a backup from that long ago, I'd be looking to restore a weekly backup. Similarly, after several months, I'd only be interested in monthly backups. After creating your daily backup, the script runs through the other files in the backup directory and deletes the files you don't need any more. The script will keep:

• One week of daily backups
• One month of weekly backups (1st, 8th, 15th and 22nd)
• Monthly backups for one year
• Yearly backups for ever

Before I wrote the script, samhobbs.co.uk was a WordPress site hosted on a Raspberry Pi until the drive I was using bricked. I didn't have a recent backup so I lost the lot. Now I make backups to an external hard drive, so that if the SSD in the my Intel NUC gets corrupted I'll be able to recover. The encrypted copies sent to an external email address protect against the server being stolen or lost in a fire.