OT: XP SP2 Security Hole / Backup Thread Appended

[Robert T. Repko (R Squared Consultants)]

Believe it or not at 10/3/2004 11:06 PM, Brian K. White said:
>D. Thomas Podnar wrote:
>>>Jean-Pierre A. Radley wrote:
>>>>Transpower at aol.com propounded (on Sun, Oct 03, 2004 at 11:41:11AM
>>>>-0400):
>>>>>In a message dated 10/2/2004 9:08:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>>>>>fp at wjv.com writes:
>>>>>
>>>>>>Transpower at aol.com, the prominent pundit, on Sat, Oct 02 11:19
>>>>>>while half mumbling half-witicized:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>One positive thing about XP SP2:? I installed it several days
>>>>>>>ago and I must say that my computer (specifically disk reads and
>>>>>>>writes) appears to be much faster than with SP1.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Appearances can be deceiving.  In other words, do you have any
>>>>>>benchmarks you ran before and after.  I do that on disk systems
>>>>>>and save the results in the Unix servers.
>>>>>
>>>>>No benchmarks yet; my demo copy of Performance Test ran out.  Next
>>>>>time I do a backup I'll let you know if there's any difference.  By
>>>>>the way, backing up 13 GB used to take 1 hour, 20 minutes on an HP
>>>>>Ultrium LTO; after changing settings so that system cache (rather
>>>>>than programs) is optimized (and setting System Mechanic so that XP
>>>>>writes the cache every 2 seconds), I got the backup time down to 20
>>>>>minutes! And shadow copy now works properly.
>>>>
>>>>Speaking of backups, on OSR 5.0.7, I've installed a SCSI Iomega REV
>>>>drive.  A complete backup which took 62 minutes to a DDS-4 tape
>>>>takes 20 minutes to a REV drive.
>>>
>>>We have one of those too on our new box but I don't have a way to
>>>make a good comparison like that.
>>
>>Yes, you do. See below.
>>
>>>Old box didn't have dds-4 but dds-3 and the tape was on a 20 or
>>>40mhz scsi card while the rev is on udma 100 or 133 IDE.
>>
>>Not on OpenServer. Not exactly.
>>
>>>Old box let the tape drive do the compression, new box per-force
>>>must do the compression in cpu. Old box had a plain 80mhz or u160
>>>scsi drive on a ordinary 33mhz x 32bit pci card, new box has a
>>>raid-10 array of u320 drives spread over 2 u320 channels on a 133mhz
>>>x 64bit pci-x card etc etc etc...
>>>
>>>It's taking me 3:45 hours to back up and 4:05 to verify 54 gigs.
>>>which is compressing down to only 17 gigs of raw media space!
>>>
>>>---snip BackupEDGE summary---
>>>Files Encountered      = 757032
>>>Total Data             = 54.48GB
>>>Data Written           = 17.18GB
>>>Volume Left            = 15.40GB
>>>SW Compression         = 76%
>>>Elapsed Time           = 03:47:39
>>>Data Transfer Speed    = 1351477 bytes/sec
>>>Net Transfer Rate      = 77.11 MB/min
>>>--------
>>>
>>>This includes about 4 gigs of jpegs and pngs (scanned documents that
>>>are already highly compressed)
>>>and about 42 gigs of customers bacups, mostly in the form of
>>>complete rsync copies of customers filepro trees (just the menus,
>>>config & filepro dir, no binaries) and a few sets of compressed tars
>>>that revolve every night. The tars are bzip2 but the rsync'ed trees
>>>are straight fp and very compressible.
>>>
>>>What I do have for comparison is the ctar summary from the old box,
>>>which due to the smaller media had a lot of things excluded from the
>>>backup... ----snip----
>>>         FILES: 236725
>>>         Total DATA: 8.026Gb (Gigabytes)
>>>         Actual Tape Data Written: 8.185Gb (Gigabytes)
>>>         ROOM LEFT on this Volume: 15.253Gb (Gigabytes)
>>>
>>>         Elapsed Time:  42 minutes  53 seconds
>>>         Data Transfer Speed: 3420199 bytes/sec  ( 195.7 Mb/min)
>>>----snip----
>>>
>>>I'm almost positive that someone somewhere told me that the rev was
>>>faster than dat, (I don't remember if it was backupedge or seneca
>>>data, or who...) but... this shows the old std-9000 drive working
>>>twice as fast as the rev.
>>
>>NO, It DOESN'T!
>>
>>>So all in all, I'm pretty dissapointed.
>>
>>You should be ecstatic. I don't think you have interprested the
>>statistics properly.
>
>you are right...
>near the top of the ctar log file is the total capacity of the tape, 23 
>gigs & change (which is just a number I myself  put in since it's the 
>estimated compressed space)
>
>For some reason that number stuck in my head and I was thinking that the 
>old box was backing up 23 1/2 gigs in 42 minutes
>but there is no question, it was only backing up 8 gigs in 42 minutes.
>
>So, it's doing better than the old box. But now hearing about Johns tape 
>being off it's stride and doing only 700 megs/min, that 77 sounds pretty 
>lame. But the rev cost something like $450 and I don't even wanna think 
>what an ait drive goes for. :)
>
>Just for the record, even when I thought it was performing badly, I never 
>thought it was the software, strictly hardware.
>I quite like backupedge and it's especially cool that the rev drive looks 
>like a cd or dvd to the bios and so is bootable, and how backupedge just 
>cranks out a iso image and tacks it on the front of the backup so that 
>every backup is bootable and contains it's own copy of recoveredge and so 
>all you need to restore the whole box from scratch is one solitary rev 
>carttridge, and any one will do.
>
>The rev wasn't available in scsi yet when we ordered our box else we'd 
>definitely have gotten that.

A Sony AIT LVD  SCSI is under $1000.00


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