Linux Backup Shell Script for Files and MySQL

I assembled this script to backup my web server onto a USB thumbdrive. It mounts the thumbdrive (/dev/sdc1), backs up a couple of directories, does a MySQL dump, and then unmounts the drive. It appends the day of the week to the file name so you can run it daily as a cron job and you’ll get 7-days’ worth of backups on a rotating basis.

#!/bin/sh

####################################

#

# Backup to usb thumbdrive

#

####################################

# What to backup.

backup_files="/home/shared /etc"

# Where to backup to.

dest="/home/administrator/backup/usb"

# Create archive filename.

day=$(date +%A)

hostname=$(hostname -s)

archive_file="$hostname-$day.tgz"

sql_file="$hostname-$day.sql"

# Mount the usb thumbdrive

mount -t vfat /dev/sdc1 /home/administrator/backup/usb -o uid=1000,gid=1000,utf8,dmask=027,fmask=137

echo "Thumbdrive mounted"

# Backup MySQL

echo "Backing up MySQL to $dest/$sql_file"

date

mysqldump --all-databases --password='XXXXXXX' > $dest/$sql_file

# Print start status message.

echo "Backing up $backup_files to $dest/$archive_file"

date

# Backup the files using tar.

tar czf $dest/$archive_file $backup_files

# Print end status message.

echo "Backup finished"

date

# Long listing of files in $dest to check file sizes.

ls -lh $dest

# Unmount the usb thumbdrive

umount /home/administrator/backup/usb

echo "Thumbdrive unmounted"

Running Node.js Alongside Apache

I decided to set up Node.js on my Linux server running Apache.  Getting a Node.js server running was trivially simple, but I had a bit of trouble getting the mod_rewrite stuff correct to make it pretty (i.e. no port in the URL).  Basically I wanted to create a sub-directory on my site and route all the requests going there to my Node.js server, leaving everything else as-is.  So, http://kevnls.com/ and http://kevnls.com/etc/ would still be handled by Apache, but http://kevnls.com/node/ would be handed-off to Node.js.

Before I began, I already had Node.js serving up content at http://kevnls.com:8000.  I'm not going to address that part, because there are plenty of resources that can help you get to that point.

The first thing I needed to do was create a symlink to the directory where my Node.js server was running (/home/shared/node/).  In my case my CMS has a public/ folder where I can put stuff like 'whatever.txt' and it will resolve to http://kevnls.com/whatever.txt.  So, this is where I created a symlink.  At this point http://kevnls.com/node/ pointed to /home/shared/node/ in the filesystem.

Then in the /home/shared/node/ folder I created my .htaccess file with this mod_rewrite rule:

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes -MultiViews

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://kevnls.com:8000/$1 [P]

-----------------------------------------------------------------


Then I needed to get the proper modules running in Apache to handle what I wanted to do.  You can issue the following shell command and just type in the modules you want to enable:


a2enmod

In my case I needed 'proxy', 'proxy_http' and 'rewrite'.



After a quick Apache restart everything was working the way I wanted it.  Now on to the coding.