Blog | Alex Gray

Automated Robocopy Backups With Email Notification

What happens is you schedule a task to run the first Robocopy script. Based on the error level output one of two things happen: a success or failure. If there is success you run one batch file, if it fails you run another.

The other week I was horsing around and came up with this method of backing up some files on Windows using Robocopy, and automatically sending an email of the results based on success or failure using Robocopy’s error level output codes.

There’s basically 3 parts that make this thing work:

The Robocopy script or scripts
Fail or Success send email script
Powershell scripts to send the email based on success or failure

That second batch file runs a PowerShell script that sends an email (saying success or fail in the subject) and attaches the Robocopy log.

Let’s dive in 🙂

Automatic WordPress Backups from DigitalOcean Droplet to Local Machine

This post explains how to implement automatic WordPress backups from a DigitalOcean droplet to your machine of choice using SSH/SFTP.

In this post I want to detail my way of implementing automatic WordPress Backups on a site hosted on a DigitalOcean VPS. I am looking for advice on how to improve this setup from efficiency and security standpoints.

Requirements:

DigitalOcean droplet running LEMP/LAMP stack (web server) and a WordPress site
SSH Key Authorization between server and backup storage machine

Python Development Environment: Django with Postgre on CentOS 7

My thought process and steps taken to setup a development environment for learning django/python development.

My focus for the past year and a half has been mostly on networking, security, and systems administration / break fix type topics. However I have recently decided to dive into programming. I decided to start the journey into python, and I wanted to combine that with django for web app development. I quickly found how important it is to setup a Python Development Environment.

How To: Install a Solid State Drive in Your Laptop (Asus Q551L)

This how to will run through swapping out the storage device in an Asus Q551L laptop, but the process must be similar on many machines.

SSD stands for Solid State Drive. According to this article from PC World upgrading to an SSD from an HDD will provide “massive” performance improvements that are immediately noticeable. I would have to agree with that especially in terms of time to boot!

Today I’m going to walk through replacing the storage on an Asus Q551L laptop with a Samsung 860 EVO with 1TB capacity. The process is probably similar on many laptops though. Here is what you will need:

Using Windows PowerShell to Compute File Hash (Bonus: automatically compare it to a given value)

Learn to use Windows PowerShell to calculate hash checksum values, and automatically compare the output to a given value!

Being interested in security, you can’t help but hear about “hashing” and “file integrity”. I was aware that you can download third party software to calculate file hashes using different algorithms such as SHA256 and MD5, but I wasn’t aware you can do it in Windows PowerShell.

The coolest thing is how simple it is. Keep reading to learn how we do it!