As a part of the computing overhaul at my company, each particular workstation that we overhauled had its user profile extracted. This profile contains documents, downloaded files, anything on the Desktop, that sort of information. There never really was any centralized storage until I brought a lot of it to life, later on, so many of these profiles are rather heavy with user data. They range all the way up to about 144 gigabytes each. This user data primarily just serves as a backup, so while it’s not essential for the operation of the company, I want to keep as much as I can for long-term storage and maximally compress it.

The process started with setting up an Ubuntu server on my new VMWare Host and giving it a lot of RAM to use. Once the Ubuntu server was established, which on its own took a whole five minutes to install, I found a version of the self-professed “best compression software around” 7zip and got that installed on the virtual Ubuntu server. Then I did some light reading on 7zip and the general rule of thumb appears to be “throw as much as you can at it and it will compress better”, so I maxed out the application with word size, dictionary size, the works. Then started to compress folders containing all the profile data that I had backed up earlier. Throwing 144 gigabytes of data at 7zip when it’s maxed out takes a really long time. Then I noticed the older VMWare cluster and realized that nothing was running on that so for its swan song I set up another Ubuntu server and duplicated the settings from the first one on the second one and pressed that into service as well.

I then thought about notification on my phone when the compression routine was done, but by the time I had thought about it, I had already started the 7zip compressor on both servers. Both of these were far enough along where I didn’t want to cancel either operation and lose the progress I had made compressing all these user profiles. I am not a Bash Shell expert so it took a little digging around to find that there already was a way, temporarily, to freeze an application and insert more commands after it so that when the first application completes, the next application will go immediately into operation. You use Control-Z, which freezes the application and then the command “bg %1 ; wait %1 ; extra command”. Then I thought about how I’d like to be notified and dug around for some sort of email method. None of these servers that I put together had anything at all in the way of email servers and I really wasn’t keen on screwing around with postfix or sendmail. I discovered a utility called ssmtp which did the trick. Once I configured it for use with my workplace Office365 account and did some testing, I had just the thing that I was looking for. I stopped the application on both servers doing the compression and inserted the email utility to the end of the application finishing. When the compression is done, I will be emailed.

All in all, quite nifty and it only took a few minutes to set up. Once I’m done with this particular task, I can eliminate the “junky” Ubuntu server altogether on the old VMWare host and trim back the Ubuntu server running on my new VMWare host. I quite love Ubuntu, it’s quick and easy, set up what you want, tear it down when you don’t need it anymore, or put the VMWare guest on ice as an appliance until you do need it sometime later. Very handy. Not having to worry about paying for it or licensing it is about as refreshing as it can get. I just need something to work a temporary job, not a permanent solution. Although considering how much malware is out there, the breakpoint between the difficulty-to-use for end users in Linux may eventually give way to the remarkable computing safety of using Linux as a primary user workstation operating system. There is still a long while before Linux is ready for end-user primetime. I sometimes wonder what it will take for the endless vulnerabilities of Windows to break Microsoft. Hope springs eternal!