Latest News

[10/10] New snapshots.

[09/23] New stable and unstable snapshots are out. Mondo v1.5x now lets you exclude all NFS-related mounts and devices, with the '-N' switch. Also, major DevFS-related bugs have been fixed which affect NTFS users in particular.

[09/06] Mondo v1.46 and Mindi v0.66 are out. I am keeping the dates in the version numbers (i.e. 1.46_20020906 and 0.66_20020906) for various reasons. If people don't like it, people will let me know, I am sure.

[08/27] New stable (1.4x, 0.6x) and devel (1.5x, 0.7x) snapshots. Check out the new artwork from Webdragon. See Stefan Huebner's new documentation for Monitas. See Lee Harvey's work on a new website for Mondo.

[08/02] New Monitas snapshot. New M&M stable+devel snapshots.

Mirrors are operational. If you want to run a mirror, e-mail me here.

Future releases

The project began in late 1999. The first major release was on February 18th, 2000 - known as "Mondo 2/18" for obvious reasons.

I am very interested in making Mondo work across networks, giving it abilities similar to Ghost's multicast / remote-restore. Mondo v1.4x supports NFS backup/restore already. However, Monitas will be much more feature-rich than Mondo.

Now that Mondo supports tape streamers, I am turning my attention to the user interface and to Enterprise-level stuff.

Diary

October 10th

New snapshots, mostly to fix Debian-specific problems. Gee, Debian is hard to support. Go figure.

September 23rd

New stable and unstable snapshots are out. Mondo v1.5x now lets you exclude all NFS-related mounts and devices, with the '-N' switch. Also, major DevFS-related bugs have been fixed which affect NTFS users in particular.

XMondo is coming along nicely. I expect to upload something in a week or two.

September 18th

New stable & unstable snapshots are out. Mondo v1.5x now lets you exclude all NFS-related mounts and devices, thanks to the '-N' switch.

September 12th

New stable & unstable snapshots are out.

September 7th

Mondo v1.50_20020907 and Mindi v0.70_20020907 are out. They include many changes under the hood, none of which are very interesting to the expert user but all of which will benefit the novice user. For example, just type 'mondoarchive' to backup your PC. Type 'mondorestore' to restore with or without rebooting first. It's that simple, folks.

September 6th

Mondo v1.46 and Mindi v0.66 are out. I am keeping the dates in the version numbers (i.e. 1.46_20020906 and 0.66_20020906) for various reasons. If people don't like it, people will let me know, I am sure.

September 5th

New stable (1.4x, 0.6x) and devel (1.5x, 0.7x) snapshots. Mondo v1.46 and Mindi v0.66 are due out any day now.

August 27th

New stable (1.4x, 0.6x) and devel (1.5x, 0.7x) snapshots. Check out the new artwork from Webdragon. See Stefan Huebner's new documentation for Monitas. See Lee Harvey's work on a new website for Mondo.

August 10th

The new stable (1.4x, 0.6x) snapshots will make it easier for tape users to spread their data across tapes without worrying about exactly how large the tapes are. Some tapes are not actually as large as they say they are, so Mondo will from now on leave 100MB unused at the end of each tape. Of course, if your tape is 20MB less than it claims to be in length then you'll only lose 80MB... ;-)

The development (1.5x, 0.7x) snapshots will detect your tape/CD drive and its settings for you if you run 'mondoarchive' (i.e. without any parameters).

On a more serious note, let's remember that the War on Terrorism is about oil, not freedom. How about a war on pedophilia? Oh, I forgot, protecting children from sexual abuse isn't as sexy as saving the world from this week's evil archvillain. How about a war on soft money? Well, Enron can't bribe him a second time: they're broke. How about a war on corporate accounting skullduggery? Cheney's relationship with Arthur Andersen would make that difficult. Oh well. The Bush Administration is well known for its irrational exuberance (or should that be hubris?).

Never mind that the President was judged by the SEC to have engaged in Martha Stewart's new, fun pastime. (I can imagine the headline-writers now: "What? Martha's been defrauding us? Hold the front page and drop that silly lead banner about Dubya. The People have a right to know the truth about Martha, and we're gonna tell 'em!")

Oh, that's right, it was ten years ago. Presidents only have to behave honorably after they've been elected. They can pardon themselves, especially if they're Christians, and just go on as if nothing had ever happened. The People don't need to know every detail of Dubya's sordid past, do they?

How about his sordid present?

Let's look at both by going back to the 'evil archvillain' thing. Bush's family has been doing business with evil archenemies since WW2, when the family company was seized by the US Government on the grounds that it was a front for the Nazis. Now, fast-forward to the 1990's. Bush Jr. has inherited a propensity for collecting buddies of ill repute such as Khaled bin Mahfouz.

Khaled bin Mahfouz is a big investor in the Carlyle Group (GOP pals and military hardware manufacturers who've done rather nicely out of this latest 'war') with chums on the Group's board. He is also backing Bin Laden to the tune of 7 figures a year, and has been for a decade.

Did I mention Enron had been secretly negotiating with the Taliban to build a pipeline through Afghanistan? Did you know that? Neither did I. The cover-up by the FBI was a little too successful: it gave the Taliban time to let Al Qaida complete the training and preparation necessary for the attack on the World Trade Center - you know, the one in mid-September of last year. Oh, and Bush Sr. was a business partner in the Carlyle Group with the Bin Laden family from the early Nineties to... hmm, you'll have to fill in the end-date for yourselves.

That pipeline 'operation' was the reason Enron (a seasoned malefactor in the oil business) bought up huge tracts of land in the Caspian basin: it was for the 'railroad about to go through Rock Ridge'. What a good thing that Bush now has ersatz control of Afghanistan and its government. All he needs now is a toe-hold in Turkmenistan. With Enron stock at an all-time low, its land almost worthless and the Afghani and Turkmeni governments nice and pliable (the latter terrified of Russia trying to assert itself), Bush's business associates can build the pipeline oh-so-cheaply. They'll make a killing, just like the Carlyle Group are.

The sooner the American government (whoever happens to be at the helm - Dick Cheney, Mrs Clinton, Dick Cheney again, ...) stops taking it upon itself to engage in unilateral military incursions (200+ since 1945, with 680 million dead) to score points at home, the sooner the World will stop laughing at America.

August 2nd

The new Monitas tarball contains my typical ramblings with some additional work by a very talented 3rd party.

I have finally written a script to automate the process of renaming and rolling Mondo and Mindi's snapshots (stable + development branches). If you are interested in taking part in the testing of Mondo v1.5x and Mindi v0.7x then please check out the development branch's latest snapshots.

July 30th

New snapshots are available for the stable branch of Mondo and Mindi. Please download them if you have been having trouble with the stable branch.

New development (1.5x, 0.7x) snapshots are out, too. They will give you some idea of how I've been restructuring the source code.

July 17th

New snapshots are available for the stable and development branches of Mondo and Mindi. The development branches contain more support for RPC calls and NFS mounting in the boot disk. Eventually, I hope to support NFS/PXE booting and restoration via a single boot disk.

July 15th

Mindi v0.65 and Mondo v1.45 are out! They contain a slew of bugfixes and some minor enhancements.July 13th

1) New snapshots. 2) I have two desktop PC's and one laptop now, for which I am very thankful. I can now do some serious regression-testing, especially on behalf of tape users.

The new snapshots fix several important bugs. If you are a tape user or a Red Hat 7.3 user, you'll want them (the snapshots, not the bugs).

I think I've finally nailed the NFS problem, too.

June 29th

New snapshots for Mondo, Mindi and Monitas are available. Also, I have finally gotten my hands on a desktop PC again. Now I can start fixing some bugs...

June 11th

Phazeman has written a nifty HOWO for newbies, which he published via linuxmonster.org and his own website. Also, Monitas is coming along nicely...

June 5th

Mondo v1.43-r7 and Mindi v0.63-r7 are out. Thanks, KP, for rolling the packages. I am uploading daily snapshots now, in case users are interested in trying the latest and greatest features.

May 28th

Mondo v1.43-r6 and Mindi v0.63-r6 are out. Thanks, KP!

May 21st

NEW - check out Mike's page for SuSE users.

May 15th

Oo! Oo! Mondo is in the German "Linux Magazine", says Michael Stibane. Michael has also designed a seriously cool, new logo for Mondo, too. (The article was by Charly Kühnast, apparently.)

May 6th

Mondo v1.43-r4 and Mindi v0.63-r4 are out.

April 25th, 2002

Mondo v1.43 and Mindi v0.63 are out. Troff has commented the code splendidly. Donald K. has mailed me a set of SuSE CD's which will enable me to customize Mondo to suits the needs of the distribution. KP is rolling RPM's. It all looks very promising.

April 18th, 2002

KP has released some new RPM's for Mondo, Mindi and Isolinux. Check out http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/kp if you are interested. They're neat.

April 1 3 th, 20 02

Mondo v1.42-r3 and Mindi v0.62-r3 are out.

April 1 0 th, 20 02

Mondo v1.42 and Mindi v0.62 are out. Let's see how they go...

March 31st, 2002

Lots of patching. Lots of debugging. New manual and PDF (updated, anyway - nice job, Mr. Hultgren!) available at the top of the Download page. Mikael is kicking butt, yet again. Oh, and Mindi v0.60 is out. It looks good.

March 21st, 2002

Mondo v1.41 and Mindi v0.59 are out. Oh, and happy birthday to me!

March 3rd, 2002

Mondo v1.40-r6 and Mindi v0.58-r6 are out. Basically, r5 + minor bugfixes = r6.

February 24th, 2002

Mondo v1.40-r5 and Mindi v0.58-r5 are out. Enjoy. I wiped and nuke-restored my PC using the latest releases. If you downloaded Mondo before Sunday, 24th Feb @ 6 p.m. (GMT) then please download these releases, just in case.

February 19th, 2002

The groovy new manual is out. Cafeole, Troff, Randy and I have done our best to make Mondo as exciting and easy to use as a toaster. Mondo looks as if it is finally stabilizing - I mean, really stabilizing, not simply behaving properly most of the time. Users are telling me it is 'slick', 'perfect', etc. There must be bugs lurking but for now they seem to be under control. Debian users, please submit your bug reports. I'll do my best to figure out what's Mondo's fault and what's Debian's fault.

February 17th, 2002

Mondo v1.40-r3 and Mindi v0.58-r4 are out. They look good so far. Bug reports, please!

February 15th, 2002

3pm: I backed up my server (6GB hard drive, 128MB RAM, CPU=AMD K6-300) to one CD-R. 5pm: I nuked it. (It's a Windows 98 / Red Hat 7.2 system, btw.) Windows and Red Hat booted just fine. Phew. No problems of any kind were encountered.

The new Nuke Mode also resizes all partitions proportionately, to fill up the hard disks. This is useful if you are migrating from a 20GB hard drive to a 40GB hard drive. You don't have to edit the mountlist or even restore interactively: just nuke it. Mondo v1.40-r3 will include this feature.

February 10th, 2002

Mondo v1.40 is out. So is Mindi v0.58, which goes well with a dry white wine.

February 1st, 2002

Mindi v0.56 is out. It fixes minor keyboard mapping bugs. Mondo v1.25 is out, too. It handles files of 2GB in size now. There are a few other minor fixes but basically v1.2x is solid as a rock, as far as I can tell. Please feel free to send me bug reports to prove me wrong. ;)

January 28th, 2002

Mindi v0.55 is out. I have opened Mondo 1.5x. Mondo v1.40 will be out in 4-6 weeks.

January 25th, 2002

Mondo v1.37, Mondo v1.24 and Mindi v0.54 are out. Mondo v1.37 has a proper 'selective restore' interface which you will like, I am sure. Please submit logs with bug reports. :)

January 20th, 2002

Mondo v1.36 and Mindi v0.53 are out. Mondo v1.36 is a giant leap forward but it's not for newbies. Use it with caution. If you are reading this, it means I have successfully nuked my PC with v1.36; however, YMMV. Tape users should always use --verify. CD users should not use --verify but should boot into Compare Mode instead.

January 14th, 2002

Mondo v1.35 has been out for a few days now. It looks good. I have wiped and restored using tapes, CD's and ISO's-over-NFS using v1.35; I have not lost any data yet.

I am moving large chunks of Mondo from the shell script (mondo-archive) to the C-based archival engine (mondo-tarme). Users will notice and enjoy the difference.

Currently unemployed as I am, I hope I can balance the demands of job-hunting with the demands of Mondo's users. My wrist pains are creeping back. It must be the time on IRC. If necessary, I'll stop going.

I hope to have OS-neutral support in place by the end of the month, with a pretty interface by the end of next month (February).

January 5th, 2002

Mondo v1.23 and Mindi v0.52 are out. They install to /usr/local and fix some minor bugs. I am working on NFS support.

I have backed up and restored my PC using 1.23/0.52; no problems were encountered.

January 3rd, 2002

Mondo v1.23 is due out on Sunday. It will install in /usr/local. Ditto, Mindi v0.52. Mondo v1.35 has been pushed back by at least a week. It might be out on Jan 15th. Rewriting the tape support from the ground up is turning out to be harder than I thought. I have spent about 40 hours on it since last Saturday. I am still burning the midnight oil, testing it, breaking it, fixing it...

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