Backup and Restore ext4 filesystem using fsarchiver

Important Note: Until the time of writing this article, "partimage" DOESN'T SUPPORT EXT4, it detects ext4 as ext3 and then displays an error message saying "can't read bitmap block 0 from image", so if you use something like the bootable disk "systemrescuecd" for backup and you're using an ext4 filesystem, you'd better use another alternative such as "fsarchiver" as in the following steps:

1. Create a mountpoint to save the image to, e.g. "/root/backup"
   
2. "fsarchiver savefs /root/backup/backup.fsa /dev/sda1" where sda1 is the partition you wish to backup.

fsarchiver uses gzip compression by default and it will display a summary once it finishes, make sure the summary doesn't contain any errors. To restore the image:

1. "fsarhiver restfs /root/backup/backup.fsa id=0,dest=/dev/sda1" where "/dev/sda1" is the partition you wish to restore and "id=0" is used to indicate that it's the first partition in the list of paritions - if any - inside the "backup.fsa" file.

For more information, visit http://www.fsarchiver.org/QuickStart

UNetbootin: Burn any ISO or image files to USB Disk on Linux

1. Go to the following URL: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ and download the file
2. Make the file executable (chmod +x file_name)
3. This step is specific for Ubuntu: If you receive the message "7z not found ....", open a terminal and run "sudo apt-get install p7zip-full"

BTW, if you need to write IMG files instead on Ubuntu, you can install the USB image writer by running "sudo apt-get install usb-imagewriter"

Enjoy :)

Network Manager 0.7 Multiple Simultaneous Connections!

Four network connections active at the same time:

• 3G connection (etisalat USB modem)
• 2 wireless networks with 2 different wireless cards (the internal card and another external one)
• 1 wired connection

This is EXTREMELY useful and I gained a lot of benefits getting connected to multiple networks at the same time and being able to direct the network traffic to its destination using proxies, check the screenshots below:


Note that there must be one default connection (that can be changed manually since version 0.7.1) that all the traffic go to except if else specified.