I myself have been using the backup software BackupPC for almost a decade, and I started to backup our lab computers to a central backup server about two years ago. BackupPC supports deduplication and therefore much data can be stored on a couple of 2 TB drives.
I just switched back from MacOSX to Ubuntu for work. Mostly for financial reasons. We need more computers at work and a really good PC laptop is just half as expensive as a MacbookPro or iMac.
Already the third time this happens to me: An update is available for the mysql server and I just "apt-get upgrade". The upgrade process gets totally stuck at the following task:
Preparing to replace mysql-server-5.1 5.1.66-0ubuntu0.10.04.1 (using .../mysql-server-5.1_5.1.66-0ubuntu0.10.04.2_i386.deb) ...
mysql stop/waiting
The process that got again stuck in some eternal loop (or whatever) is an egrep replacement of some textfile:
egrep -qi -r ^[^#]*ndb.connectstring|^[:space:]*\[[:space:]*ndb_mgmd /etc/mysql/