NArchivist Marches on...

I released version 0.4 of NArchivist, my cloud-based backup/archiving solution, about a week ago.  I should have made a blog entry about it then, but I've been tied up with other things.  Plus, I wasn't entirely sure I wasn't going to have to make another quick-fix release.  This is largely because I gutted the encryption sub-system to satisfy two requirements.  First, it needed to support streaming of very large files to and from the data stores, and second, it had to work on my older CentOS5 servers.  Version 0.3 was built with a tool called m2secret, which I used to encrypt the files I was backing up.  Ok, no worries, except I found out the hard way that m2secret needed Python 2.5 and, alas, my CentOS5 servers only had Python 2.4.  Upgrading wasn't really a good option.  Plus, m2secret operates by reading the entire file into memory, then encrypting it, then sending it to the target.  Fine, for small(-ish) files, but for larger files this could be a real problem.  I knew this going in, but wanted a quick solution that I could fix later.  Bumping into the Python 2.4/2.5 problem made it later.  So I fixed it.

This has pushed back my Windows support a bit, and my creation of a web-based interface for the system.  But that'll be along fairly soon.  No choice, really; I need the thing myself.