Man, do I suck at finishing projects before I start new ones!
My latest interest is backup software. I looked at AMANDA and Mondo Rescue and a zillion other things, but I wasn’t really happy with any of them. AMANDA looks good, but seems to not support rotating media well. Yes, I know about cdrw-taper, which is a plugin for AMANDA to handle CD’s or DVD’s, but it seemed to be an incredible pain in the ass to get it to work, and there’s no HOWTO or good documentation.
Mondo Rescue is probably great, but it was distinctly not debian friendly. I don’t know why. If I just wait a while, this might fix itself. That is one of the beauties of open-source. The Mondo author and the Debian guys will work things out and life will be good.
In the meanwhile, I’m doing some requirements analysis of what a good backup program should do, in preparation for writing my own.