How can I decompress on OS X a .tgz I created on Linux with files having accents in their names? I get “Cannot open: Invalid argument” for each file. Help help help help!

P.S. Looks like there’s just no way to do that (or maybe using pax instead of tar, but I haven’t got it on my Knoppix live CD). So let’s try out rsync -e ssh and hope I won’t screw up the options and miss half my files.

So, for the geeks who can have an interest in those things (and are able to understand what I’ll be writing), right now I’m having a preliminary rsync from one drive to another on my server. Because my fantastic Linux fileserver, that I’ve had for a year now, freezes (completely, for real) when you use more than one PCI thing at the same time — it crashed when I used the video capture card and the hard drive (you can hardly ever use one without the other), so I put the capture card on my other PC, but the server still freezed when I used Apache a little too much. I always assumed it was because there were too many hard drives inside, but I realized this week that it’s just the fact of using a drive and the Ethernet port at the same time (yeah, that sucks, too, for a fileserver). Since my data is on SATA drives (plural because of RAID-1) and no other computer in the house has a SATA port, I’m copying 60GB of data from a SATA drive to a temporary ATA drive, which I’ll then put into another, borrowed, PC in order to finally rsyncssh my files to the Mac.

And the reason why I had initially wanted to use tar rather than rsync is that the odds of losing some files at one step or another are way too high for my taste.

Moral of the story, Serial-ATA is crap, and if you want to put your files on a RAID-1 array (for the non-geeks who skipped the last paragraph and have no idea what I’m talking about, that’s the protocol that saves your data on two or more hard drives so nothing’s lost if one drive fries), do it with SCSI or don’t do it at all.

Mmh… no, actually, I don’t see what it’s got to do with anything.

Moral of the story, rather, if you’re on a Mac and you want a fileserver, buy an Xserve RAID. There. And even if you’re not on a Mac — but you should be.

And don’t buy faulty motherboards from your stepfather’s reseller. And delete all your files so you won’t cling to them anyway. And to hell with computers anyway.