Reliable backup systems are critical to any type of development. The following simple python script can be setup on a crontab and will tar a server's /home and /etc directories and scp them to a remote server. It will send an email alert when it is finished, and can be extended to include other directories. It also has a way to exclude wild-card file patterns or directories.
I found this posting handy when I was trying to gzip files on my windows machine. The documentation that comes with Python is not very good regarding gzip. This explanation was clear and concise.
I decided to setup Trac for the projects I work on at World Resources Institute. Previously, we had used a combination of DokuWiki and Mantis to manage our projects.