Archive
Posts from 2007
Remotely mounting directories through SSH
I manage a fair number of Linux hosts, and have recently been looking for ways to securely mount remote directories on my servers for administrative purposes. NFS and Samba don't have a terribly good security track record, so I don't like to use either of these solutions unless truly warranted. Rsync over SSH is pretty sweet, but it's not quite as transparent as I would like it to be. Since all of my hosts support SSH, I started to wonder if someone had developed a solution to transparently move files between two systems using SSH…
$ read more →Running processes in fixed time intervals
While messing around with Sun Cluster 3.2, I came across hatimerun. This nifty program can be used to run a program in a fixed amount of time, and kill the program if it runs longer that the time alloted to it. If hatimerun kills a program, it will return a status code of 99. If the program runs in it's alloted time, hatimerun will return a status code of 0…
$ read more →First thoughts of Sun Cluster 3.2
Over the past few weeks, I have been heads down studying for the Sun Cluster 3.2 beta exam. I finally took the certification test this week, and am hopeful that I passed (I am pretty sure I did). Prior to studying for this exam, my last experience with Sun's clustering technology was Sun Cluster 2.2. I was not a big fan of it, since it caused a number of outages at my previous employer, and lacked a number of features that were available in Veritas Cluster Server…
$ read more →Redhat Linux FTP client annoyance
The netkit-ftp client that ships with Redhat Enterprise Linux comes with a verbose option, which will among other things instruct the client to print the number of bytes transferred after each file is successfully sent. These messages look similar to the following: 85811076 bytes sent in 1.3e+02 seconds (6.7e+02 Kbytes/s) I had several enormous files (each > 2GB) I needed to move to another server, and noticed that the netkit-ftp client wasn't printing status messages after the files were transferred. To see what was causing the issue, I started reading throught the netkit-ftp source code. After a few minutes of poking around ftp.c, I came across this gem: I reckon the folks who developed this code never transferred files larger than 2^31 bits on 32-bit platforms…
$ read more →Now this is some sweet livin'
This is the news of the year. Spinal Tap is reuniting to fight global warming! I hope they will turn it up to 11!!!
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