Unison File Synchronizer is a a cross-platofrm, GPL’ed tool for keeping filesystems synched across machines.
I am really interested in this kind of technology that not only does mirroring of directories & files, but mirrors them in such a way that when you modify the file it doesn’t copy the whole file across the network but instead copies over changes at the byte level.
Other options might be Windows Distributed File System or Coda file-system on Linux.
I think it would help with the Dallas to Portland connection, but I think it would be especially useful for sharing with China and Malaysia offices. That way, if someone wants to pull down a file that’s already been uploaded & synched, they will be pulling down a local copy — much much faster than pulling down a copy over the LAN. We may ever consider mirroring our intraweb app server, so people can access it like they are in their local office.
Oh, my world for a MacBook Pro. For those times when I absolutely must use Windows, in the past I have struggled with Virtual PC emulation or log into a remote desktop connection on a windows box. Since Virtual PC not only runs Windows XP on top of my puny little powerbook, but it emulates an intel processor, it runs as slow as a dog. And remote desktop is no good for testing networking stuff, which is often the whole reason I want to run Windows.
Now there is Parallels for the new intel-based Macs, which allows you to run Windows, Linux, or whatever else intel-based OS you like. The great thing is you can run it in a window, you don’t need to reboot. And since intel macs don’t have to pretend they are intels, there is very little emulation — this means the speed is much better than Virtual PC. Hooray for virtualization.
Watch it in action on YouTube
I always forget how to backup the 2003 box, which is something I try to do whenever updating it (or installing new software).
The command is “ntbackup” from Run.
I think Mark had installed Ultra VNC on one of our computers in the office before, but I hadn’t really looked at it that closely until now. There are a couple interesting things about Ultra VNC.
It supports Windows Domain Logons. This means we would not have to worry about figuring out the VNC password on a machine.
It supports session encryption. It has built in file-transfer, and chat system. This is not so much an issue since we have a VPN, but Ultra VNC allows you to setup a repeater or NAT to NAT connectors to work around the problems associated with NAT routing.
A really interesting feature is called Singleclick. It allows you to provide a weblink to a user who doesn’t have VNC installed, they downloaded a minimal 300K distribution of UltraVNC, which then does a reverse connection to your system, but shares their machine. This might especially be useful for helping our laptop users.
The big downside is there are no Mac or Linux clients. But like most flavors of VNC it has a built in Java viewer you access via a web-browser. And this java version supports all the MS Logon, encryption, and file transfer features too.
The big question is speed, I have found the only VNC Server to give decent performance by way of Java client so far to be Real VNC. So I will definitely be doing some testing with Ultra VNC to see how it performs. But if this goes well, I’m thinking this may be our new default VNC software.
Logs spiraling crazy, we run out of disk space all the time. A nifty trick to find where the disk went is to issue: du -cks * |sort -rn |head -11
This returns where the disk usage is, and makes finding the bloated log a lot easier.
Dare I say, one day, this will be what replaces Webshare on our intraweb: Link. Login/Pass: demo / demo.
No source code yet, soon they say.
(via Ajaxian.com blogpost)
Sometimes a user needs help with something. Since everybody seems to have Skype now, this application could be a useful feature to give “help” without using VPC.
Unyte here.
So we all know we shouldn’t access router configuration pages when wireless, right? http://router.yourdomain.com:8080, including the password, will go over the are crystal clear. But when duty calls,
1) Connect to a cisco VPN
2) kelvin@pluto:~$ sudo route add -host router.yourdomain.com dev cipsec0
This will tunnel all traffic over the VPN to malaysia.
Note: Command for Linux — Ian, do you know the similar command of OS X/BSD?
A bunch of Unix admins apply the “never have to touch the client computer directly” mentality to Windows:
Once upon a time, in spring 2000 to be exact, a merry band of system managers from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology set out on a mission, to apply their well tempered Unix knowledge to Windows 2000. Against all odds, they came back, mission accomplished (sort of) and were still able to tell their story.
A LOT of good stuff here on automating the administration of Windows client computers as much as possible. And not just Win2K, a lot of this stuff covers XP too.