Edward's questions

I have 1 source server that contains about 30GB of files that I want to copy to 7 other servers. I currently SCP the files over to the first four servers and when that transfer is complete SCP to the last 3 servers.

Would using BitTorrent be faster to distribute the files to all 7 at once? The connection internally is already fast and consistent between each of the servers. I know it would probably take some load off the source server, but would it just take longer to distribute the files?

What's a good scriptable client I could use from the shell? I'd want everyone to stop seeding after 100%.

Between 9pm and 6am I run automated jobs to update our databases, and I want to disable a specific list of users from logging into MySQL.

I want to be able to send our customers email and/or SMS reminders when their billing dates are coming up. A couple issues:

1) How do you send SMS? Do I need to register for a SMS number or some service?

2) I don't want our company's domain to ever be marked for spam, and I fear if I send these notifications through our company's domain it may happen.

• Is there a way I can setup a mail server using the same domain (or subdomain) that will not be marked as spam?

• or is there a third party email and SMS provider that I can send messages through?

I know there are a lot of different marketing related email providers, but I don't know if it matters that these are more customer service related messages.

Our parent company (Microsoft shop) host the DNS and desktop setups for all the affiliate companies: parentcompany.com, affiliatecompany1.com, affiliatecompany2.com, etc.

The parent company has control of all the desktop computers, and they point them to their DNS server.

We are one of the affiliate companies and are mainly a Linux shop. We would like to be able to control the affiliatecompany1.com domain name and be able to add/remove INTERNAL host without going through our parent company to set them up. I still would want them to manage all our external site outside the firewall.

I'm wondering if we can tell our parent company to setup their Microsoft DNS to point all lookups for affiliatecompany1.com to our own DNS server that we would have full control of... Is this possible, and how?

I'm trying to figure out how other people implement their log management systems.

I have 20-30 Linux servers and a few Windows boxes (most of them virtualized). We utilize a lot of Perl and Bash scripts to do most of our automated jobs and I'm trying to standardize their logging.

I've been looking at log4perl and log4sh for logging of scripts and syslog-ng to get all the logs on a centralized logging server. I've also read up on splunk, even though is sounds like the enterprise edition is pretty pricey and I might go over the free license limit with all my servers.

I've seen other tools like swatch and logcheck, but I'm not quite sure how all these pieces fit together... Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!