ChrisInCambo's questions

Currently our system runs entirely inside AWS. We do rolling snapshots of our EBS and often practice running restores.

What keeps me up at night is having all our eggs in one basket. Here are the scenario's:

• Our Amazon zone has some massive event that destroys the data centre
• Someone gains access to our AWS account, terminates our instances and deletes all our snapshots

To mitigate these risks I'm thinking about moving snapshots periodically to another AWS account (with different credentials) in another region.

My question is this, is this an adequate level of precaution or should I be looking to offsite backups that are completely removed from Amazon?

I have a command line program that is expecting to be passed a configuration file e.g.

sphinx --config /some/config_file

I'm calling this command from inside a ruby program where I'm currently dynamically generating the config file before writing it to disk, this seems like a waste as the file is only every used once and just deleted again straight after.

I was wondering if there's a way to avoid writing the file to disk and just passing in something that the program will think is a file but really hasn't been written to disk?

Ok I'm pulling my hair out over this one. We have a wireless network with many clients all working well except two Ubuntu clients running 10.10 that can't access the internet via a browser at the same time. They can both still ping, use Skype etc but can't browse.

As soon as the one that can browse exits the network browsing returns for the other and vice versa. As ping and Skype was working I assumed some kind of DNS problem but moving over to OpenDNS didn't solve it, nor did restarting networking or using wired rather than wireless.

We also switched out the router, and it still persisted so I'm sure this isn't a network issue. The two clients are both laptops and work fine together on a wireless network at another office (which we don't control).

I'm thinking something must be cached from the other network they both use that's causing this but have no idea what.

Does anyone have any ideas? I just don't know where to go from here.

I'm currently an emacs user, but thought I would come back and take another look at Vim for fun.

My client machine is Ubuntu, and I frequently work on other ubuntu servers within my network, emacs and tramp is really nice in this regard, I can just connect to a file via sftp and then easily navigate to it's parents/children/sibling, just as if I was dealing with a file on the local file system.

With Vim I can sftp to a file, but none of the navigation stuff works, when I use :e or fuzzy file search, vim still thinks I'm back on the client machine. If I try to :cd to the sftp directory I get an error.

Is there anyway I can get the same file/folder navigation regardless of whether I'm looking at an sftp folder or a folder on my client machine?

Cheers,

Chrsi

I'm using a product called vlad which is making non-interactive ssh connections to my Ubuntu server but the problem is that it can't see any of the environment variables.

I've been googling like crazy but can't find a solution. I've tried adding the variables to an .ssh/environment file for the user on my server and also changing the settings in /etc/ssh/sshd_config but no joy.

Can anyone help?

Cheers,

Chris

I need to write some complex xml to a variable inside a bash script. The xml needs to be readable inside the bash script as this is where the xml fragment will live, it's not being read from another file or source.

So my question is this if I have a long string which I want to be human readable inside my bash script what is the best way to go about it?

Ideally I want:

• to not have to escape any of the characters
• have it break across multiple lines making it human readable
• keep it's indentation

Can this be done with EOF or something, could anyone give me an example?

e.g.

String = <<EOF
 <?xml version="1.0" encoding='UTF-8'?>
 <painting>
   <img src="madonna.jpg" alt='Foligno Madonna, by Raphael'/>
   <caption>This is Raphael's "Foligno" Madonna, painted in
   <date>1511</date>-<date>1512</date>.</caption>
 </painting>
EOF

I have a host machine which is connected to the internet via a usb 3g dongle and is not attached to a network. Basically from the client I want to be able to ssh into the client from the host and I also want the client to have internet access.

When I use a host only adapter the host can ping the client, but the client can't access the internet. When I use NAT I can access the internet but the host can't ping the client. I have also tried setting up two adaptors NAT and host only, but it just seems as if adaptor 1 overrides adaptor 2.

Could suggest a solution?

Regards,

Chris

I have tried:

sudo "some string" >> test.txt

But I am getting permission denied warning.

Can anyone help?

Does anyone know of a simple one liner to read the first line of a file in bash?

Can anyone tell me why this bash script works if I cut and paste it to the terminal but throws "server_prep.sh: 7: Syntax error: "(" unexpected" when launched using $ sudo sh server_prep.sh ?

#!/bin/sh

#Packages
apt-get -y install ssh libsqlite3-dev ruby-full mercurial

#Gems
required_gems = ( rake rails sqlite3-ruby )

#Set up directories
[ ! -d /var/www ] && mkdir /var/www
[ ! -d /var/www/apps ] && mkdir /var/www/apps

#install gems manually
if ! which gem >/dev/null; then
    wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/60718/rubygems-1.3.5.tgz
    tar xvfz rubygems-1.3.5.tgz
    ruby rubygems-1.3.5/setup.rb
    ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem
    gem update --system

    #Tidy Up
    rm -rf rubygems-1.3.5.tgz rubygems-1.3.5
fi

#Install required gems
for required_gem in "${required_gems[@]}"
do
    if ! gem list | grep $required_gem >/dev/null; then
        gem install $required_gems
    fi
done

Thanks in advance!