Joseph Turian's questions

I have an Amazon account, as does my colleague.

He spun up an EC2 instance, and wants to give me admin permissions. In particular, I want to be able to start and stop the instance, open and close ports, etc.

How does he give me admin perms for the instance?

I would like to use commands like:

ec2-authorize default -p 8000-8001

I already have an access key and a secret key, but my colleague provided me with one. He did not, however, provide me with the X.509 CERT, and a lot of the admin commands complain that I need it. How do I get a cert?

I want to run a Unix program which runs for a few seconds, without sacrificing speed of execution. After it is done, I would like to know what dynamic (shared) libraries it used.

What is the appropriate command?

The main problem is that I have a handful of BLAS implementations, and I want to figure out exactly which one is being used by each of a handful of different programs.

Trust, but verify.

Let's say I want to hire someone a sysadmin, and give them root access to my Unix system. I want to disable X windows for them, only allow shell usage (through SSH, maybe), so that all operations they perform will be through the shell (not mouse operations).

I need a tool that will log to a remote server all commands they issue, as they issue them. So even if they install a back door and cover their tracks, that will be logged remotely.

• How do I disable everything but shell access?
• Is there a tool for instantaneously remotely logging commands as they are issued?

I want to do a large disk transfer, which slows down responsiveness of my system.

What I want is a Unix command that will only run the command after I have been idle at the console for a few minutes. And if I come back half way in, it will suspend the job. Until I walk away from my computer.

Is there such a command, or software package?

[edit: The key part of this question is how to determine if there is console activity, to automatically suspend.]

I would like to put up a "Site under maintenance" page, so that every URL request is shown this page.

What is the correct way to write a .htaccess file to do this?

I have a web site that communicates via XMLRPC with an XMLRPC server web service. (The web service is written in Python using xmlrpclib.) I believe that xmlrpclib will block while it is handling one request.

So if there are three users with an xmlrpclib request ahead of you, your response takes four times as long.

How do I handle it if I receive too many XMLRPC requests and the web service gets bogged down and has slow response time?

If I am getting slashdotted, my preferred behavior is that the first users get good response times and everyone else is told to come back later. I think this is superior to giving everyone terrible response times.

How do I create this behavior? Is this called load-balancing? I am not actually balancing though, until I have multiple servers.