Andy Lester's questions

We have a cronned job on a production web server that requires tarring up files from across the filesystem. It runs for about 105 minutes, and during that time, Apache starts swapping because all that reading of a few gigs of files has expanded the amount of memory for the filesystem cache.

The data that tar is reading doesn't need to live in the filesystem cache. It's going into the tarfile and that's it. Is there something where we can say like tar cvf whatever/ --no-system-file-buffer-reads? My reading of man tar doesn't turn up anything that looks like it would help.

You don't have to point out that this can be seen as a "Doc, it hurts when I go like that! So don't go like that" situation. Somehow we need to dump files into a tar file, so not going like that isn't an option.

I have a few IP addresses I want to add manually to denyhosts because they're huge sources of inbound spam. What's the best way to do this? Or should I not be messing with it?

I want to manually add these to denyhosts, but I don't see a way to do it through any program options. I see nothing in denyhosts.py --help.

It looks like it could be as simple as adding a line to /etc/hosts.deny, but since the process to delete an IP (see here on ServerFault and the DenyHosts FAQ) involves updating six files, it makes me think it's not "Can't You Just... add the IP to the file?".