sludge's questions

I have DNSMasq set up on a relatively idle Pentium D 3.4Ghz Debian Linux machine. When I run dig queries locally, the second result is always 0 ms. When I run dig queries on any other machine on my network, the cached response time is a constant 35ms. This is in spite of the fact that I get LAN ping times back -- under 1ms.

Using DNS Benchmark, I ran a test that shows I can hit my ISP's DNS servers faster than my own for cached queries.

How am I accruing 35ms on cached DNS responses for remote queries but <1ms for local queries at the server's command prompt?

I'm looking at using S3 as an offsite backup repo for my Subversion database. When I dump my SVN database, it's about 10 gigabytes. I would like to avoid the charge of uploading that data repeatedly.

The anatomy of this large file such that new changes to Subversion modify the tail of the file, with everything else staying the same. Because Amazon S3 does not allow you to "patch" files with changes, I will have to upload ten gigs every time I instantiate a backup after doing a simple submit to Subversion.

Here are the options as I see them:

Option 1 I am looking at duplicity which has --volsize which splits data over an amount of megs. Is it possible to split the Subversion dumps using this so further incremental backups are measured in megabytes?

Option 2 Can I just backup the hot subversion repository? This seems like a bad idea if it is in the middle of writing a submit. However, I have the option of taking the repo offline between the hours of midnight and 4am. Each revision in my Berkeley DB uses a file as its record.

I have a machine with 4gb of RAM, but Linux is only detecting two in top and free. The BIOS reports 4.

Running i386 Debian Lenny.

This was observed on Mac OS X 10.5, running Terminal.app. On a native Linux machine, from a bash command prompt, typing meta-backspace deletes up until the most recent whitespace. On a Mac, it sounds the system bell.

SSHing into a Linux machine with Terminal.app as the terminal causes the same problem.

This behavior is consistent with the third party application iTerm. However, the Windows program PuTTy handles meta-backspace (and other meta commands) as expected.