Brendan Abel's questions

I have 200+ Windows 7 machines that are part of a render farm. They're all running a service that is responsible for running render farm commands on the machine.

Currently, several environment variables are set via Group Policy.

After changing environment variables in the Group Policy and restarting the machines several times (by issuing a remote command through the service), the environment variables still aren't being applied to the service.

However, if I Remote Desktop into the machines and then restart, the environment variables will be applied correctly to the service upon restart.

Is there a way for me to get these environment variables to apply correctly to services without having to Remote Desktop into 200+ machines every time I change an environment variable via Group Policy?

I have a linux machine with two network interfaces. They are both connected to local networks -- one is 192.168.*.*, the other is 10.*.*.*.

The 192.168.*.* network is completely private and does not have internet access. The 10.*.*.* network does have internet access.

Currently, I can do external ping's and the names will resolve

ping google.com

However, when I try to ping a machine name on the 192.168.*.* network, the name will not resolve

ping computer-name
ping computer-name.domain
ping computer-name.domain.local

If I specify an IP address, it will resolve

ping 192.168.x.x

How can I set up DNS settings so that the machine names on the private local network will resolve, but I can still resolve external addresses?

I am using Centos6.

I'm using the Group Policy Management Editor to add an environment variable to our Group Policy. In general, this environment variable shouldn't already exist on the host machines, but if it does, I'd like the Group Policy setting to completely replace whatever was set on the host machine.

The Environment Variable editor gives me two similar options -- Update and Replace. The help text for both is nearly identical, both saying that it will replace the variable in the specified environment.

What is the difference between these two options? Which one should I choose to accomplish what I want?

I'm testing Salt. I have a simple test setup of 3 VirtualBox VM's -- with salt-master running on one of the machines and salt-minions running on the other 2 VM's.

I can start either of the salt minion VM's and they will connect to the master and receive commands. If I start both minion VM's, they will both connect for a short period of time, and then one will drop and show as not connected from the master.

Actually, I don't even need to have more than one VM client active. With 1 VM client and 1 VM salt-minion, it will disconnect.

I can restart the salt-minion and it will reconnect to the master and receive commands again... for a couple of minutes at least. Eventually, it will show as disconnected on the master. Running the salt-minion in debug doesn't appear to show anything that explains why it's showing as disconnected on the master.

What could be causing this?

Edit:

The OS I'm using is Ubuntu 14.04. The master and minion environments are the same except for the salt-master package. Running --versions-report on master and minion gives the following versions:

             Salt: 2015.5.3
            Python: 2.7.6 (default, Mar 22 2014, 22:59:56)
            Jinja2: 2.7.2
          M2Crypto: 0.21.1
    msgpack-python: 0.3.0
      msgpack-pure: Not Installed
          pycrypto: 2.6.1
           libnacl: Not Installed
            PyYAML: 3.10
             ioflo: Not Installed
             PyZMQ: 14.0.1
              RAET: Not Installed
               ZMQ: 4.0.4
              Mako: Not Installed
           Tornado: Not Installed
Debian source package: 2015.5.3+ds-1trusty1

I have a single root directory (on a NAS) that I need to backup to another server. The hierarchy of the directory is several layers deep and a majority of the data is composed of extremely large files collections inside about a dozen directories located in various locations throughout the hierarchy. If I do an rsync on the parent directory, I can get a throughput of about 100MB/s. I've tested running multiple rsync processes manually on different directories and can get a higher throughput (350-500MB/s). I'm running rsync from the destination server.

I've implemented a naive solution, where it just splits up the rsyncs using the directories directly under the parent directory, but it needs to be more targeted than that, since some of those directories contain more data than others. Ideally, each process would be responsible for syncing roughly the same amount of data.

Is there a way to use rsync so that it splits up a task into n rsync processes, each with a (roughly) equal number of files.

I want to update my local Thunderbird address book with a list of valid email addresses on an IMAP server. I'm not that familiar with IMAP, does it allow this? If so, could someone point me to an existing code library (preferably python) that allows me to do this?

thanks.