john's questions

I have a range of ipv6 addresses available (native) and want to use them. I 've setup the kernel to support ipv6 and installed the necessary tools (iproute2 etc).

I am having a problem understanding how to actually add the range for the server to use it. Do I have to configure each one separately or is it possible to add the whole range?

Also, after I recompile the programs to support ipv6 (Gentoo), is there an expected strategy on which ip they 'll be using for outgoing connections (assuming the other end is ipv6 enabled)? Is it random, is it the first one, is it something entirely different?

I am confused as to the durability of the EBS volumes on AWS.

As an example, volumes that operate with 20 GB or less of modified data since their most recent Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume. This compares with commodity hard disks that will typically fail with an AFR of around 4%, making EBS volumes 10 times more reliable than typical commodity disk drives.

Because Amazon EBS servers are replicated within a single Availability Zone, mirroring data across multiple Amazon EBS volumes in the same Availability Zone will not significantly improve volume durability.

Does this mean that the 1/200-1/1000 probability of failure is before the automatic replication or after?

Is there a way to recursively find all files owned by a user and change them to another user/group in Gnu/Linux?

I assume there must be some magic one liner but my command line wizardry skills are not up to that :)

Thanks!

Is it possible to safely downgrade the user 'root', replacing it with a different account name? (say 'admin'). So, in the end, 'admin' would be uid 0 and 'root' 123.

I am using Centos, if that makes any difference. What worries me is if any of the standard services use root hardcoded (cron scripts maybe?) and that causes everything to fail.

Thanks!

I am new to this concept. :)

Can I use a distributed filesystem in as a way to have redundancy for web applications?

Server A and Server B would have Apache/mySql installed on the distributed filesystem and server C manages the connections (if sA is down, go to sB - or a round-robin DNS). Would something like this work?

If so, that would be awesome, since I would not have to worry about db syncing and file syncing.

Thank you!

Edit: Thank you very much all for the informative answers! Lots of things for me to digest. I (almost) randomly nominated an answer.

What do I need to write in crontab to execute a script at 3pm every day?

I am confused as to how to set up username/password restrictions on tinyproxy (so that not all the world can access it - ip alow/block has limited use in my setup). Any pointers?

Thank you!

This is my first time using Gentoo and I am quite lost.

I want to install Nginx. The current ebuild does not have support for limitproxy http://nginxlimitproxy.sourceforge.net

I can see I have to modify SRC_URI to add the source of the new plugin. But what is the next step?

edit: Is there an official way to contact the maintainer?

I got an extra /28 ip range for a centos based VPS. I am wondering how to add them as range in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts , instead of creating 13 ifcfg-venet0:x files.

Thank you!

I want to set up a mail server with as much smaller memory footprint as possible on a Centos 5 very low end machine.

Bare minimum features is enough. :)

But what are my options? I can't seem to find anything like that. Or perhaps I can stripdown one of the well know packages?

Thank you.