Apreche's questions

I have a group of servers all properly configured with SSH agent forwarding. It is a typical bastion server style configuration where the only machine you can connect to from the outside is server A. From server A you can use agent forwarding to connect to servers B, C, D, etc. It is all working perfectly.

Sometimes I want to copy a file from my local machine to server B. In order to do this I have to first scp the file to server A. Then ssh to server A and scp the file to server B. Then I delete the file from server A.

Is there a way to copy the file directly from my computer to server B via server A in just one command executed on my local machine?

I have some staging and development web servers on cloud hosting. I do not want them to be accessible to the general public. It's easy enough to restrict access by network or authentication.

The problem is that there are many times where I want third parties to have access, so they can preview changes before they go into production. It would be too much to ask these third parties to configure VPN clients or to create user accounts for all of them. It's ok if it's a little bit less convenient than just sending them a link in an e-mail, but too much would be a problem.

Is there a best practice for this scenario? If so, what is it? I feel like I'm asking how I can have my cake and eat it to, so I completely understand if you tell me it's not possible.

I don't want to use Fedora 8. I would be very happy to use the newest version, but there is no choice. My problem is that 8 comes with python 2.5. I am trying to upgrade it to 2.6, but with no luck.

The only caveat is that I don't want to just install directly from source. I want to do it through the package manager using an rpm. I have tried building my own rpm from source using rpmbuild. I have tried using src rpms from newer versions of Fedora. I've tried these CentOS instructions. Nothing seems to actually result in an rpm file that installs successfully.

I have also tried extensive Google searching, and have been unsurprisingly unable to find any rpms that work, or working instructions to build my own rpm.

I have a web server. Lots and lots of DNS entries for domains and subdomains are pointing at this server. Most of them, like www.foo.com, foo.com, and subdomain.foo.com, I want to keep. However, there is a certain list of subdomains for which I want to redirect.

For example, all of these urls resolve to the web server.

test.foo.com bar.foo.com baz.foo.com

test.foo.com is fine, we don't have to do anything, but bar and baz are on the list. That means we have to redirect them to

bar.list.foo.com baz.list.foo.com

I can't just do a subdomain wild-card rewrite here because there is a long list of subdomains we want to redirect and a long list of ones we do not want to redirect.

Can/should I do a mod_rewrite that compares the subdomain to a list in a text file? If so, how do I do that? If not, how do I handle these redirects?

I know that I can make an entry into a mod_rewrite configuration, one for each subdomain, but that is a lot of typing, and there must be a better answer.

I have a domain, let's call it foobar.com. All of the MX records for foobar.com point to Google's mail servers because I am using Google Apps for your domain to manage it. It's great because everyone gets all the advantages of GMail, but our e-mail addresses aren't @gmail.com.

I also have a server. Primarily, it's a web server, but it also serves other things. One of the things it serves is the web site for foobar.com and also sites for various virtual hosts such as shop.foobar.com and forum.foobar.com. The server is running Ubuntu 8.04, because I like using LTS releases in production.

The thing is, there are various applications running on the server that need the ability to send out emails. Various applications, like the cron jobs, send me e-mails in case of errors. Some of the web applications need to send e-mail to users when they forget their passwords, to confirm new registered users, etc. Lastly, it's nice to be able to send e-mail from the command line using the mail command, or mutt.

How can I setup the mail on the web server to go through the Google apps mail servers? I don't need the web server to receive mail, though that would be cool. I do need it to be able to send mail as any legitimate address @foobar.com. That way the forum application can send mails with [email protected] in the from field, and the ecommerce application will have [email protected] in the from field. Also, by sending the mail through the Google servers, we can avoid a lot of the problems with the e-mails being blocked by various spam filters on the web. Google's SMTP servers are trusted a lot more than mine would be.

I'm pretty good with administering Linux systems, but I am absolutely brain dead when it comes to e-mail. I need step by step directions from beginning to end on how to set this up. I need to know every thing to install, and every single change to the configuration files that is necessary. I have tried following various howtos and guides in the past, but none of them were quite right. Either they didn't work at all, or they offered a configuration that is not what I wanted.

Please help. Thanks.

My work tends to involves using SSH to connect to various machines, and then using vim to edit files on those machines. The problem is that I have to constantly copy my .vimrc file around. It's very annoying to open vim and not have any settings. Is it possible to carry my vim settings around with me from machine to machine without manually copying it everywhere?

I did some searches, but I was unable to find a list of which CPU models support VT-x and which do not. Where can I find such a list?

I've got a VirtualBox VM running with host-only networking. This VM is running Apache, and I want to setup a bunch of name-based virtual hosts in it that can be accessed from the web browser on the host machine.

The thing is, every time I add a new sub-domain for a virtual host, I have to add it to the hosts-file. Right now I have something like this:

192.168.56.3 vm site1.vm site2.vm site3.vm site4.vm ...

I want to achieve the same effect as this

192.168.56.3 vm *.vm

I know that * doesn't work as a wildcard in a hosts file. Is there another way to achieve the desired result short of running an actual DNS server? Should I just suck it up and keep adding to my hosts file manually?