I'm trying to run a command over SSH like this in a here-document:

ssh example.com <<END
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
END

Which normally works except when I'm trying to run something that needs input, such as the password for sudo. In that case, I'm getting the following message:

sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified

I know I can use the -t flag on SSH to allocate a pseudo-tty such as this:

ssh -t example.com "sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload"

And it'll work, but when I try the same thing with here-document, it doesn't work and I'll get the same error about no tty being present:

ssh -t example.com <<END
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
END

Any idea how I can make this work?

Also, in case you are wondering why I want it to work with the here-document instead of just passing it on the same line, it is because the input commands (there can be a few) come from a configuration file read by a script and I've heard it avoids the trouble of escaping the commands for the quotes, double quotes, etc.

Has anyone had experience plugging GlusterFS and Openfiler together or something similar?

Here is the motivation:

• Disk space on multiple server regrouped using GlusterFS
• Centralized access using LDAP/AD and quota management using Openfiler as the GlusterFS client
• SMB/CIFS server for easy sharing to multiple users on Mac and Windows

I know I can have Gluster installed on Openfiler (rPath Linux) successfully but Openfiler seems to be very picky on what it can use as a shared drive. Mounting the Gluster volume inside an existing share does not seem to allow quotas with the mounted folder free space.

If this is not possible, is there any alternative to give the same capabilities?

What would you recommend for a medium office fileserver? By medium office I mean roughly 100-150 users that connect to the fileserver sporadically during the day. We're talking about 2TB of data and rising. File sizes ranging from a lot of small files (doc, xls, pdf, fonts) to large files (HD videos and huge PSD). Users connect to these servers using both Macs and PCs.

We're currently using a few separated servers of a few GB each but we'd like to centralize the management of that, leave some place to growth and simplify the location of the files to the users.

At equal pricing, what would you suggest? We could get something like a Dell (R410 or NX300) with RAID5 or the HP equivalent and we would get good pieces, support and roughly 4TB of usable space. Or, for the same amount of money, we could put together a few (4-5) home-made rack-mounted servers (Supermicro board, older Intel processors, 2 or 4 GB or RAM and some basic Caviar Black) and cluster everything through GlusterFS or similar. This would remove the enterprise support option and would move most of the work in our hands but would give us far more usable disk space for the same price.

Both possibilities have their own pros and cons. I'm not really looking for arguments for/against enterprise support, I'm more looking for this:

1. Any experience with home-made clusters?
2. Any arguments on the risk of using commodity hardware?
3. Any points on the performance of such system?
4. Any recommendation on alternate solutions that gives place for growth?

I have pfSense (1.2.3) with a WAN (gateway 10.10.20.1/24) and an OPT1 (gateway 10.10.21.1/24). I also have a LAN (static 10.10.12.1/24, DHCP 10.10.12.128-199/24).

I want to create rules so that traffic coming from LAN go through WAN if the source IP address is below 10.10.12.128/24 and through OPT1 otherwise.

I would I go and make that happen?

Thanks!

Solution: I'm filtering on two subnets as proposed by cpbills and I've added rules on the LAN interface that filters all source 10.10.12.128/25 and then uses the gateway of OPT1 and for the rest, then it falls back on the default route that forward all traffic to the WAN gateway.

What is the best way to split the computers of a LAN (about 50 computers) to go on two WANs, depending on the computers' IP address or computers' configuration (gateway). I'm not looking for load-balancing, I need to be able to route which computer uses which Internet connection.

A solution would be to rewire the old office to split the two distinct groups that need to use two different Internet connections but I'm not sure it's worth it at the moment.

I have a pfSense router configured with the LAN (DHCP), WAN1 and WAN2. I also have the IP addresses (and ability to configure) the next router on WAN1 and the one on WAN2.

What would you suggest? Routing based on IP addresses ranges? Different gateways? VLANs would be difficult for the same reason as to why rewire is a bit complicated.

Thanks!

// Edit:

The rationale is: imagine a big old office floor with two or three companies renting it. The wiring was done when as for one company, mixing in multiple switches in multiple locations across the big floor. One company is paying for a simple Internet connection, the other one for a dedicated link to its server.

I've a had one of our servers going down (network wise) but keeping its uptime (so looks the server is not losing its power) recently. I've asked my hosting company to investigate and I've been told, after investigation, that Apache and MySQL were at all time using 80% of the memory and peaking at 95% and that I might be needing to add some more RAM to the server.

One of their justifications to adding more RAM was that I was using the default max connections setting (125 for MySQL and 150 for Apache) and that for handling those 150 simultaneous connections, I would need at least 3GB of memory instead of the 1GB I have at the moment.

Now, I understand that tweaking the max connections might be better than me leaving the default setting although I didn't feel it was a concern at the moment, having had servers with the same configuration handle more traffic than the current 1 or 2 visitors before the launch, telling myself I'd tweak it depending on the visits pattern later.

I've also always known Apache was more memory hungry under default settings than its competitor such as nginx and lighttpd. Nonetheless, looking at the stats of my machine, I'm trying to see how my hosting company got those numbers.

I'm getting:

# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1000        944         56          0        148        725
-/+ buffers/cache:         71        929
Swap:         1953          0       1953

Which I guess means that yes, the server is reserving around 95% of its memory at the moment but I also thought it meant that only 71 out of the 1000 total were really used by the applications at the moment looking a the buffers/cache row.

Also I don't see any swapping:

# vmstat 60
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
 0  0      0  57612 151704 742596    0    0     1     1    3   11  0  0 100  0
 0  0      0  57604 151704 742596    0    0     0     1    1   24  0  0 100  0
 0  0      0  57604 151704 742596    0    0     0     2    1   18  0  0 100  0
 0  0      0  57604 151704 742596    0    0     0     0    1   13  0  0 100  0

And finally, while requesting a page:

top - 08:33:19 up 3 days, 13:11,  2 users,  load average: 0.06, 0.02, 0.00
Tasks:  81 total,   1 running,  80 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  1.3%us,  0.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 98.3%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1024616k total,   976744k used,    47872k free,   151716k buffers
Swap:  2000052k total,        0k used,  2000052k free,   742596k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
24914 www-data  20   0 26296 8640 3724 S    2  0.8   0:00.06 apache2            
23785 mysql     20   0  125m  18m 5268 S    1  1.9   0:04.54 mysqld             
24491 www-data  20   0 25828 7488 3180 S    1  0.7   0:00.02 apache2            
    1 root      20   0  2844 1688  544 S    0  0.2   0:01.30 init               
...

So, I'd like to know, experts of serverfault:

1. Do I really need more RAM at the moment? // Update: I'd really like to understand why they say I'm using all my current RAM and how to justify the RAM bump they recommend.
2. How do they calculate that for 150 simultaneous connections I'd need 3GB?

Thanks for your help!

I'm doing a backup of multiple external servers on a local machine using rsnapshot and it's working beautifully. Now, I'd like to clone the destination snapshots on an external disk that will be rotated. The thing is, I'd like to maintain the hard links structure to save space on the external disk.

I can clone the snapshots on the local machine to the external disk, but what weights 10GB on the local machine becomes 70GB on the external disk because the hard links structure is not reproduced. I don't want the external disk snapshots to link towards the local machine, but I'd like the same hard link logic without having to transfer the data twice from my multiple external servers:

daily.0/
daily.1/ -> only differences from daily.0/
daily.2/ -> only differences from daily.1/
...

Is it possible using rsync (or another tool) to replicate the structure of my local snaphosts elsewhere? Or just to simply tell rsnapshot to put the snapshots in two different destinations using the same rotation mechanism?

Thank you for your ideas!

This question is in two parts:

Shape

How can I limit the bandwidth on a ASA5510 to less than 10Mbps?

Currently I have:

policy-map shape_policy
class class-default
 shape average 9000000 36096
!
service-policy shape_policy interface outside

But when I look at the traffic on the outside interface it seems it sometimes busts the 10Mbps.

Police

Also, is it possible to limit the bandwidth taken by each users on the ASA? I've tried something like that (although it is not running at the moment):

police input 3000000 51200 conform-action transmit exceed-action drop
police output 3000000 51200 conform-action transmit exceed-action drop

Is it the way to go or is there a better way?

Thanks!

// Addendum:

I should add I'm using version 8.0(4) of the firmware as it can help provide proper configurations for the latest ASAs.

// Status:

I've opened up a bounty. I got two interesting answers although not definite. One seems to be outdated in terms of supported commands, the other one does not answer the second part of the question and leave me unsatisfied. Cisco experts needed!

Consider the following scenario:

• I am running lighttpd-1.4.19 and I am handling big uploads (hundreds of MBs but less than 1GB) through it.
• Server is running on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.
• Files are temporarily written to /var/tmp.
• PHP5 is handling the end-result through fastcgi.
• During an upload, upload chunks are written in the temporary directory.

The weird thing is that although the chunks are written on disk, free memory on the server is reducing gradually up to the full file size during the upload. I would understand RAM diminishes by the size of each chunk (let's say 1-2MB) until they're written on disk but I don't understand why it is by the whole file size (let's say 300MB).

1. Would you know why the RAM would be taken for the whole file although chunks are written on disk? Is it possible /var/tmp is mounted directly in memory? Versus /tmp?
2. If not, would you know how to diagnose and how to pinpoint which process is taking up the memory? I didn't see the lighttpd nor php-cgi process increasing with ps but maybe I'm not looking at the right thing.
3. Or better yet, would you have a recommendation on a good web server (Apache, Nginx, lighttpd, etc.) and config to handle big uploads without storing everything in RAM?

Thanks!