Kovags's questions

Me and a friend has two servers (linux/gentoo) - both has ADSL connections (16Mbit/s download - 512Kb/s upload) and they're located several hundred kilometers away.

Since our upload bandwidth is way too narrow for nowadays requirements, we decided that it would be a good idea to synchronize and load-balance them.

We're serving MediaWiki and Wordpress, using mysql replicas to replicate the databases, lsync (based on git) to sync the files and our DNS servers are resolving to both IP addresses.

It's been running for some days and we just began to experience synchronization issues - files that should be in his server that aren't and files that got erased from my server for no apparent reason;

We thought about DRDB, that synchronize the files at a lower level (DRDB doesn't synchronize file changes in a directory; we must have a new partition on both sides and DRDB will sync their blocks - which seems to be far more stable).

But there's a con - as for our understanding, DRDB doesn't seem to be able to scalable - and this is a must since we plan to have more servers in the future.

My questions are:

1) Is it possible to have lsync working seamlessly or is it just the way it is?

2) Is it there any way to make DRDB scalable? (even if it's a workaround)

3) In your opinion, what would suit my case best?

I work in the IT support department of a branch of a huge company.

I have to take care of a database with all the users, computers, etc. I'm trying to find a way to automatically update the database as much as possible, but the IT infrastructure guys doesn't give me enough privileges to use Active Directory in order to dump the users, nor they have the time to give me the information that I need.

Some days ago I found Active Directory explorer from Sysinternals that allows me to browse through Active Directory, and I found all the information that I need there (username, real name, date when it was created, privileges, company, etc.). Unfortunately I'm unable to export the data to a human readable format. I'm just able to take a snapshot of the whole database in a machine-readable format. Doing the snapshot takes hours and I'm afraid that the infrastructure guys won't like me doing entire snapshots on a regular basis.

Do you know of any tool (command-line is preferable) that would allow me to retrieve the values of the keys or export it to XML, CSV, etc?