Frank Brenner's questions

I'm currently setting up a POC installation of an internally developed web application. We are testing AD auth using the Python LDAP module. My question: does every authenticating web app user need a CAL? Or can we get by with just one device-CAL for the web-app server?

Thanks!

I have just acquired a server with:

2x quadcore Xeons

48G ECC RAM

5x 160GB SSDs on an LSI 9260-8i

Before deploying the target platform, I'd like to collect as much benchmark data as possible, testing I/O with hardware RAID in various configurations, ZFS zRAID, as well as I/O performance on vSphere and with KVM virtualization. In order to see real disk I/O performance without cache effects, I tried running Iozone with a maximum file of more than twice the physical RAM as recommended in the documentation, so:

iozone -a -g100G

However, as one might expect, this takes far too long to be practicable. (I stopped the run after seven hours..)

I'd like to reduce the range of record and file sizes to values that might reflect realistic performance for an application server, hopefully getting the run times to under an hour or so.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

How can I execute a series of commands from my bash history? For instance if I want to execute the commands numbered 34 to 42 in my bash history, I've tried things like:

for n in $(seq 34 42); do
   exec \!$n;
done

but that doesn't really it do the the trick, does it. Any ideas?

Thanks!

I would like create Visio diagrams of an OpenLDAP directory. Is there a way to import an LDIF, or connect Visio to the LDAP Server?

Thanks!

How can I check out only certain subfolders from a branch in Bazaar? Example:

Given the branch consisting of:

/myapp /myapp/doc /myapp/bin /my /myapp/bunch-o-crap

how do I create a versioned working copy of just

/myapp/doc /myapp/bin

I have the following situation:

A web server that lives in our company intranet has an address in a private range. Certain license restrictions prevent us from changing the private address. Port 443 is made public using port-forwarding over a public address on our gateway. So far so good.

Externally, we use a hosted Linux server with Bind9 as the authoritative name server for the mycorp.com domain. This server resolves our web server FQDN to the external, public address, so:

superwebsite.mycorp.com -> 209.85.148.103 (apologies to google)

Internally, we use a Windows 2003 Active Directory server as a DNS server. This server is authoritative for our intranet domain and resolves the internal FQDN of our server to the private address, so:

superwebsite.mycorp.localdomain -> 192.168.1.25

We have recently purchased a commercial SSL certificate for superwebsite.mycorp.com, so we need our internal AD Server to resolve the public FQDN to the private address, so:

superwebsite.mycorp.com -> 192.168.1.25

We also would like to serve Subversion repositories from this server, so it is important that the external URL be the same as the internal, otherwise developers will have trouble with their workspaces...

How can I tell Active Directory to resolve this one specific FQDN to the private address? Obviously I can't create the zone superwebsite.mycorp.com inside the intranet: this would cause the AD DNS server to consider itself authoritative and ignore the real authoritative server outside of the intranet.

I need to create a new tar archive from the filtered output of the original. I thought something like this might work:

tar xvpf myarchive.tar --exclude=foo* | tar cvpf mynewarchive.tar

but that doesn't.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

I have a tar archive created on an old Unixware machine using ISO8859-1 encoding. When I try to extract it under Macosx Lion, I experience a bit of weirdness with German umlauts. For instance:

I open a terminal.app window with the encoding set to "ISO8859-1" and set my locale like this:

export LANG=de_DE.ISO8859-1
export LC_ALL=de_DE.ISO8859-1

then take a peek at the archive:

dhcp202:Downloads frank$ tar tvf backup.tar home/frank
x home/frank/
x home/frank/Präferenzen/

note that the "ä" is displayed correctly

I then unpack the archive with

tar xvf backup.tar home/frank

the "ä" is also displayed correctly in the output from tar, but when I list the directory contents, I see:

dhcp202:Downloads frank$ ls home/frank
Pr%E4ferenzen 

What's up with that?

I'm trying to restore a 40 GB tar backup to an ancient UnixWare 2.1 box. The backup archive is on a Linux box in the same network. At this point, I'm cat'ting the tar archive through rsh to tar on the local box, which is excruciatingly slow. It would be far preferable, of course, to copy the tar archive to the local box and extract it there, but the disk add utility won't seem to let me create a VxFS partition greater than 2 GB. I created a large VxFS partition on a Unixware 7.1 box, but I could not successfully mount it on the 2.1 box.

Is there a way around this, or is this just a limitation of the operating system?

When setting up a web server with multiple IP-based virtual hosts, I've always used the eth0:x alias notation in /etc/network/interfaces. The wiki on my hosting provider states however that this is deprecated and one should now use the iproute tools.

Is this correct, and what's the difference between using aliases and using iproute?