Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Here is a productivity tip from the you-don’t-want-to-do-this department:

You don’t want to wait for a filesystem check to finish, when it’s working on a 200 GByte partition.

Hopefully, this tip explains the 5-hour downtime that the server experienced from today’s morning and until now.

As you might know, podcasts are like radio shows recorded and distributed digitally (read: mp3 and RSS). Since pretty much anyone can record a show and distribute it over the Internet - everyone and their brother do that.

The file sizes of some podcasts are huge. There are shows that last for more than an hour and include pieces of music and stereo special effects. I’ve seen this eat up more than 50 MBytes each.

Since I only have a 128 MByte memory card (and about 20 of those MBytes are eaten by software intallations and other data), I was looking at ways to minimize the file sizes of the podcasts that I wanted to listen to.

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For a while now I have been using ICQ both at home and at work. Instead of having two different copies of data or running ICQ remotely, I was simply copying all data files over between these two locations. rsync with scp were doing the job just fine. The problem emerged when I started to use ICQ on more than two machines (two machines in the office and one at home). I had to always figure out where is the latest copy of my data and distribute it from there to all the other locations. After doing it manually for just a couple of time bored me to death and I decided to write a script.

I started off with a very specific script that was only meant to copy my ICQ back and forth, but quickly realized that it can be generalized to copy any set of directories. So, here it is - sync_dirs.pl.

This script accepts and requires only one parameter - directory to synchronize. You can define a few shortcuts for frequently used directories inside the script. Locations are also defined inside the script. Since this piece of code uses Net::SSH and Net::SCP, the current limitation is that you must have ssh configured to authorize with keys, not passwords. The good news, is that you need only one location to be able to access all the others. The most recent copy of data will be copied over to this central location and from there distributed to all the other machines.

One thing I liked about Linux is it’s hidden simplicity. When in a hurry, I usually go for the first working solution of a given problem. If the same problem appears often, I can get used to the first solution so much that I don’t even think about simplifying it.

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Many beginning Linux users experience difficulties getting used to the filesystem structure. Indeed, there are many files and directories, the structure of which are not as obvious as it could be. Choosing an appropriate location for a new file or directory is difficult and many choose to follow their own instincts.

With more experience, the file hierarchy becomes clearer and old concepts of placing files and directories start to fade out. When it happens, finding things becomes difficult. It is than that users learn that Linux has many tools for finding things. And it is than that they become confused once again.

Read on for a quick introduction into searching tools available in Linux.

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