Robin Bowes

I have a NexentaStor-based NAS device on my home network. It has 10 x 500GB SATA Drives in a raidz2 configuration giving me approx 4TB of usable storage. I don't have many users at home (basically, just me!) so I don't bother with any central authentication mechanism – I simply make sure that use I the same login ( robin ) across all servers, and on unix/linux servers I make sure the UID is the same ( 10000 ). When a user is added to NexentaStor, it is allocated the next available UID beginning at 1001 ( 1000 is allocated to the admin user). For the robin  login, I need this to be 10000 . Not a problem – simply drop to a bash shell on the NAS and use vipw to change the UID of the login. The bit I *always* forget is that the CIFS server uses a different passwd file ( /var/smb/smbpasswd ) and it is necessary to change the UID in that file too.

We currently deploy our app code to around 50 nodes using capistrano. We use the "copy" deployment method, ie. the code is checked out of svn onto the local deployment node, rolled into a tarball, then copied out to each target node where it is unrolled into a release dir before the final symlink is put in place. As you might imagine, copying to 50 nodes generates quite a bit of traffic, and it takes ~5 mins to do a full deploy. I was reading  this interesting link  today; one bullet in particular jumped out at me: "… the few hundred MB binary gets rapidly pushed bia [sic] bit torrent." Now that's an interesting idea – I wonder if I can knock up something in capistrano that deploys using bittorrent?