[lug] 3 Questions: 1) Port Forwarding 2) Unison 3) Job Management Software 4) Test Apache

[David Anselmi]

Gordon Golding wrote:
[...]
> 2)  Anybody know anything about Unison?

Heard about it recently, nothing negative so far from a group I trust. 
It claims to do conflict resolution and I wonder how that works on 
binary (e.g., Word) files.  Maybe it hoses them, maybe it realizes it 
can't handle them and leaves it up to you.  But the web site didn't say 
at a leasurely glance.

[...]
> 3)  Any thoughts on Job Management Software?

In Windows they have something called at, I think.  Unix might have a 
similar tool, maybe cron? ;-)

What do you want the cron doesn't do, and why would you want to 
configure it using something less familiar and flexible than shell 
(perl, python, ...) scripts?

> I want to set up servers to do automated Backup and Status-type
> tasks. ie - Do Backups, filter some logs and post advisories, test
> that Apache isn't frozen, connect with home base and send the
> backups, etc.

Sounds like what you want is a tool to do each of those tasks.  And you 
probably want a separate tool for each (it's the UNIX way).  And cron 
hooks them together.  Let's see, amanda for backups, logwatch for log 
filtering, nagios (or even lynx, heck) for Apache monitoring, rsync to 
send backups off site.  Not to say that any of those are the best tools 
for you.

Perhaps if you're worried about managing many machines you need a 
central configurator (cfengine or one of many others)?

> 4)  I have a number of Servers up.  Regularly, Apache freezes.  I can
> look at processes, I don't see anything wierd, but it does respond to
> a Browser. Any idea how a Server can actually see if Apache is
> reponding to connects?

Sure, ask it for a web page.  You can do something simple like netcat to 
port 80 and see if it connects, or use lynx to retreive a page and see 
if you get a 200 status, or wget the page(s) and diff them against what 
they should be.

Dave