main June 2022

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3 participants
3 discussions

Sharing disk space between servers
by Mark Rogers 27 Jun '22

27 Jun '22

I have several virtual servers with the same provider. Typically I have around 50GB disk space. On some I have largish databases, with consequently large database backups. The backups are for recovery from cock-ups rather than disaster recovery so retaining them on the same server is convenient, but they do tie up disk space, and the ones with the biggest databases lose the most to database backups. So ideally I want to do something to share the spare capacity on other servers, but safely. for example in the event that one server got hacked I don't want that to provide a backdoor to another server, and nor should any data that's been shared onto it be easily accessible. In an ideal world, it would be nice to ring fence (say) 15GB of capacity on server A and make it available over the network to server B such that A can't access B's files even though they're stored there (I accept that I can't stop someone with root on A deleting the files, but they should at least be encrypted so that they can't be read). And whilst B can use that allocated chunk of A's disk, it must not be able to access anything else on A. Ideally the capacity that's shared should be pretty easy to change so I can easily adapt if A needs more space. (I wondered about trying to remotely mount an encrypted file on A as a filesystem on B, but adapting the size later would be difficult.) As anything I do will be making changes to already functioning servers A & B the changes need to be relatively narrow to avoid the risk of breaking something. Thoughts / suggestions / experience of doing something like this? I can think of various paths to take, from simply pushing files over scp and working out how best to secure it (and manage the quota), to something far more complex like GlusterFS, with lots of options in between. So it's not really a lack of ideas as any idea which ones would be best! -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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Editing files on remote servers over SSH
by Mark Rogers 26 Jun '22

26 Jun '22

What's the best way to edit files on remote servers over SSH? Using a text editor directly over SSH is fine, but a GUI editor like VSCode is easier to work with. But I never have much luck getting SSH/SFTP plugins to work reliably, so I wondered what other people do. Preferably cross-platform as I have to switch between platforms a lot. -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0344 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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SSD HDD and simlinks?
by Phil Thane 01 Jun '22

01 Jun '22

After plaguing this list for months about my ailing desktop PC I finally skipped it and bought a (basic) new one. It comes with 128GB SSD. It's fast of course but not very big. So here's the plan but any advice would be good... I took the (almost new) 1TB drive out of the old PC and there's a lot of stuff on it. I've fitted it to the new machine but not installed anything yet as my ancient keyboard with a PS2 plug won't fit! Once that's sorted I'll install Mint. I *think* I'll do a standard install to the SSD and ignore the HDD. My user data on the HDD is mostly in /home/phil/Nextcloud and it was synced to my Nextcloud server. I assume, hope, I can keep that synced data on the HDD and just link the directory to my new /home/phil/... Not sure if that means using the link as the Nextcloud directory when setting up the client or maybe Nextcloud will allow me to connect direct to the HDD. Either way though I'm hoping to avoid taking all day to sync my data across the network. I remember long ago having a PC with 2 small HDD and setting it up with / on one but /home on the other. Is that still a thing? Is it worth doing in this case? Though bearing in mind it means formatting the HDD and re-syncing all the data. -- Phil

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main June 2022