To know what directories are exported by a NFS server, you can use the showmount -e nfs_server from a NFS client.

[root@client:~]# showmount -e server<br /> Export list for server:<br /> /data/dir1 (everyone)<br /> /data/dir2 client1 client2 client3

(The /data/dir2 is exported only to specified clients)

This is nothing new, but just in case you missed it, Yahoo! published a fairly detailed report about how to speed up your website response times : Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site.

Many of the tips are common sense, some are somehow unexpected, and some I didn’t know like the HTTP/1.1 header ETAG. Let’s see what that’s about.

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you might have seen posts about SSH, RSYNC, ZFS Snapshots and so on. This article aims at describing the big picture, and to explain how I’ve been using those tools and technologies to build my own home backup system.

I don’t usually comment movies on my blog because this is really not the point, but I’ve just seen “Outsourced” and it literally cracked me up, so I decided to make a short exception 😉 (Besides I’ve already thought of a good excuse you’ll find out later in this post)

ZFS is a great filesystem. Amongst its many features, it has snapshots. Let’s see how to use them.

Quoting the RSYNC homepage : “rsync is an open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer.”

To make rsync both secure and automated (i.e : non-interactive), you can use SSH as the transport and set up a key pair. This is what will be discussed in this post, along with a few improvements.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 is released today, you can grab it from the OpenSolaris website.

The distribution is a bootable CD which will let you try it before installing. It includes most of the big hits of Solaris 10 (zfs, dtrace, containers and so on).

If you never tried Solaris or OpenSolaris, this might be a good kick start !

If you experience a slow SSH connection to a Solaris 10 host while after connection everything works fine, then read on !

If you upgraded your Ubuntu on an IBM T40 Laptop only to find out that there is no sound anymore, you’re not alone in this 😉

Follow the bug report for more information !

Edit 2008-05-11 : As of today I don’t have this problem anymore … update your machine if you haven’t yet !

Edit 2008-06-22 : Sound vanished again … I really need to look into this before this drives me crazy !!

This post presents what is the attack known as “ARP Man in the Middle” which is basically a way for a malicious user to sniff network traffic on a fully switched network. If you don’t know this attack yet, go on reading.