Author: todbot

me okay
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Cache This

dumb stream-of-consciousness replacing of ‘cat’ with ‘cache’ for movies

  • That Darn Cache — You can never have too much
  • Cache on a Hot Tin Roof — A story of casemodding gone horribly, horribly wrong
  • The Cache From Outer Space — Computer technology gets uplifted via Roswell-related research
  • The Cache In The Hash — Turns out you really do know more when stoned
  • Cache Me If You Can — “Why don’t huge porn files load faster!?”
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‘Try Again’ button for map routing

I wish mapping websites like maps.google.com & maps.yahoo.com had a ‘next’ or ‘try again’ feature after giving you a set of directions.

So many times I can see that there is an alternate route that may be faster, more entertaining, etc. and if I could only say “next”, meaning “perform another route planning, but this time, ignore the connecting streets from the previous route planned”.

Even better (and perhaps more tractable) would be to let one select which street in the current route to delete and route around.

On so many routes I get mapped I’m often saying “yes, yes, that’s all very fine and good, but what if I don’t want to take BigNastyChoked Bvld.”

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secure cvs setup

On server (called ‘booty’, say):

% sudo mkdir /usr/local/cvs
% sudo cvs -d /usr/local/cvs init
% sudo chmod -R a+rw /usr/local/cvs

On client (called ‘junk’, say):

% export CVSROOT=${USER}@booty:/usr/local/cvs
% export CVS_RSH=ssh
% mkdir testimport
% cd testimport
% touch hellothere
% cvs import -m "initial import" testimport testimport start
% cd ..
% mv testimport testimport.away
% cvs checkout testimport

No other work, like setting up a cvs ‘pserver’ with inetd is required.

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ssh and tar thru ssh gateway

I have an ssh gateway (let’s call it gate) that I use to access my internal network. On that net, I have a machine (let’s call it stuff) with stuff I want. A lot of stuff. And I want to use tar to preserve the permissions and symlinks and stuff on the files. I’ve done this before, but that knowledge is lost to the misty times of the dot-com days. But I re-figured it out:

From somewhere out on the net…

Try to log into the internal machine:


somewhere% ssh -t gate 'ssh stuff'

This gets you logged into the machine called ‘stuff’ on the private net protected by ‘gate’. The -t flag is to force pseudo-tty allocation, since ssh normally won’t do that when input is stdin.

Copy a file by hand:


somewhere% ssh -t gate 'ssh stuff cat "~/some/file.txt" ' \
> some_file.txt

Yeah, the quoting is going to get sucky if you keep this up.

Tar up a whole filetree, saving the tarball:


somewhere% ssh -t gate 'ssh stuff tar cpzf - "~/some/directory/" ' \
> some_directory.tar.gz

Copy a few filetrees (with relative paths and spaces) to your local drive:


somewhere% ssh -t gate 'ssh stuff "cd some/directory; \
tar cpzf - one\ dir two\ dir"' | tar xvzf -

Some of you old fogeys may recognize this pattern as how we moved directories between filesystems in the days when mv wouldn’t let you.