Skip to content

Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale Logo Fediverso

Social Forum federato con il resto del mondo. Non contano le istanze, contano le persone

Following on the heels of ssh(1) yesterday, today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is rsync(1).

Uncategorized
1 1 0
  • Following on the heels of ssh(1) yesterday, today's is rsync(1).

    It's one of the key elements in my podcast listening (more on that to come later this month), where my podcatcher pulls down podcasts into a backlog tree structure, and I rsync the whole thing to my phone for listening. It also undergirds my blog deployment, building in Nikola (still gotta find some time to switch that to my custom Makefile driven build process) and then rsync'ing the output/ tree up to my web-server.

    And last night our teen wanted our family photo website content's pictures for a school project, so I was able to rsync the latest copy of them to a backup USB drive that he could browse offline.

    It's reliable and does a particular job (keeping two directory trees in sync) very well. Yes, ZFS send/receive is more efficient if both sides support it and they're whole datasets, but that's not always the case.

    Also, since I use bash as my shell, the "^" substitution makes it easy to issue something like

    $ rsync -n -avr $SRC $DEST

    and if it looks good, use

    $ ^-n

    to remove the dry-run flag and run it for real.

  • stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafeundefined stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe shared this topic on

Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
Post suggeriti
  • 0 Votes
    1 Posts
    0 Views
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent it's lynx(1). Which is amusing because it's been scheduled for today on my calendar since the beginning of the month, but @neil chose to share links(1) today as well, for many of the same reasons. 😆It's been around for decades—I used it to browse gopherspace (and maybe WAIS?) in the 90s via a 1200 baud dial-up connection to a shell account and later the nascent WWW when it arrived.Sadly, ClownFlare, Google, and anti-AI-bot/scraper tech has made many formerly-accessible-with-lynx sites now inaccessible, some blocking by User-Agent, some blocking due to the lack of JavaScript support.But it has the right amount of usability and friction, so I can use it from my command-line-only writer-deck netbook to do a little research or read some HTML documentation, without getting sucked into the modern web.My custom configuration puts it in Advanced mode (no help-bar at the bottom), specifies vi-key-bindings, a custom color-scheme, uses links-and-form-fields-are-numbered making it easy to jump to them, and text-fields-require-activation so I don't get stuck in text input boxes when using j/k to scroll up/down in the document.I also have a couple shell wrapper-functions to invoke lynx on particular URLs (Wikipedia, dictionary/thesaurus/rhyming resources, web search, etc) with the CLI arguments filled in.I also have mutt configured to show text/html messages in lynx (either using `lynx -dump` and the internal pager, or using `m` from the attachments menu to view it interactively)
  • 0 Votes
    1 Posts
    2 Views
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent, today it's OpenSMTPD¹.In the past I've tried to set up Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, and qmail at various junctures, but found them all unwieldy in their configuration syntax. Macros and compiling them, or digging through dozens of config files for relevant settings. Lots of "here are thousands of settings, but don't change them unless you really know what you're doing." It drove me a bit crazy.Then OpenBSD folks created OpenSMTPD.The configuration syntax was sensible and simple. It didn't try to do everything, just adequate SMTP serving with some privsep. It was easy to point it at certificates that acme-client(1) obtains for me via httpd(8) interactions scheduled in cron(8), all within the base system.It's the MTA with OpenBSD's fingerprints of simplicity & security all over it.⸻¹ https://opensmtpd.org/
  • 0 Votes
    1 Posts
    2 Views
    Today in #FreeSoftwareAdvent I'm thankful for the BSD projects, particularly FreeBSD & OpenBSD. Nothing against NetBSD or DragonflyBSD, I just haven't found a regular use-case for them in my day-to-day.I recently wrote up¹ why/how I ended up on a mix of FreeBSD & OpenBSD after a long tenure with Debian since it drifted from the Unixy principles² I loved and grew up with.⸻¹ https://blog.thechases.com/posts/why-bsds/² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
  • 0 Votes
    1 Posts
    2 Views
    Though a bit niche, my #FreeSoftwareAdvent today is ed(1). As the goofball behind @ed1conf, I certainly play it up, but I certainly use it more than the average Unix/BSD/Linux user.A while ago I wrote up list of reasons¹ why one might use ed, and some are more obscure/improbable reasons (though I've encountered all of them in that post), there are a couple of those that drive me back to ed regularly:• I can still see the output of previous commands on the screen while I edit, where a full-screen editor would obscure that output that I need to incorporate in my edit• it's just darn fast for a quick edit, changing a variable name or adding/removing an entry in a list, etc. No startup costs for a honkin' huge $VISUAL with dozens of plugins and language-server processes and GUI rendering• very usable on low-bandwith/high-latency connections like I sometimes get when I remote into machines (less of a problem now, but I still experience sessions where I'll SSH in, invoke ed, make the change, write & quit, and exit the shell, in a couple seconds, while the screen repaints things oh-so-slowly• and most importantly, there's quality geek-cred for using it in front of others 😆⸻¹ https://blog.thechases.com/posts/cli/why-ed1/