System Admin

Forcing a mysqldump to always be nice to CPU and I/O

Thursday, Mar 14th, 2013

Exporting or dumping a database with mysqldump, pg_dump or sqlite is a common procedure. The problem is the programs always run as fast as possible generally monopolizing your hard disk and sometimes your CPU. This can noticeably slow down other processes. Generally, responding to a HTTP request or a simply a ls command is more important than the database dump. If the dump takes slightly longer you'll probably never notice it.

Scripting public-key-access-only user creation in Linux

Thursday, Aug 9th, 2012

The process of adding many users to a new Linux system can get tedious, especially if it is involved. So, let's replace the process with a simple shell script.

For this example, public keys are the only allowed login method. Password login is disabled, so the password is not set. The first step is to run set -e to stop the script on any errors. Next assign readable variable names, and check they aren't null. Next the user is created, and as the user the public keys are setup.

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