I manage many servers as well as pop into a few other systems now and then. I was getting somewhat irritated with typing out everything. A search on Google showed many results. It seemed the most common command to do this was this.

complete -W "$(echo `cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | sed -e s/,.*//g | uniq | grep -v "\["`;)" ssh

As a preliminary note: DO NOT follow anything in this and proceed to ask for help. If you follow this than consider yourself void of ANY support. Especially from the -kernel channel. They support and develop stock kernels, not your personal modifications.

Now.. In my quest for a fast boot time into a fully functional system that is very light weight, I tried out Gentoo. After using Gentoo I discovered that they're not that "ricer" community everyone claims they are. In many way's they're the exact opposite. Sure some of them fall into the ricer category but they're not very common.

I was hosting my own email server for about a year. I enjoyed the fact that I had full and complete control over the entire mail server. I enjoyed being able to fine tune everything to fit my needs exactly. I was doing this for about 1.5 years.

Unfortunately, there were a few things I couldn't control that really killed the fun of running my own email server. First of all, dealing with the people complaining that it's not how they want it weighed on me. Aside from that there were also power outages, hardware failures, software hangs (from power dips), firewall/router deaths, modem spasms (now very frequent), etc. Not only that, but I only had 1mbit upload available and 1.5mib max available at about $100/mo more.

What it came down to is that running a mail server just isn't for me given my limitations. I needed an alternative and I found one. There is this thing called Google Apps (google.com/a) that is capable of hosting your domain email for you.

I decided to give it a shot. It's not a quick or idiot proof process, but it was worth the effort.

WARNING! Do Not do this to your systems. This is for informational purposes only. Do this in a virtual machine only. If you do this outside of a virtual machine, your computer will blow up and you will die. You've been warned.

I did in fact do this over SSH which was not safe and not smart. That fact that I did it does not mean any intelligent or knowledgeable person should do so. In fact, they probably wouldn't consider it.

You ever been trying to connect to a server using SSH and it takes years to connect? Maybe not years, but hours.

Yup, I've waited over an hour before just to make an SSH connection to a server.

I've never been able to figure it out until now. The issue was because of my hosts file. My server had been running on two IP's. It still is, and is still capable of utilizing both. However, I needed to give one card specific control to handle most all of the network requests.

How good are your backups?

I thought mine were pretty dang good. I found out otherwise. I had the following two lines running nightly for my backups.

# Make MySQL backup
mysqldump -u root -p "$( /var/mysqldump/mysql-$(date +%F).gz
# Delete old copies
find /var/mysqldump/ -mtime +90 -exec rm {} \;

Anybody know what's wrong with that?

For 99% of Linux commands, this would be perfectly good syntax. Unfortunately, this is one of those 1% times where things aren't the way you expect them.

I was using -u root -p "$(</root/.sql.pwd)"

This is for anybody with multiple email accounts that wants to consolidate. My solution here requires and number of POP email accounts and one IMAP account.

I don't even want to begin thinking about the time it took me to come up with this solution. Hopefully it can save somebody 10 or more hours of digging and scripting.

My method works like this.
1. Synchronize IMAP account with local Maildir copy
2. Download POP emails
3. Push emails to Maildir local copy
4. Synchronize local Maildir copy with IMAP account

What an interesting question... Why not use all the RAM and HD space you have as long as it doesn't affect performance? It's one that's been nagging at me a lot lately.

I've seen an 8.10 64bit Live CD running on a dual monitor setup and I've seen it do so VERY beautifully. Everything except sound worked right out of the box. If I had a desktop system like that, I'd be running it that same way. It was fast, responsive, pretty, everything.