Spreading GNU Parallel by making a testimonial video

Several months ago I was asked to record a small video to Spread GNU Parallel. GNU Parallel is a fantastic tool, a Swiss army knife for process parallelization. With GNU Parallel you can:

Till that moment I had already written 2 post on my web page:

But making videos was a new world for me… Here you are:

Please do not apply any cat filter to it (vlc video.mp3|cat) 😛 😛 It is not funny! (April’s fool is coming)

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Optimizing long batch processes or ETL by using buff/cache properly

During the COVID-19 I have invested some of the “free time” given by the lock down to refresh some old topics like capacity planning and command line optimizations.

In 2011 I got my LPIC-3 and while studying for the previous LPIC-2 two of the topics were Capacity Planning and Predict Future Resource Needs. To refresh this knowledge I recently took Matthew Pearson’s Linux Capacity Planning course from the LinuxAcademy

My interest in Data Science and Business Intelligence started with a course I took where the main tool used was Pentaho mostly PDI (aka Kettle) for ETL jobs and Report Designer for reports automation. Then I continued with Waikato’s university WEKA courses and this path drove me to read Jeroen JanssensData Science at the Command Line book which I have recently re-read again. In his book, Jeroen uses Ole’s Tange GNU parallel a tool I have already written about in my A Quick and Neat 🙂 Orchestrator using GNU Parallel post

How are Linux Capacity Planning, ETL, command line and parallelization of jobs related you might wonder. Let’s dig into it

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Adding headless capabilities to the Tresorit backup software using Xpra / Winswitch in Linux

Recently I have changed my backup solution from SpiderOak to Tresorit. I have been very happy with SpiderOak since I started with them around 2009, But last year backups and sync started to fail. Eg: backups taking ages or not finishing at all, etc. Also support response time was not good enough and didn’t find a proper fix for my problems, so finally I decided to move my business elsewhere. The chosen one was Tresorit, a Swiss based company that offered two things important for me de-duplication and client side encryption.

Both solutions works in Linux but Tresorit needs a GUI to work (SpiderOak support a headless mode). This was a problem as I wanted to run the Tresorit client in a headless VPS servers. To add a kind of pseudo headless support to the Tresorit client I decided to use the Xpra software a multi-platform (Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac) screen and application forwarding system or as they say in the web page “screen for X11”.
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A Quick and Neat :) Orchestrator using GNU Parallel

Sometimes you have to deal with servers that you don’t know anything about:

  • You are a short temp IT consultant with not previous knowledge on the environment.
  • The CMDB is out of order.
  • You are on a DR situation.
  • Or simply the main administrator is not there.

And you need:

  • Run commands in parallel
  • Get info from many servers at a time
  • Troubleshoot DNS problems
  • Check how many servers are up and running

On my systems I use two orchestrators: MCollective and SaltStack (configured automatically using puppet) that fulfill my needs. But let’s see a quick way to have an orchestrator in a rapid manner.

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Como encontrar un servidor en un CPD

Si bajas a menudo a un CPD porque tienes que hacer algo en algún servidor (patching, cambio de cinta, cambio de disco duro, etc) te habrá pasado alguna vez que no encuentras el servidor en el CPD.

Con este pequeño truco podrás encontrarlo fácilmente a ritmo de Axel Foley 😛

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Linux – Acceso al diccionario de la RAE desde la consola shell de Linux

Alguna vez te habrá pasado que no tienes un diccionario de castellano a mano cuando te hace falta. Con este sencillo script, puedes consultar el Diccionario de la Real Academia Española de la lengua desde tu consola favorita.

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Instalando Debian GNU/Linux con LVM+RAID1 en una maquina virtual emulada QEMU

Alguna vez has querido hacer pruebas, practicas con un sistema operativo instalado sobre RAID por software + LVM (Volumenes Lógicos) y no tienes ningún equipo libre para hacer pruebas. Instala una Debian LVM+RAID1 en una maquina virtual emulada usando Qemu.

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Instalando Debian GNU/Linux con LVM+RAID1 desde el instalador (debian-installer)

Con las antiguas ISOs de instalación, teníamos que hacer instalación normal en un disco, añadir otro disco, configurar el RAID1 por software y sincronizar los 2 discos. Ahora podemos hacerlo de una sola vez. El nuevo instalador (debian-installer) nos permite instalar desde cero una maquina con RAID1 por software y volúmenes lógicos LVM.

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Qemu – Imagen i386 qcow Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (etch) utilizable desde qemu

Hace poco tiempo que descubri el proyecto FreeOsZoo. Basicamente es un repositorio de imagenes QEMU de sistemas operativos libres. Desde la pagina del proyecto FreeOsZoo incluso podemos probar algunas de estas imagenes QEMU online antes de descargarnos un monton de MB o incluso GB.

Como tenia pensado realizar un par de tutoriales sobre aplicaciones, servidores, redes usando imagenes QEMU y debian, me he decidido a hacer una imagen qcow para qemu segun las especificaciones de la pagina del proyecto FreeOsZoo de mi distribucion linux favorita: Debian.

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