Another vote for rsync + simple wrapper script + cron + ssh keys. rsync is brilliant at coping with interruptions, it can guarantee that files match on client and server with checksums. It's fast, it's simple, supports restricting the amount of bandwidth it uses and it's easily scriptable. Wrap it in a shell script to detect failure and retry a certain number of times before informing the user (you). Make sure you setup ssh keys so it can run unattended. Feed the script to cron and tell it to attempt the transfer at some time in the middle of the night.

Bonus points for the wrapper script:
- Have your script detect available bandwidth and only use ~70% of it if you're actively using the computer at the time
- Setup a simple lockfile so that if you it's still running when it tries to run again it will give a useful error
- Maybe have it try once every 2 hours between 2AM and 6AM until it succeeds? (see point above about locking)

I'd be curious if other people are already doing similar things with the above tools.

In a pure democracy the people vote for *laws* not representatives. That's why the US is considered a Democratic Republic (or a *Representative* Democracy). It has nothing to do with the voting method and *everything* to do with what people get to vote for.

That's also what they said in the late 90's when the PowerVR was competing with the 3Dfx Voodoo add-in cards. Given that there have been at least 50 million PowerVR-based GPUs shipped so far that's a heck of a footnote.

Just to restate: You don't care if a diagnostic tool is less deterministic and specific as long as you don't have to learn anything new to deal with new situations (like dualstack). Alright, thing I've got it now.

The people who operate the filters != the end users of the mail system.
End users pay for the cost of operating the filters by seeing advertisements in their webmail or paying for the email service. And yes, this has been working well to prevent the vast majority of spam (something like 99.9% according to my GMail account) from landing in inboxes for 15 years or so at this point.

Another +1 from me. I've hosted a couple websites with them and also run a (small, private) minecraft server there as well. Their IRC channel has a lot of very smart, funny people, many of them who work for prgmr. Actually, if you hang out on the IRC channel you get to see the inner workings of the business as well. If you're going to be running a bunch of VMs though, Linode or Rackspace both have nice web-based management consoles. But for a "personal" VPS it's hard to recommend prgmr highly enough.

Well, we've already seen Google, Mozilla and Microsoft remove root CA certs from their products. Each one of them could do a lot of damage to a CA by removing a root cert, even without cooperation with the others. And yet, in the very recent past we've seen their security teams cooperate closely when dealing with compromised CAs. I think it's reasonable to believe that at least one of them will stay on the ball, when we've already seen proof that they can actually coordinate pretty well in exactly this sort of situation.

Ah, so what you're getting at, is that while Unix-like OSes are well suited for multi-user text processing, workstations, desktops, servers, super computers, cell phones, and embedded industrial computers with realtime processing requirements they might not necessarily work everywhere?

I work in IT and I'm relatively certain that the IT department at my company isn't *universally* reviled. In no particular order, here are some of the things that I think make us mesh with the rest of the company well:
1) An emphasis on hiring IT people with good communication skills, sometimes even preferring the candidate with communication skills and a good "cultural fit" (e.g., excited about working for the company, interested in continuing to learn, etc), over the candidate with specific technical experience.
2) A company-wide emphasis on not hiring technophobes into jobs where they'll be in front of a computer 8 hours a day.
3) IT management that can say "no" at least some of the time
4) IT management with the foresight to actually calculate internal support costs (i.e., hours spent making it actually work) into the TCO of a technology
5) A top-down corporate philosophy of avoiding vendor lockin means that we tend not to get stuck with our backs to the wall (or over the barrel ...) all that often.
6) Using bugzilla for support ticket management (or replace that with any other good way of keeping track of open issues). Our biggest problem in the past had been with users asking for support and those issues getting glossed over or forgotten about.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head, but I can certainly say that without all of those in place doing IT would be a *ton* harder and/or require more staff to get the same amount of work done.

I pretty much agree with 100% of that. Mac OS X 10.7 took a while to grow on me, as did GNOME 3. But now they just feel "right." I'm a really big fan of the way GNOME 3 deals with notifications and "applets." I'm not a fan of the iPod/iPhone but it doesn't have much to do with the UI. In fact, the only part of the UI I didn't like was solved in the latest release with the improvements to notifications.