programm issues--moving files back and forth

[luke]

On Wed, 26 Nov 2008, Tyler Littlefield wrote:

> > > It appears to me as though you are looking at your problems in terms of
> > > solutions, rather than defining the problem and solving the route causes.
[.]
> Most of my problems branch from lack of knowing that this tool was available,
> etc. I try to track down a problem and work from there, in solving the
> problem. I'm not totally sure what the origenal comment was supposed to
> convey.

That rather than solving the current problem, go and find out _why_ the 
problem happened.  Was it because of a lack of security?  Secure your 
system, and the problem will solve itself, rather than patching over it.  
Was it because you're using the wrong mail software for your purposes?  
Rather than fighting with your current software to make it fit the 
circumstances, find the one which does the job better out of the box.

It's the idea of building on shaky foundations.  It's fine if you know you 
are building on shaky foundations, because then you won't build anything 
that you expect to last.  However if you are covering cracks with planks 
during the construction phase, and then thinking they can support the 
house which they were never intended to do, problems will start to pop up 
when it's too late to easily and cheaply start over.

That said, it's hard to know what you need when you're just starting out, 
and as you say, one can not always be aware of what tools are out there 
for a particular task.  However, if you are well able to determine what it 
is that you are trying to achieve, you should be able to do some 
searching, and find out what tools are available.

If 1,440 files per day are appearing in a directory, and you don't 
want them, you can write a cron job to do an rm through that directory on 
an hourly basis, and the files will be gone--poof: problem solved.
You have found a solution to the problem, but haven't bothered to figure 
out the cause, and solve that instead.
Because checking the process table and a few other things, will probably 
tell you that there is a program running once per minute, which creates 
a newly-named PID file for itself, and then doesn't clean up when it 
unexpectedly crashes.  If you can find that program, and can find out what 
it's doing, and check the logs, you'll probably be able to solve the 
crash, the program will clean up after itself in future, and poof: problem 
solved.  Only now several problems have been solved, including some you 
probably didn't know about yet (massively expanding log files, for 
example), all because you backtracked the cause, and solved the problem, 
not the symptom.
In fact, thinking of this, wasn't it you with a similar situation, 
involving cron job problems mailing you empty messages?  You wanted to 
stop the messages, or make them go away, and until someone suggested it, 
you did not think to figure out and fix the problem with the particular 
cron job which was prompting them.  I think that was you.

 I will add, that key to asking for help, is providing all relevant 
information during the first iteration of the question.  The information 
about your router would have eliminated or quashed the DMZ debate.

What ever the question is, provide the circumstances.  If it's a 
networking question particular to your setup, describe your network, and 
the devices on it, unless you really are expert enough to describe only 
the parts which you are 100% sure are at fault.
If it's a network security question, describe your topology, and what 
firewalls, NATs, routers, gateways, bridges, modems, and systems are in 
play, and describe what ports you need open and why, if your question 
relates to ports.

If you're asking how to mount files on machine A, which are located on 
machine B; and further how to edit them in-place: describe the operating 
systems, and network relationship, between those two machines, and explain 
which machine is to be the host, and which is to be the client.
Re that question, I now believe I understand that the files at issue 
are on a Linux host, and you have a Windows client which needs to edit 
them.  However I may have that inverted.
The Linux box is outside your network, one presumes on a DHCPed public 
address, and the windows client is on an private Class C address behind a 
NAT provided by something or other.

If all that is right, then SSHFS isn't going to work, unless someone has 
ported it to Windows.  NFS would, and Samba would.
If you don't trust Samba over a public network (and nor should you), then 
route it over a tunnel of some kind, such as a VPN (I have suggested 
OpenVPN for this, and a search on "samba over openvpn" returns interesting 
results), although if you can do it without Samba, that is probably 
preferable.

The point is, only you know your full configuration.  You must be able to 
figure out _why_ the way you want to do something is a good/the only idea, 
or if in fact there is a far simpler arrangement available.
For example: can you edit your files on Linux?  If so, but need to use 
Windows to do it for some reason, how about a Windows SSH client 
connection into Linux, wherein you can run nano or the like?

I do not pretend to be fully aware of all of the Windows <> Linux file 
accessing options, so whether SSHFS has some how been ported, or NFS works 
for you, or a Linux fileserver would be better for your situation, or 
tunneling Samba is better, I can not really say.
It is so much easier just to answer the question which is asked, but you 
run the risk of following advice which may not apply to your situation, 
because you did not describe your situation well enough, or did not know 
enough to be in that situation yet, in which case you end up hurting 
yourself, and thinking that those who answered gave bad advice.

Try to look at every cry for help, as someone who had never heard of your 
situation (or you, or your network) might look at it, and anticipate the 
questions he would ask.  "Does this line of my question lead to other 
questions?"
In so doing, you may realize that you have a deeper issue which, if 
rectified, would eradicate your problem.

I'm not trying to set you off on some new and unusual path (E.G. don't try 
this at home), but faced with the router you described, I might very well 
DMZ a Linux box, put a second NIC in it, and firewall my whole network 
through the Linux box, leaving the router as nothing but a modem, only 
serving as a bridge between my Linux gateway and the world.  That would 
eliminate your file and Samba problem completely, as Samba running on your 
internal network, could see the private interfaces of the Windows and 
Linux machines, and would be blissfully untouched by the wide world of 
crackers just on the other side of the Linux NAT machine.

Regards,

Luke