Ssh

At our company we use Capistrano for deploys. It reads Ruby instructions from a ./Capfile in the project's root directory, then deploys accordingly via SSH. It has support for releases, shared log dirs, rollbacks, rsync vs remote cached git deploys, etc. It can be run from any machine that has access to your production servers. Be it your workstation, or a Continuous Integration server. So all in all pretty convenient but typically it assumes you know what servers you want to deploy to at the time of writing your Capfile. What if the composition of your platform changes often? Will you keep changing the Capfile right before every deploy? Seems like effort ; )

If you are writing code in Go and are executing a lot of (remote) commands, you may want to indent all of their output, prefix the loglines with hostnames, or mark anything that was thrown to stderr red, so you can spot errors more easily. For this purpose I wrote Logstreamer.

I recently had an annoying encounter with the error message: `Too many authentication failures for root`. I found out this can be caused because you've hoarded too many SSH keys :) So serves me right, but let's see what happens exactly.

With SSH you can securely login to any Linux server and execute commands remotely. You can even use SSH to transfer and [synchronize files from one server to another](/blog/2007/08/16/synchronize-files-with-rsync/). Automating these tasks can make your life easier, but normally SSH prevents that because it requires you to login every time. Well, not anymore, in this article I will show you how to connect to SSH without a password.

Synchronizing files from one server to another is quite awesome. You can use it for backups, for keeping web servers in sync, and much more. It's fast and it doesn't take up as much bandwidth as normal copying would. And the best thing is, it can be done with only 1 command. Welcome to the wonderful world of rsync.