From my last posting about ZFS “Fun with ZFS send and receive” we see that the ZFS commands are really easy to use but very powerful, because of this I find it easy to write scripts to do the things I need. Here is some code that I use for snapshots, it’s written in python but can be ported to anything as it’s taking command line output and parsing info for what it needs.

For the people who haven’t had the opportunity to play around with ZFS, it’s a powerful filesystem which lets you easily manage storage with very simple commands. Right now you can use ZFS within FreeBSD, OpenSolaris and Solaris and there are also ports for Linux, MacOS and NetBSD but they still in the works and something I wouldn’t use in production. For this posting we will be looking at some ways you can use zfs send and zfs receive command and how they can help you manage your storage along with combining them with other Unix tools.

Most people know that port 22 is used for SSH communication and due to this common knowledge, you get people using scripts to test for weak passwords. If you look into your /var/log/auth.log and you see tons of fails/errors from users not on your system or from invalid passwords for root, it means you have people trying to break into your system. Truthfully, anyone that puts a system online with port 22 open will see this happen to them.

Sometimes it’s nice to be able to share files with other people. There are many sites online where you are able to do this but you are limited by size, type of file, or lacking in security. SFTP gives you the ablity to transfer from your server securely. Users that have SSH access can start using SFTP right away with applications like WinSCP. You don’t want to give people full access to your system, so this is where SFTP only users come in to play.