1. Allow each team captain three opportunities over the course of the entire match to request an instant replay where any of the following are at issue:
•  A goal was denied due to a penalty of any sort. (Think U.S. v. Slovenia.)
•  The captain believes that a call or failure to call a handball, diving, or offsides was improper.
•  A corner kick is denied where the captain believes the defender last touched the ball.
•  A player is given a red card and the captain believes it was unfounded.
•  The captain believes the ball did or did not cross the plane of the goal line and was improperly called.

The replay officials would require clear and convincing evidence of an error to reverse a call.

2.  Have the clock kept by official timekeepers on the sideline with control of any scoreboard clocks. They stop the clock every time the ball crosses the plane of the sidelines and any time the official’s whistle blows and start the clock when the ball is back in play. This eliminates unpredictable stoppage time at the end of matches and also would probably allow the halfs to be shortened to 35 or 40 minutes while yielding the same amount of actual play.
3. Allow unlimited substitutions.
4. Give an automatic red card to players penalized for diving. They are removed from the match immediately and the side must complete the match without a substitution.
5. Make the goal 22 cm higher and 44 cm wider. (This adds one diameter of the ball on every side, which ought to lead to more scoring.)

Bonus idea: Forbid artificial noisemakers of any sort in the stadiums.

There you have it. Five simple suggestions that would, I think, greatly improve international soccer and which would resolve many of the greatest complaints among those who are interested in soccer, but not yet committed fans.

Install rsnapshot on both the remote machine and the backup server:

apt-get install rsnapshot

Save yourself a copy of the default config file if you ever need it:

cp /etc/rsnapshot.conf /etc/rsnapshot.conf.default

On the backup server I create an rsnapshot user:

groupadd -g 3500 rsnapshot
useradd -u 3500 -s /bin/false -d /home/rsnapshot -m -c "rsnapshot" -g rsnapshot rsnapshot

Then prepare the backup server to be able to automatically access the production server using ssh keys:

cd /home/rsnapshot
su -m rsnapshot

With the previous command you become the user rsnapshot on the shell. You could confirm this with:

whoami

The next few commands must be run as user rsnapshot!

Create the keys:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Hit enter on all prompts. It is important that you do not enter a passphrase otherwise the backup will not work without human interaction, so again hit enter. In the end two files are created: /home/rsnapshot/.ssh/id_rsa and /home/rsnapshot/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

I’m not completely sure this next step is necessary, but I’m partially working from this guide, so next I create a file /home/rsnapshot/.ssh/config with the following contents:

host yourdomainname_backup
hostname yourdomainname.example.com
user root
identityfile /backup/.ssh/id_rsa
compression yes
cipher blowfish
protocol 2

This next step may be unnecessary, but to be safe:

chmod -R go-rwx /home/rsnapshot/.ssh

Now copy over the public key you just created to your production server:

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@yourdomainname.example.com

If your production server to be backed up happens to run Ubuntu, as one of mine did, then you should login to the production server and then do away with it’s silly refusal to have a password for root with:

sudo passwd root

and then you’ll have no trouble with the prior step which copies the public key of the user rsnapshot to the file /root/.ssh/authorized_keys on the production server yourdomainname.example.com.

You can confirm that this worked with:

ssh root@yourdomainname.example.com

That should have logged you in as root on your production server without requiring you to enter a password. Now, on the one hand, this is exactly what we were trying to do, but on the other hand, we don’t want to leave it like this or anyone who gets access to the rsnapshot user on your backup server could be root on your production server. Not good. So next we fix that by taking a look at /root/.ssh/authorized_keys. It should look similar to this:

ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEA[...]/zkctw== rsnapshot@backupservername

Now prepend from="1.2.3.4",command="/root/validate-rsync" just before “ssh-rsa” separated only by a single space, all on a single line like so:

from="1.2.3.4",command="/root/validate-rsync" ssh-rsa AAAAB[...]/zkctw== rsnapshot@backupservername

where “1.2.3.4″ is your backup server’s numeric IP address. This change means that user rsnapshot can only login from your backup server’s IP address and can only run a single command, “validate-rsnyc”. We must now create the file /root/validate-rsync with the following content:

#!/bin/sh

case "$SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND" in
*\&*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
*\(*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
*\{*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
*\;*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
*\<*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
*\`*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
*\|*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
rsync\ --server*)
$SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND
;;
*)
echo "Rejected"
;;
esac

Special thanks to Troy Johnson for this script. Now make the script executable:

chmod u+x validate-rsync

You should now be setup on the production server and can logout and go back to your rsnapshot user on the backup server. Become root on the backup server so you can edit the rsnapshot configuration file, /etc/rsnapshot.conf which you can learn more about at this rsnapshot HOWTO. The main thing to know about this config file is that everything that looks like a space probably should be a TAB instead.

#I suggest the following changes:
snapshot_root /home/rsnapshot/.snapshots/
lockfile      /home/rsnapshot/rsnapshot.pid # user rsnapshot can't write to /var
ssh_args      -o BatchMode=yes

#Uncomment the following:
cmd_cp        /bin/cp
cmd_ssh       /usr/bin/ssh
cmd_du        /usr/bin/du
interval      monthly 3

#Choose some directories to exclude:
exclude       /home/user/JunkThatIDontWant

#And choose some directories to backup:
backup        root@yourdomainname.example.com:/home/user/ yourdomainname.example.com/
backup        root@yourdomainname.example.com:/etc yourdomainname.example.com/
backup        root@yourdomainname.example.com:/var yourdomainname.example.com/
backup        root@yourdomainname.example.com:/usr/local yourdomainname.example.com/

Now you probably put some spaces where there were supposed to be tabs, so check your config file's syntax with this test:

rsnapshot configtest

Once it comes back with "Syntax OK" you are ready to try your first hourly snapshot. Become the rsnapshot user and give it a try with:

cd /home/rsnapshot
su -m rsnapshot
rsnapshot -V hourly

This will give verbose output so you can see that something is really happening. Once you get an hourly snapshot or two to complete successfully, you should automate this with cron. As the rsnapshot user, type:

crontab -e

and choose your schedule, something like:

0 */4 * * * /usr/local/bin/rsnapshot hourly
50 2 * * * /usr/bin/rsnapshot daily
40 2 * * 6 /usr/bin/rsnapshot weekly
30 2 1 * * /usr/bin/rsnapshot monthly

which would do 6 hourly backups a day (once every 4 hours, at 0,4,8,12,16,20)
1 daily backup every day, at 2:50AM
1 weekly backup every week, at 2:40AM, on Saturdays (6th day of week)
1 monthly backup every month, at 2:30AM on the 1st day of the month.

And there you have it! You have automated remote backups of your production server using rsnapshot.

top -b -n 1 | awk '{if (NR <=7) print; else if ($8 == "D") {print; count++} } END {print "Total status D: "count}'

top - 11:53:48 up 5 days, 18:47,  1 user,  load average: 3.00, 3.00, 3.00
Tasks: 132 total,   1 running, 131 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.2%us, 12.3%sy,  3.8%ni, 83.3%id,  0.2%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   2075620k total,  1773432k used,   302188k free,   395648k buffers
Swap:  2650684k total,      716k used,  2649968k free,  1165208k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 8548 root      20   0  2296  684  576 D    0  0.0   0:00.00 find
 8675 root      20   0  2296  684  576 D    0  0.0   0:00.00 find
32070 root      20   0  2296  688  576 D    0  0.0   0:00.00 find
Total status D: 3
tempe:~# killall -9 find

After that, the load average immediately began dropping back to normal.

I just made such searches a lot easier for myself by creating this Firefox search engine plugin that searches resource.org via Google.

I typically know the citation or party name that I’m looking for, and so this search engine plugin puts your terms in quotation marks automatically so that Google searches for exactly that search phrase on resource.org.

In using this plugin so far, I get exactly the opinion I am looking for as the first link far more often than I used to when just using Google. Try it for yourself.

I assume you have ssh or command line access to your host. If not, you could accomplish the same thing using ftp, but you’ll have to pay attention to what directory you upload into:

1. Install Drupal 6.x
2. Download the Drupal WYSIWYG part of FCKeditor from http://drupal.org/project/fckeditor
3. Extract that in sites/all/modules (you may have to create the modules dir) with tar -zvxf fckeditor-6.x-1.4.tar.gz
4. cd to sites/all/modules/fckeditor
5. Download the FCKeditor part of FCKeditor: http://ckeditor.com/download
6. Extract that in sites/all/modules/fckeditor/fckeditor [Yes, seriously.] with tar -zvxf FCKeditor_2.6.5.tar.gz
7. Go enable the FCKeditor module in the drupal admin section, it’ll be down below all the core modules in its own section.

mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sdb1

This is on a software RAID array called /dev/md0 made up of /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1.

Brian-

Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

USPS

(1) David Harris: St. Bartholomew and The Frail Stag

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, October 7, 2009.

We hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. In commemoration, we have placed your picture on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Sigh…

We miss you already. We’ll be right here at http://cdbaby.com/, patiently awaiting your return.
–
CD Baby
The little store with the best new independent music.
http://cdbaby.com cdbaby@cdbaby.com (503)595-3000