ssh

Here is the presentation material for my talk entitled The Dark Arts of SSH. Please note this is a single HTML rendering that includes presenter’s notes.

Unfortunately not all WiFi connections work perfectly all the time. They’re fraught with unexpected problems including dropping out entirely, abruptly killing connections, and running into connection limits. Thankfully with a little knowledge it is possible to regain productivity that would otherwise be lost to a flaky internet connection. These techniques are applicable to coffee shops, hotels, and other places with semi-public WiFi. Always have a backup connection Depending on a WiFi connections as your sole source of connectivity is a losing proposition.

We have quite a bit of infrastructure around this including Tinderbox Pushlog (TBPL) and more. This post deals with the infrastructure and problem we face while trying to scale the ’try’ repository. A few statistics: The try repository currently has 17943 heads. These heads are never removed. The try repository is about 3.6 GB in size. Due to Mercurial’s on-wire HTTP protocol, this number of heads causes HTTP cloning to fail There are roughly 81000 HTTP requests to try per day To fix problems (mentioned below), the try repository is deleted and re-cloned from mozilla-central every few months There are a number of problems associated with such a repository.