In one of my previous post I made a tutorial how to bypass corporate firewalls and gain access into your office computer. It work well if you are at your home and you need ssh access (or any other service) to your office computer. However if the situation is reversed, and you need to access some outside service which your firewall is blocking then you would use this little tutorial with explanations. Although all this is covered in the ssh man pages, one always learn best by real life examples, so here I'll try to cover few of them.

There are tons of reasons why would one want to create a rsync server. For example you wish to backup your data to a remote server but you don't want to backup everything every time.

rsync is an open source utility that provides fast incremental file transfer. rsync is freely available under the GNU General Public License and is currently being maintained by Wayne Davison.

Munin is a great tool for performance graphing your servers, by default it will graph resources on localhost, however if you wish to monitor multiple servers from single location, then you must deploy a central Munin server.

Having central graphs mean you can have central hub of data about performance of your systems. This can later be better presented, viewed and analyzed,

While doing a little coding I tried to find some tail -f class in python that will recognize when file that we tailing is been truncated. All I found was some tail -f classes that brakes on file truncate or rotate.

Occasionally you will wish to block certain ports to your DomUs from Dom0. By default you wish to allow any traffic from and to DomU but for some security considerations, I found it to be wise to block some ports to and from my clients DomUs. One such port range is for example IRC. Although it can be routed trough alternate ports, most of automated malicious scripts use default ones. It's quite handy to block them so they ain't able to contact home.