The scribble pad of doom

Usually when I need to copy a database from one spot to the other I log into the server that has the original database and then SSH the data to the server that is supposed to have it:

mysqldump source_database source_table | ssh user@host mysql target_databases

However in this case I couldn’t get the server to connect to another server via SSH, so the command changes slightly. Instead we log into the receiving server and change our command to pull the data to us from the original database.

ssh user@host "mysqldump source_database source_table" | mysql target_database

I wrote a client that was sending emails over SMTP server and needed to debug it, but didn’t want muddle my way through setting up an actual SMTP server. Instead I found two convenient options. The first is to use python where you can starts a dummy SMTP service that prints to stdout with:

sudo python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:25

Another option is to sign up for http://dummysmtp.com that offers a free dummy SMTP server, showing the emails on the web interface.