Tag Archives: pv

CLI, OS

Transfer linode VM over ssh

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I love Linode for their straightforward pricing. I can use them for temporary infrastructure and not have to worry about getting overcharged. When it comes time to transfer infrastructure back, the process is fairly straightforward. In my case I wanted to keep a disk image of my Linode VM for future use.

The linode documentation is very good. I used their copy an image over ssh article combined with their rescue and rebuild article sprinkled with a bit of gzip compression and use of pv to grab my linode image locally, complete with a progress bar.

First, boot your linode into recovery mode via dashboard / Linodes / <name of your linode>, then click on Rescue tab, map your drives as needed.

Launch console (top right) to get into the recovery shell. In my case I wanted to SSH into my linode to grab the image, so I set a password and started the ssh service:

passwd
/etc/init.d/ssh start

Then on your end, pipe ssh , gzip, pv and dd together to grab the compressed disk image with progress monitoring:

ssh root@ "dd if=/dev/sda | gzip -1 -" | pv | dd of=linode-image.gz

Success.

CLI

Measure SSH transfer speeds

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SSH is a beautiful thing. In addition to remotely administering machines you can use it to transfer files. To do this one simply pipes the cat command on both ends. For example, to copy hello.txt on the source host to hi.txt on the destination host, the command would be:

ssh remote_host cat hello.txt | cat > hi.txt

The command takes the contents of hello.txt and pipes it over to the remote host. The cat command on the remote host takes what was piped to it as  input and the > sign instructs cat to take its input and output it to hi.txt.

A great way to measure transfer speeds using ssh between two hosts is to take /dev/zero on the source host and output it to /dev/null on the destination host. This bypasses any disk speed bottlenecks and only measures network throughput. Combine this with the pv command to get a nice graphical view of how fast the transfer is going.

ssh remote_host cat /dev/zero | pv | cat > /dev/null

The default options between my machines result in about a 65 megabytes a second transfer speed.

1

It turns out that the encryption cipher used makes a big difference on transfer speeds. Use the -c command to specify which cipher to use and see how much of a difference this makes. -o compression=no can also help with transfer speeds.

The fastest cipher I’ve found is arcfour. It’s touted as less secure, but for my local network I can accept the risk (thanks to slashdot for the discussion.)

ssh -c arcfour -o Compression=no remote_host cat /dev/zero | pv | cat > /dev/null

2

Using acrfour more than doubles the speed for me! Amazing.