SCP interview

Setup

To enable SSH to yourself on macOS:

$ sudo systemsetup -setremotelogin on
$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

On Linux, you'll need to consult your distribution's documentation.

You can verify that SSH is setup properly by running:

$ ssh localhost echo "All set"
All set!

If you see any output besides "All set", something is not configured correctly.

You should additionally "build" a "binary" by running:

$ bin/build

The resulting "binary" will be named build/customdb.

Interface

You must implement a bin/dist command that satisfies the following synopsis:

$ bin/dist BINARY HOSTS

BINARY is the file to be distributed to each host. HOSTS is a file that lists the targets to which BINARY should be distributed. Each line in HOSTS has the following form:

MACHINE:TARGET-PATH

bin/dist must copy the binary to the desired TARGET-PATH on each MACHINE. Note that TARGET-PATH is not necessarily the same on each machine.

Benchmarking

The time it takes bin/dist to distribute a binary to a cluster of eight "remote" machines is measured by bin/bench. Note that bin/bench simulates network latencies between the local machine and the hosts listed in HOSTS.

Cleanup

On macOS, you may want to disable remote login like so:

sudo systemsetup -setremotelogin off

You'll also want to delete any files starting with "scp-interview" in your home directory:

rm ~/scp-interview*