Linux-VServer is a virtualization platform that allows you to run VPSs without running complete OS environments.  It can be argued that Linux-VServer is actually more of a container platform than virtualization, however, you can’t think of it like Docker or LXC containers.  From a structural design, I would actually say that they are more similar to Solaris Zones, which are still technically containers, but the functionality is different.

As a migratory systems engineer, I have lived, or stayed extensively, in cities all over my country, The United States of America. Due to this, I belong to many mailing lists and technical groups in CONUS (CONtinental United States.) One of the groups I belong to is the the DCLUG, or more extensively stated, the Washington, DC Linux Users Group. A recent dialogue of correspondence covered a very mundane topic; the topic of “rsync,” and it’s behavior while trying to do incremental copies. A member of the group, a Mr. Michael Henry, replied with a very in-depth answer and I felt it should be recorded for posterity’s sake, as even I, being a Unix/Linux user for over 20 years, learned some rsync nuance from this walk-through. You will find the contents of his reply copied here.

I’m currently in the middle of small-scale deployment for my company. We sell a managed-service, big-data platform. This usually consists of a mix of Hadoop, Elastic Search, Storm, and Kafka; but all of that is actually irrelevant to the current topic. The data center we are deploying in lives on VMWare and from the outside is locked down with the exception of a Checkpoint SSL VPN. I work for a massive and archaic company; seriously, we have 90,000 employees and we’re still using Lotus Notes for email. It’s like it’s 1997 again; and I can say that because I was doing IT in 1997 and remember deploying Lotus Notes in the Marine Corps. Given the nature of my company, it’s needless to say they are mostly a Wintel shop and are still trying to figure out how to deal with all of their startup acquisitions, like myself. My group, ie. what is left of our startup, is mostly a Mac shop. I personally use my Debian Linux desktop for most of my work because I honestly can’t stomach Windows, and would rather not deal with OS X. That being said, there were really no directions on how to get the Checkpoint SSL VPN working with my Debian Jessie/Testing desktop, or my Ubuntu laptop. So I did what any *nix geek would do and figured it out on my own with a little know-how and a lot of Googling.