In Part 1 of this article, we discussed some basics of the ext* filesystems in Linux. In this section we’ll have some good old filesystem fun. The most commonly used tools for working with Linux filesystems are mke2fs (create ext2/ext3 filesystem), tune2fs (adjust filesystem parameters) and e2fsck (check and repair filesystem.) ADD JOURNAL TO EXT2 […]
E is for Ext3fs Part 2
F is for Find
One-liners illustrating the use of the find command abound on the world wide web. The command’s operation is straight forward, but it has so many options that the man page always makes for fascinating reading. The find command is your friend whenever you need to *find* files based on name, size, file type, creation/access/modification time, […]
G is for grep
Like using the word “grok” in conversation, saying “grep” out loud brands you a SuperGeek, at least in the mundane reckoning of members of the “normal” population. They don’t understand that grep is simply an odd concatenation of the phrase “grab regular expression”; and even if they did know, it would mean nothing to them. […]
H is for Head, Tail, or Split the Difference
Head, tail and split are three of the most commonly used utilities on GNU/Linux systems for the manipulation of text files. They are tiny, sharp, and all possess some handy options of which even the experienced user may be unaware. Head returns the first lines of a file or standard input. By default, it outputs […]
Using MSInfo
Do check out msinfo32.exe. Virtually everything that you would want to know about the system configuration of a Windows machine will be revealed with this command. Msinfo32.exe is located under /Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/MSInfo (at least on our system). If you wish to dump the report to a file, use: msinfo32 /report reportname.txt It takes […]
Live Graph of Apache Processes – Part 1 – Introduction
There are 3 parts to this article: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 One benchmark that we are interested in while monitoring Apache on GNU/Linux is the number of httpd processes running. Here is an example graph of the number of httpd processes running that is created by the scripts in this article: […]
Live Graph of Apache Processes – Part 2 – Displaying Scale
There are 3 parts to this article: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 In the introduction to this series we showed a graph of Apache processes (httpd). This article will show how to create the scale of the graph and the initial fig file entries. See Xfig.org for more details on the graphing […]
Live Graph of Apache Processes – Part 3 – Counting and Displaying
There are 3 parts to this article: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 In this article we introduced this graph and showed how it looks live, and in this article we created the scale. Finally, we will get to the part that creates the blue bars that comprise the graph. Here is the […]
Monitoring Systems With Zabbix – Initial Configuration – Part 1
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 Zabbix is an open source (GPL) monitoring system with a database back end. The system can be configured via a web browser. We used CentOS 4 for this install. Do set this up in a lab, first. Read […]
Monitoring Systems With Zabbix – Initial Configuration – Part 2
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 We are going to configure this as a server, without SNMP support, and with MySQL as a database: [root@srv-1 data]# cd .. [root@srv-1 create]# cd .. [root@srv-1 zabbix-1.1beta8]# ./configure –enable-server –with-mysql checking for a BSD-compatible install… /usr/bin/install -c […]
Monitoring Systems With Zabbix – Initial Configuration – Part 3
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 Start the server: [root@srv-1 zabbix-1.1beta8]# cd /usr/local/bin [root@srv-1 bin]# ./zabbix_server [root@srv-1 bin]# cat /tmp/zabbix_server.log 027362:20060418:104022 Starting zabbix_server. ZABBIX 1.1beta8. 027364:20060418:104022 server #1 started [Alerter] 027366:20060418:104022 server #2 started [Timer] 027368:20060418:104022 server #3 started [ICMP pinger] 027373:20060418:104022 server #4 […]
Monitoring Systems With Zabbix – Initial Configuration – Part 4
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 Run make [root@srv-1 zabbix-1.1beta8]# make Making all in src make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/local/src/zabbix-1.1beta8/src’ Making all in libs make[2]: Entering directory `/usr/local/src/zabbix-1.1beta8/src/libs’ Making all in zbxcommon . . . gcc -g -O2 -o zabbix_sender zabbix_sender.o ../libs/zbxcommon/libzbxcommon.a -lresolv -lnsl make[3]: […]
Monitoring Systems With Zabbix – Initial Configuration – Part 5
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 The agent files also end up in /usr/local/bin by default: [root@srv-1 zabbix-1.1beta8]# cd /usr/local/bin/ [root@srv-1 bin]# ls zab* zabbix_agent zabbix_agentd zabbix_get zabbix_sender zabbix_server [root@srv-1 bin]# ls -l zab* -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 179347 Apr 18 10:56 zabbix_agent -rwxr-xr-x […]
Monitoring Systems With Zabbix – Initial Configuration – Part 6
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 When first logging on to Zabbix, the login name is admin, and the password is blank: Change the admin password as soon as you can: Use configuration/hosts to add a host. Make sure you link with the correct […]
Monitoring HTTP Connections
Here is a perl script that determines the number of HTTP connections on a server, and displays the rusults on one of the seven segment displays on the NetAdminWorld console: open (HC, “ssh -p <port> root\@example.com ‘netstat | grep http | wc -l ‘|”); while (<HC>){ $count=$_/6 } use IO::Socket; my $sock = new IO::Socket::INET […]
Monitoring and Automatic Recovery of Services with Monit
Monit is a small, easy to configure monitoring system for *nix systems that will attempt to restart services that have failed. Grab the tarball, extract, configure, make, and make install: [usr-1@srv-1 ~]$ tar -xzf mon*4.7*.gz [usr-1@srv-1 ~]$ cd mon*7 [usr-1@srv-1 monit-4.7]$ ./configure checking for gcc… gcc checking for C compiler default output file name… a.out […]
Logging Performance Monitor Counters to SQL Server – Part 1
There are 4 parts to this article: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 On Windows Server 2003, Perfmon counters can be logged directly to a SQL database. Let’s do that. Create a database on your SQL Server. We called the database pmon: We’ll create a device for the database with […]
Logging Performance Monitor Counters to SQL Server – Part 2
There are 4 parts to this article: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 Use Windows NT authentication: Do not dynamically determine the port. Uncheck and make sure port 1433 is used: Change the default database to pmon: The rest of the defaults are OK: Click finish, and the summary screen […]
Logging Performance Monitor Counters to SQL Server – Part 3
There are 4 parts to this article: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 Click Test Data Source, and if all is happy, a window showing the results of the ODBC connectivity test will pop up: Another summary of the ODBC connection: Let’s use our perfmon database. In performance monitor, create […]
Logging Performance Monitor Counters to SQL Server – Part 4
There are 4 parts to this article: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 After you close out the settings, the counter log should be started. If not, then start it: Add the counters from the database by clicking on the log icon from System Monitor and selecting the database via […]
