Databases, Systems & Networks

Source: BinaryTides

Hardware information

Like for every thing, there are plenty of commands to check information about the hardware of your linux system. Some commands report only specific hardware components like cpu or memory while the rest cover multiple hardware units.

This post takes a quick look at some of the most commonly used commands to check information and configuration details about various hardware peripherals and devices. The list includes lscpu, hwinfo, lshw, dmidecode, lspci etc.

1. lscpu

The lscpu command reports information about the cpu and processing units. It does not have any further options or functionality.

$ lscpu
Architecture:          x86_64
CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order:            Little Endian
CPU(s):                4
On-line CPU(s) list:   0-3
Thread(s) per core:    1
Core(s) per socket:    4
Socket(s):             1
NUMA node(s):          1
Vendor ID:             GenuineIntel
CPU family:            6
Model:                 23
Stepping:              10
CPU MHz:               1998.000
BogoMIPS:              5302.48
Virtualization:        VT-x
L1d cache:             32K
L1i cache:             32K
L2 cache:              2048K
NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0-3

2. lshw – List Hardware

A general purpose utility, that reports detailed and brief information about multiple different hardware units such as cpu, memory, disk, usb controllers, network adapters etc. Lshw extracts the information from different /proc files.

$ sudo lshw -short

H/W path        Device      Class       Description
===================================================
                            system      ()
/0                          bus         DG35EC
/0/0                        processor   Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU    Q8400  @ 2.66GHz
/0/0/1                      memory      2MiB L2 cache
/0/0/3                      memory      32KiB L1 cache
/0/2                        memory      32KiB L1 cache
/0/4                        memory      64KiB BIOS
/0/14                       memory      8GiB System Memory
/0/14/0                     memory      2GiB DIMM DDR2 Synchronous 667 MHz (1.5 ns)
/0/14/1                     memory      2GiB DIMM DDR2 Synchronous 667 MHz (1.5 ns)
/0/14/2                     memory      2GiB DIMM DDR2 Synchronous 667 MHz (1.5 ns)
/0/14/3                     memory      2GiB DIMM DDR2 Synchronous 667 MHz (1.5 ns)
/0/100                      bridge      82G35 Express DRAM Controller
/0/100/2                    display     82G35 Express Integrated Graphics Controller
/0/100/2.1                  display     82G35 Express Integrated Graphics Controller
/0/100/19       eth0        network     82566DC Gigabit Network Connection
/0/100/1a                   bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4
/0/100/1a.1                 bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5
/0/100/1a.7                 bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2
/0/100/1b                   multimedia  82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller
/0/100/1c                   bridge      82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1
/0/100/1c.1                 bridge      82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2
/0/100/1c.2                 bridge      82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 3
/0/100/1c.2/0               storage     JMB368 IDE controller
/0/100/1d                   bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1
/0/100/1d.1                 bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2
/0/100/1d.2                 bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3
/0/100/1d.7                 bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1
/0/100/1e                   bridge      82801 PCI Bridge
/0/100/1e/5                 bus         FW322/323 [TrueFire] 1394a Controller
/0/100/1f                   bridge      82801HB/HR (ICH8/R) LPC Interface Controller
/0/100/1f.2                 storage     82801H (ICH8 Family) 4 port SATA Controller [IDE mode]
/0/100/1f.3                 bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller
/0/100/1f.5                 storage     82801HR/HO/HH (ICH8R/DO/DH) 2 port SATA Controller [IDE m
/0/1            scsi3       storage     
/0/1/0.0.0      /dev/sda    disk        500GB ST3500418AS
/0/1/0.0.0/1    /dev/sda1   volume      70GiB Windows NTFS volume
/0/1/0.0.0/2    /dev/sda2   volume      395GiB Extended partition
/0/1/0.0.0/2/5  /dev/sda5   volume      97GiB HPFS/NTFS partition
/0/1/0.0.0/2/6  /dev/sda6   volume      97GiB Linux filesystem partition
/0/1/0.0.0/2/7  /dev/sda7   volume      1952MiB Linux swap / Solaris partition
/0/1/0.0.0/2/8  /dev/sda8   volume      198GiB Linux filesystem partition
/0/3            scsi4       storage     
/0/3/0.0.0      /dev/cdrom  disk        DVD RW DRU-190A

Check out the following post to learn more about lshw

Get hardware information on Linux with lshw command

Lire la suite…

“inotify”, Remplaçant de “dnotify”, est une technologie, intégrée au noyau Linux (>=2.6.13) , destinée à notifier les événements, modifications, accès, etc, effectués sur le contenu d’un système de fichiers en ce basant sur le contrôle des “inodes” (structures de données contenant des informations sur les fichiers d’un systèmes de fichiers).

« incron« , Pour « INotify CRON », permet d’exploiter les informations « d’inotify » afin d’effectuer une action, commande(s), scripts, etc, en cas de modifications de fichiers ou de répertoires donnés.

Installation de inotify

« inotify » Est intégré au noyau et est activé dans les kernels fournis par les distributions.

« incron » Est, de son côté, empaqueté sur la plupart des distributions mais nécessitera, sur Red Hat et ses dérivées (CentOS, Scientific Linux, etc) l’ajout des miroirs EPEL (« Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux » voir « Ajout des miroirs EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) sous Red Hat like (CentOS, RHEL, SL, …) » sur Admin Linux). L’installation s’effectue via le gestionnaire de paquet de votre distribution.

Sous Ubuntu, Debian et ses dérivés :

# apt-get install incron

Sous les dérivés de Red Hat :

# yum install incron

Sous Gentoo Linux « emerge » se chargera de l’installation tous comme « pacman » le fera très bien sous Arch Linux.

Lire la suite…

Using TimeMachine with rsync: Over many years, I have dealt with scripts that do backup versioning, i.e., maintain multiple backups. Due to their flexibility, they have been complex to understand and configure. Here is a simple rsync-based tool with a different focus: The experienced systems administrator who wants to keep his system’s complexity down.

Backup in action: TimeMachine and rsync

It consists of a simple script, which you can call rsync-backup.sh and store wherever you like, e.g., in /usr/local/sbin. I will use these names and paths in the examples.

#!/bin/sh
# Usage: rsync-backup.sh <src> <dst> <label>
if [ "$#" -ne 3 ]; then
    echo "$0: Expected 3 arguments, received $#: $@" >&2
    exit 1
fi
if [ -d "$2/__prev/" ]; then
    rsync -a --delete --link-dest="$2/__prev/" "$1" "$2/$3"
else
    rsync -a                                   "$1" "$2/$3"
fi
rm -f "$2/__prev"
ln -s "$3" "$2/__prev"

During normal operation, it boils down to three simple statements:

1. rsync with --link-dest: Copying the contents of <src> to <dst>/<label>, reusing the files from the previous backup with hard links ((The non---link-dest rsync does not use --delete to reduce the risk of accidentally deleting files when called with wrong parameters))
2. rm and ln: Remember this backup location for the next incremental backup.

Voilà – it doesn’t get much easier than that!

Of course, there is something missing: The actual backup policy. It is separated into cron, which I consider an advantage. Using this separation of duties, many policies can be implemented very easily and composed in a modular way:

Create daily backups  for every weekday

You might know this from automysqlbackup or autopostgresqlbackup: A backup is created every day and overwritten after 7 days. This is achieved by adding the following file to /etc/cron.daily/:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/rsync-backup.sh /home /data/backup `date +%A`

All your user’s files are copied daily to /data/backup, named after the current day, overwritten weekly.

Daily backups for a month

Sure, this is easy as well, by putting this with a descriptive name into/etc/cron.daily/:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/local/bin/rsync-backup.sh /home /data/backup `date +Day-%d`

Lire la suite…

A syslog server represents a central log monitoring point on a network, to which all kinds of devices including Linux or Windows servers, routers, switches or any other hosts can send their logs over network. By setting up a syslog server, you can filter and consolidate logs from different hosts and devices into a single location, so that you can view and archive important log messages more easily.

On most Linux distributions, rsyslog is the standard syslog daemon that comes pre-installed. Configured in a client/server architecture, rsyslog can play both roles; as a syslog server rsyslog can gather logs from other devices, and as a syslog client, rsyslog can transmit its internal logs to a remote syslog server.

In this tutorial, we cover how to configure a centralized syslog server using rsyslog on Linux. Before we go into the details, it is instructive to go over syslog standard first.

Basic of Syslog Standard

When logs are collected with syslog mechanism, three important things must be taken into consideration:

• Facility level: what type of processes to monitor
• Severity (priority) level: what type of log messages to collect
• Destination: where to send or record log messages

Let’s take a look at how the configuration is defined in more detail.

The facility levels define a way to categorize internal system processes. Some of the common standard facilities in Linux are:

• auth: messages related to authentication (login)
• cron: messages related to scheduled processes or applications
• daemon: messages related to daemons (internal servers)
• kernel: messages related to the kernel
• mail: messages related to internal mail servers
• syslog: messages related to the syslog daemon itself
• lpr: messages related to print servers
• local0 – local7: messages defined by user (local7 is usually used by Cisco and Windows servers)

The severity (priority) levels are standardized, and defined by using standard abbreviation and an assigned number with number 7 being the highest level of all. These levels are:

• emerg: Emergency – 0
• alert: Alerts – 1
• crit: Critical – 2
• err: Errors – 3
• warn: Warnings – 4
• notice: Notification – 5
• info: Information – 6
• debug: Debugging – 7

Finally, the destination statement enforces a syslog client to perform one of three following tasks: (1) save log messages on a local file, (2) route them to a remote syslog server over TCP/UDP, or (3) send them to stdout such as a console.

In rsyslog, syslog configuration is structured based on the following schema.

[facility-level].[severity-level]  [destination]

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Source: ServerDensity

The industry is hotting up at the moment, and there are more tools than you can shake a stick at. Here lies the most comprehensive list on the Internet (of monitoring tools). Featuring over 80 ways to monitor your machines. Within this article we outline:

• Command line tools
• Network related
• System related monitoring
• Log monitoring tools
• Infrastructure monitoring tools

It’s hard work monitoring and debugging performance problems, but it’s easier with the right tools at the right time. But how much of your valuable time do you think it would take you to investigate all of these tools and find out which one is best for you?

Why not check out Server Density first, it has a beautiful UI, an api that’s easy to use and alerts that will keep downtime to a minimum.

Top 10  System Monitoring Tools

1. Top

This is a small tool which is pre-installed in many unix systems. When you want an overview of all the processes or threads running in the system: top is a good tool. You can order these processes on different criteria and the default criteria is CPU.

2. htop

Htop is essentially an enhanced version of top. It’s easier to sort by processes. It’s visually easier to understand and has built in commands for common things you would like to do. Plus it’s fully interactive.

3. atop

Atop monitors all processes much like top and htop, unlike top and htop however it has daily logging of the processes for long-term analysis. It also shows resource consumption by all processes. It will also highlight resources that have reached a critical load.

4. apachetop

Apachetop monitors the overall performance of your apache webserver. It’s largely based on mytop. It displays current number of reads, writes and the overall number of requests processed.

5. ftptop

ftptop gives you basic information of all the current ftp connections to your server such as the total amount of sessions, how many are uploading and downloading and who the client is.

Lire la suite…