There are few places harder to get to in this world. But therearen't anywhere it's harder to live.The average temperature in Antarctica at the bottom of the Earth is a balmy 58 degrees below.That's when the sun is out.For millions of years they have made their home on the darkest,driest, windiest and coldest continent on Earth.The Penguins.Penguin is technically a bird. Although one that makes his home in the sea. Each year at around the same time he will leave the comfort of his ocean home and embark on a remarkable journey.He will travel a great distance and though he is a bird. he won't fly.Though he lives in the sea. he won't swim. Mostly, he will walk.But he won't walk alone.It is March ......
March of the Penguins ,The IceWalkerz!!


Sound Tracks of "March of the Penguins ", feature film by National Geographic Channel.
What is Linux ? You’d probably say, “Linux is an operating system.” Yes, but remember, however, that the strictest definition of Linux is only the kernel . The more relaxed definition would be an overall package called a distribution that is ready to install and use. There are well over 300 distributions of Linux, most of them containing commonly-needed applications—and even games! Linux was originally meant to be a UNIX clone. Here, by clone,we mean that it would look and behave like UNIX. But bear in mind that Linux does not contain a single line of UNIX code! The source code of the two is entirely different.Linux was officially introduced only in 1991 by its famed creator Linus Torvalds,who at the time was a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Little did he know that his creation would grow in size and popularity to the extent it has today.Linux is what it is today because of the help of developers who worked on it not for money but for the kick of it. They were driven by passion and belief in a cause.Did you know that most servers today run on Linux? That means there’s a good chance there’s Linux somewhere behind all those Web pages you see. Linux is not just an OS you use at home instead of Windows; a whole range of enterprise suites are now based on the Linux platform. From network servers to Web servers, several places have Linux as the backbone.There are countless brains at work who pursue the technology—not for money, but out of sheer interest and passion.Linux boasts of some of the best online peer support today. Linux is standing today showing the IT world the innovation that can be achieved by sheer community work. And,Linux is free too. It appears, there is after all something like a free lunch! When the world around you is trying Linux, why would you want to be leaving behind the excitement?

Monday, January 5, 2009

Linux System monitoring using Dstat

dstat is a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat, nfsstat, and ifstat. It includes various counters (in separate plugins) and allows you to select and view all of your system resources instantly; you can, for example, compare disk usage in combination with interrupts from your IDE controller, or compare the network bandwidth numbers directly with the disk throughput (in the same interval).

Dstat also cleverly gives you the most detailed information in columns and clearly indicates in what magnitude and unit the output is displayed. Less confusion, less mistakes, more efficient.

Dstat is unique in letting you aggregate block device throughput for a certain diskset or network bandwidth for a group of interfaces, ie. you can see the throughput for all the block devices that make up a single filesystem or storage system.

Dstat allows its data to be directly written to a CSV file to be imported and used by OpenOffice, Gnumeric or Excel to create graphs.



Download:
OpenSuse 11: here
Fedora: here

After downloading the rpm file, install it using command: rpm -ivh dstat-0.6.8-3.1.noarch.rpm

Using Dstat
Using dstat to relate disk-throughput with network-usage (eth0), total CPU-usage and system counters:

dstat -dnyc -N eth0 -C total -f 5

Checking dstat's behaviour and the system's impact on dstat:

dstat -taf --debug

Using the time plugin together with cpu, net, disk, system, load, proc and topcpu plugins:

dstat -tcndylp -M topcpu

this is identical to: dstat -M time,cpu,net,disk,sys,load,proc,topcpu

Using dstat to relate cpu stats with interrupts per device:

dstat -tcyif

Get a Report by Mail
There may be cases wherein you want to observe how your server is performing over a period of time. You can setup a background process in Linux will give you a reading with a certain interval, generate a report, and mail out the file to you.

The following script will run Dstat for three hours, reading the data every 30 seconds, and will mail out the report to me@myemailid.com.

#!/bin/bash
dstat –output /tmp/dstat_data_mail.csv -CDN 30 360
mutt -a /tmp/dstat_data_mail.csv -s “Dstat Report for 3 hour run” me@myemailid.com < /dev/null

Save the above script in a file called dstat_script.sh on your server, give it executable permission and then run it as a background process:

# chmod +x dstat_script.sh
# nohup ./dstat_script.sh &

Done. Yes, it’s that simple. You will now be mailed this report after it’s done running. You can optionally schedule this script as a daily cron job so that you can receive this data every day.
at Monday, January 05, 2009
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