Featured »

March 2, 2022 – 2:00 pm

Books have been written on the subject of awk and sed. Here’s a small sample of commands I put together over the years that are useful for everyday system administration tasks. Most of these tasks …

Read the full story »
Networking

Unix and Linux network configuration. Multiple network interfaces. Bridged NICs. High-availability network configurations.

Applications

Reviews of latest Unix and Linux software. Helpful tips for application support admins. Automating application support.

Data

Disk partitioning, filesystems, directories, and files. Volume management, logical volumes, HA filesystems. Backups and disaster recovery.

Monitoring

Distributed server monitoring. Server performance and capacity planning. Monitoring applications, network status and user activity.

Commands & Shells

Cool Unix shell commands and options. Command-line tools and application. Things every Unix sysadmin needs to know.

Home » Archive by Category

Articles in Processes

Finding Cron Jobs

September 9, 2021 – 11:28 am
iwoau71okwxqh4jv3k4ook32qps[1]

Cron is an indispensable tool for system administration. The difficulties in working with cron in a large environment stem from its decentralized nature. Cron jobs multiply like rabbits, and keeping track of them is not …

Analyzing atop Logs with atopsar

December 26, 2019 – 9:52 pm
0h7vjqy3irb9p63bjuuxvd0tq85[1]

I have discussed atop previously but concentrated primarily on how to run it and how to collect data. Now I’d like to spend some time talking about ways to analyze the data collected with atop.

Raising Dead Services

August 15, 2019 – 2:23 pm
ktd9zk0j9t6vap82rmdxxip6jgg

I suppose you may say all of this can be just as easily done via systemd service config files. Well, yes and no. Yes, it can. And, no, not as easily. Not even close. Because …

Late Night Rant: College Admissions Scandal

June 23, 2019 – 11:11 am
vwnz1i4nkpz6wqtxr00pse2xwea

This is America: you’re either a duper or a dupee. I’m a duper. You guys are the dupees.
— Frank Reynolds (Danny DeVito), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
How will the 2019 college admissions scandal work out? …

Watching VSFTP

November 8, 2016 – 10:56 pm
servers_006

I have an FTPS server running VSFTP and below is collection of commands useful for monitoring activity and analyzing the logs.

Monitoring Application Network Connections

February 11, 2016 – 3:12 pm
network switch

A Java application on one of my servers has been causing problems by opening up too many network connections and now closing them quickly enough. I needed to be notified when the number of connections …

Upping the Soft nproc Limit

October 5, 2015 – 11:12 am
overloaded_0004

This is just a quick note to myself about increasing the “soft nproc” value. On one of the RHEL 6 Tomcat servers I got the following error when trying to “su – tomcat”:

openlava Quick Test

February 22, 2013 – 12:46 pm
bar_001

After years working with PBS and LSF, ran into Jeff Layton’s “Share the Load” review of openlava resource manager in the Feb 2013 issue of the Admin Magazine and nostalgia took over. So I built …

Monitoring process CPU and memory usage

December 15, 2005 – 11:24 am
shell

This article contains examples of using prstat to monitor CPU and memory utilization by individual processes and groups of processes.
Example 1: Show CPU and memory usage by all processes called “*ora_smon_imanax*”
The following prstat command will …