The best articles of March 2011

Apr 302011

This is the top 7 articles for the month of March 2011.

7 – Collectd, system performance statistics on Linux

In these days I have seen in a somewhat more detailed way collectd, an excellent tool for collecting statistics on various aspects of our Linux servers.

From Wikipedia: “collectd is a UNIX-daemon which collects, transfers and stores performance data of computers and network equipment. The acquired data is meant to help system administrators maintain an overview over available resources in order to detect existing or looming bottlenecks.

The first version of the daemon was written in 2005 by Florian Forster and has been further developed as free open-source project. Other developers have written improvements and extensions to the software that have been incorporated into the project. Most files of the source code are licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2), the remaining files are licensed under other open source licenses”

6 – Incron – a cron based on FS events

In a former article we saw something about Inotify.

inotify is a Linux kernel subsystem that acts to extend filesystems to notice changes to the filesystem, and report those changes to applications. It replaces an earlier facility, dnotify, which had similar goals.

Last time I focused on the functionality of inotifywait command which can be used by shell to wait for a certain event and then perform other functions, but today we will see some uses of incron.

This program is an “inotify cron” system. It consists of a daemon and a table manipulator. You can use it a similar way as the regular cron. The difference is that the inotify cron handles filesystem events rather than time periods.

5 – Gmail backup with Linux

Gmail has become for many the favorite e-mail account, being very comfortable, with plenty of space available and a web interface that can be used through various devices: smartphone, laptop or desktop. But I guess that all of you know already all the advantages of using these email accounts so that they are becoming very important for us … but have you ever thought about making a backup of these mails ?

Yes Google is certainly very capable and reliable, but in the end, you do not have activate a free account with few thing assured ?

And it can happen to delete by mistake from the web interface one or more emails, even in these cases perhaps a backup can save us.

Thus we’ll see three ways to do a backup on your personal computer of all mail in a Gmail account.

4 – Bodhi Linux 1.0 review

I liked from the beginning the idea behind Bodhi Linux and so I followed the progress of this young version of Linux and take advantage of version 1.0 (congratulations to Jeff and the entire team) to make a review.

For the uninitiated Bodhi Linux is a recent project that taking as a base Ubuntu 10.04 “reconstructs” the Enlightenment desktop, it use the login system manager of LXDE (and also as the terminal) and offers its own package system (.bod); The system being based on Ubuntu is still compatible with .deb and dpkg and aptitude can be used without problems.

3 – iptstate, pktstat – Network stats.

Today I’ll show you two tools to be used int the terminal to monitor your network and the active connections: iptstate and pkstat

IPTState

IPTState is a top-like interface to your netfilter connection-tracking table.

Using iptstate you interactively watch where traffic crossing your netfilter/iptables firewall is going, sort by various criteria, limit the view by various criteria. But it doesn’t stop there: as of version 2.2.0 you can even delete states from the table!

The only requirements are a curses library (usually ncurses), and libnetfilter_conntrack version 0.0.50 or later.

2 – 7 Tricks with ffmpeg

FFmpeg can be considered the Swissknife of audio and video applications, with many options and possibilities. You probably already have it installed on your computer as a dependency of a program you use to watch videos or listen to music. In this article we will see some use from the command line without using graphics applications.