Guides | Linuxaria

Vi : Guides for Beginners

Sep 122012

Vi is an old screen-oriented text editor , the first release of this software is dated back in 1976, originally created for the Unix operating system.
What I like of vi is that I can find it in any Linux and Unix system I’ve to work, so once I learnt how to use it I’ve used it everywhere, but there is small problem the software is user-friendly as could be a software wrote in 1976, so many new users find really hard to understand the shortcuts and so after some small test they decide that the software is too hard and return to some graphical editor like gedit, leafpad or perhaps libreoffice.

With this article I want to give some useful information for people who have never used Vi.

Note: in general I use Vim (V IMproved) on all my systems, so I’m sure that all the following tips work with this software, if you use the classic VI some of the tips could not work.
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Surfraw – Surf the web from the CLI

Articles, Guides, Reviews No Responses »

Sep 032012

           ______  _     _  ______   _______  ______   _______  _  _  _
          / _____)(_)   (_)(_____ \ (_______)(_____ \ (_______)(_)(_)(_)
         ( (____   _     _  _____) ) _____    _____) ) _______  _  _  _
          \____ \ | |   | ||  __  / |  ___)  |  __  / |  ___  || || || |
          _____) )| |___| || |  \ \ | |      | |  \ \ | |   | || || || |
         (______/  \_____/ |_|   |_||_|      |_|   |_||_|   |_| \_____/
         Surfraw - Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Rage Against the Web

Surfraw stand for: Shell Users’ Revolutionary Front Rage Against the Web and is a funny way to query Search engines and other services on the net from the terminal; well, is funny for people who think that working on the CLI is funny ;), ah and have I told you that Surfraw was originally written by Julian Assange ? yes that one, so it must be a good tools to get information from the net…
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How to install NSD Instead of BIND as name server on Linux to save Memory

Guides 4 Responses »

Aug 312012

A name server is a server that hosts a network service for providing responses to queries against a directory service. It maps a human-recognizable identifier to a system-internal, identification or addressing component, the program BIND is the most famous name server available on Linux, it can be used to do everything you need from a name server, but sometimes you need less.

Maybe you have a VPS and you want just to manage your DNS name, for this use you could check NSD a great alternative to BIND, it does not do DNS forwarding, it only serves its own domains. but this could be enough for your project.

NSD uses BIND-style zone-files; zone-files used under BIND (named) can usually be supplied unmodified in NSD once declared in the nsd.conf configuration. NSD manages zone information compiled via ‘zonec’ into a binary database file (nsd.db) which allows lightning fast start up of the NSD name-service daemon, syntax structural verification and flagging of errors at database compile-time. All this before being made available to NSD service itself.

Let’s see how to install and configure it.

Understanding the Top command on Linux

Guides 17 Responses »

Aug 282012

Article by AlexioBash published on his website about ArchLinux in italian.

Know what is happening in “real time” on your systems is in my opinion the basis to use and optimize your OS. On ArchLinux or better on GNU/Linux in general the top command can help us, this is a very useful system monitor that is really easy to use, and that can also allows us to understand why our OS suffers and which process use most resources. The command to be run on the terminal is:

$ top

And we’ll get a screen similar to the one on the right:

Let’s see now every single row of this output to explain all the information found within the screen.
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Cacti Makes Device Monitoring Simple

Articles, Guides 1 Response »

Aug 212012

This is an article of mine, first published on Wazi

Every organization must monitor its infrastructure’s uptime and performance. While the popular Nagios application is a good general-purpose monitoring program that you can extend with plugins to handle just about any task, you may do even better by employing Cacti as a graphical front end to RRDTool‘s data logging and graphing functionality. Cacti was developed specifically to monitor and collect performance information, while Nagios is more oriented toward state changes, such as noting whether a daemon is up or down.

RRDTool stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. Cacti provides templates to gather and show information such as system load (CPU, RAM, disks), users connected, MySQL load, and Apache load, all of which can affect the performance of your site.

Cacti’s front end is completely PHP-driven. It supports data gathering via different methods such as scripts in any language and SNMP.