Linuxaria - Tutto su GNU/Linux ed Open source

Cacti Makes Device Monitoring Simple

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.

Linux Forums Etiquette

Articles 3 Responses »

Aug 182012

This is a really good article on etiquette to use on Linux forums, for everyone that wish to post on them, the original article was written by Megatotoro and published on http://linuxmigrante.blogspot.it

As a relatively new migrant to Tuxland, I’ve come to learn that Linux forums are a rich source of advice, useful information and help. They have also let me find wonderful people. Some of them are very knowledgeable of the penguin’s intricacies and others are not so seasoned, but their will to help is indeed contagious. However, some people have had negative experiences when entering a Linux forum and asking for help. These disgruntled new migrants get a bitter flavor of Linux and a number of them leave and never return.

So, I decided to put up a small Linux forum guide for newbies in an attempt to explain some important cultural differences that may affect a new user’s success rate when asking for help on a Linux Forum. For convenience, this guide is divided into 3 sections: Before Asking, When Asking, and After Asking.
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How to query a DNS server from Linux with DIG, by examples

Articles, Guides 3 Responses »

Aug 182012

In the past I’ve published articles on how to do a benchmark with namebench to see what’s the fastest DNS server for you and how to crypt your DNS traffic if you use Opendns but I’ve never done a comprehensive guide of the command dig, probably the best command you can have on the command line to query a DNS server, so today I want to show you the basic usage of this command and some trick, using examples that you can re-use for your goals.

But as first thing, probably every reader know what’s a DNS server, but anyway it’s better to take the good definition from Wikipedia:

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities. A Domain Name Service resolves queries for these names into IP addresses for the purpose of locating computer services and devices worldwide.

So let’s see how we can query a DNS server o get all the info we need.

Linuxaria is now 2 years old.

News 1 Response »

Aug 142012

Around 2 years ago I started this project, and I’m happy to see that all my work has given some good results.

I’ve received many articles by contributors and a lot of help in the corrections of the articles, I’ve published some of the things I’ve learned in my years as system administrator and installed and tested new softwares that probably I would not have seen otherwise.

It’s been an interesting journey so far and as first thing i must thank all the people that have helped with the website, but also all the readers that have left a comment, sent an email or just visited the website, THANKS !

And now, some statistical number, some curiosity and the most viewed articles for these 2 years.
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Easily manage your PPA in Ubuntu with Y PPA Manager

Guides, Reviews 2 Responses »

Aug 122012

Ubuntu software repository is one of the bigger, and this means that you can easily install a lot of software with the Ubuntu Software Center or from the command line with a simple sudo apt-get install softwarename, but sometimes you want a software that is not present or perhaps a newer release of the one available in the main repository, in this cases you can use a PPA.

A Personal Package Archive (PPA) is a special software repository for uploading source packages to be built and published as an APT repository by Launchpad or a similar application, once is published anyone can use it and install software from there, just keep in mind that once that you add a PPA you “trust” the software published from that source, so add PPA only when really needed and only from known and safe sources.

Y PPA Manager is a software that can help you in manage,add,remove and search easily PPA in your Ubuntu.
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