vmstat – what it is and how to use?

vmstat provides a summary of various functions within the system, including system wide free memory, paging counters, summarized disk activity, system calls and cpu utilization.

The output of vmstat and description of what each field means:

The first line of output from vmstat shows a summary since boot,
followed by the output over the last 3 seconds for each additional line.

10 Useful Sar (Sysstat) Examples for UNIX / Linux Performance Monitoring

10 Useful Sar (Sysstat) Examples for UNIX / Linux Performance Monitoring

by Ramesh Natarajan on March 29, 2011

Using sar you can monitor performance of various Linux subsystems (CPU, Memory, I/O..) in real time.

Using sar, you can also collect all performance data on an on-going basis, store them, and do historical analysis to identify bottlenecks.

Sar is part of the sysstat package.

This article explains how to install and configure sysstat package (which contains sar utility) and explains how to monitor the following Linux performance statistics using sar.

Results of Fedora 16 Release Name Voting

Fedora 16 is codenamed Verne. Here are other details:

The voting has concluded for the Fedora 16 release name, and the
results are in!  Thank you to the Fedora community members who made
name suggestions and participated in the voting.

The Fedora 16 release name is: Verne

Voting period:  Tuesday 2011-04-05 00:00:00 to Monday 2011-04-11 23:59:59
Number of valid ballots cast:  421

Using the range voting method, each candidate could attain a maximum
of (421*9) = 3789 votes.

The Ultimate Guide to Getting Support on Linux-use empathy to login to IRC….

The Ultimate Guide to Getting Support on Linux
Installing Linux has become effortless to the extent that anyone with a little knowledge of computers can get a Linux machine up and running instantly. However, many of them throw in the towel when faced with even the slightest of glitches. The main reason for this is the belief that Linux doesn’t offer any kind of support.

Other problem users face is that the regular technician who repairs their computer refuses even to touch a machine that’s running Linux. So, if you are one of those users disgruntled after encountering a multitude of problems with a fresh Linux install — don’t panic and read on to know some ways in which you could get support for your Linux installation.

vim autocomplete – automagically without tab.

Lets first do the setup in one line. Get my vim script downloader.

Use the script to add the script with script ID : :1879 (vim-autocomplpop) to your list of plugins for vim and you  are done.

If you are using snipmate, then make sure that you read the description of the plugin to add the required lines to the vimrc file to get the full functionality. You would love to type henceforth in your favourite editor. We will talk about more on Intellisense in few days time.. Chao till then.

Introducing /run – what is this directory doing in my root directory?

http://lwn.net/Articles/436012/

There is a suggestion to add /run directory that will be mounted as tmpfs. This directory will be mounted early in the boot process and can be used in various scenario’s. I hope this will improve few things in the linux world.

Related articles

• How to find the number of files inside the directory in linux (manivasagan.wordpress.com)
• How do you reset your Ubuntu password (wiki.answers.com)
• Finding Files using – locate – on Linux (galigio.org)

Easy ssh configuration with .ssh/config file

If you ssh to many hosts then you are aware of the pain that it takes to ssh with different username and hostname. There is an alias that you can creat with native ssh though. Here I will show you the same with an example.

  <td>
    <div class="text codecolorer">
      cat <<EOF >>~/.ssh/config<br /> Host <alias><br /> Username <user name><br /> Port <port number><br /> Hostname <hostname>
    </div>
  </td>
</tr>

You can optionally omit the parameters that you do not require explicitly. For example, if your port number is default then you can simply ignore the parameter.