How to track Average CPU Load and Disk Activity under Linux

April 6th, 2008 How to overwrite your hard disk with random characters dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda How to overwrite your hard disk with zero characters dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda Replace sda / hda with your hard disk identifier. Either of the procedure requires the system has Linux installed or accessible from Linux operating system.

September 17th, 2009 Out of many Linux monitoring tools there's a one cool one that allows you to know who is logged on the system and what they are doing. It shows current time, the time for which the system had been running, number of users currently logged on.

February 18th, 2007 The basic idea of RAID (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) is to combine multiple small, independent disk drives into an array of disk drives which yields performance and recoverability exceeding that of a Single Large Expensive Drive (SLED). Redundancy is also provided (unless RAID 0) which allows easy and often automatic recovery from hard disk crash.

August 28th, 2009 We often come across a lot of inquires on Linux systems. One of the most commonly asked questions is how to find the hardware specs /details on Linux.

March 18th, 2008 In Linux you can use the dd command to copy MBR from one hard disk to another. You can also use dd to backup your master boot record to a different (or same) media.

December 30th, 2008 Windows 7 has this unique feature of creating and manipulating a virtual hard disk drive as if they were real. More importantly, you don't even need to boot in virtual PC environment to do so.

September 17th, 2009 For any Linux user monitoring the system's performance can be an intricate task. Most of the Linux distributions already come with loads of monitoring tools.

October 20th, 2007 While configuring your routing (like load balancing with dual ADSL connections) you would often need to view the current route cache and also to occasionally delete the current cache. Here is how you can do it.

September 3rd, 2007 I currently use RAID1 with LVM on Fedora Core including RAID 1 on boot partition. This provides a fully redundant storage system with the ability to expand volume size in future.

July 13th, 2006 DKMS - Dynamic Kernel Module Support provides a framework where kernel dependent module source can reside so that it is very easy to rebuild modules as you upgrade kernels. This will allow Linux vendors to provide driver drops without having to wait for new kernel releases while also taking out the guesswork for customers attempting to recompile modules for new kernels.

March 23rd, 2009 Perhaps the smallest and still stable desktop based Linux version is Tiny Core Linux. It takes only 10MB size and runs on USB drive, CD or an internal hard disk drive, almost anywhere you want it to.

September 22nd, 2009 There are certain programs in Linux for which the source is not readily available. There is an useful diagnostic, instructional, and debugging tool for Linux to solve it.

September 18th, 2009 Do you wanna know how long the server has been running? It requires just a simple command to monitor the time for which the Linux system has been running. With a single command you can not only know about the uptime, but also the number of users that have currently logged on and the system load averages for the past 1, 5 and 15 minutes.

September 3rd, 2007 Partimage is a Linux utility which saves partitions having a supported filesystems (see below) to an image file. It is a free and open source alternative to the popular software Norton Ghost or DriveImage.

March 8th, 2007 I have been evaluating both Xubuntu and Fedora Core along with Cent OS (Open Source version / fork of Red Hat Linux Enterprise Edition). The key value and differences between these releases are: Xubuntu Xubuntu is definitely faster to use in general due to its light-weight Xfce desktop interface.