linux

Over the years I've used many version control systems, from sccs, rcs to svn and more recently bzr.

I'd heard of git, but was wary of the complexity. However Drupal is moving to git and I had to use it for a new project.

The good news is that there is an excellent book on line or in paper form, that is well written and easy to follow: http://progit.org/book by Scott Chacon. There are some O'Reilly books in both German and English but I've not read those yet.

Just a few brief notes on a test a while back...

SSH

SSH can be used to also provide performance and delay measurements.
1.    Performance: Create a large file (e.g. 750MB) and then copy it via ‘scp’ between a sever pair, copy the file in both directions to verify symmetry.

Introduction

Cacti is a great tool for graphing system/network activity, especially for Cisco devices.

The following are a few tips on getting a Cacti server (on Ubuntu 8.10 / Cacti 0.8.7b in this example) up and running quickly.

Installation

Install cacti and relevant tools:

apt-get install snmp cacti curl

Browser to http://HOST/cacti, login as admin/admin and change the password

Introduction

Being used to maore heavy weight monitoring tools such as Zabbix, or Cacti for network equipment, its was interesting to come across a very light weight solution: connectd.

Get monitoring up and running in 10 minutes!

Increasing disks have usb and firewire connections, and automatic recognition and mounting on Linux server editions (which have no GUI tools) is not always easy.

These notes are primarily for Ubuntu, but also work on my Suse 10.

To see if a disk is visible

# list disks

lsusb

fdisk -l

# list disk, with UUID and label

blkid

# list devices
ls -al /dev/disk/by-label

ls -al /media