Databases, Systems & Networks

System administrators (sysadmins) are responsible for day-to-day operations of production systems and services. One of the critical roles of sysadmins is to ensure that operational services are available round the clock. For that, they have to carefully plan backup policies, disaster management strategies, scheduled maintenance, security audits, etc. Like every other discipline, sysadmins have their tools of trade. Utilizing proper tools in the right case at the right time can help maintain the health of operating systems with minimal service interruptions and maximum uptime.

This article will present some of the most popular and useful CLI tools recommended for sysadmins in their day to day activities. If you would like to recommend any useful tool which is not listed here, don’t forget to share it in the comment section.

Network Tools

1. ping: Check end-to-end connectivity (RTT delay, jitter, packet loss) of a remote host with ICMP echo/reply. Useful to check system status and reachability.

2. hping: Network scanning and testing tool that can generate ICMP/TCP/UDP ping packets. Often used for advanced port scanning, firewall testing, manual path MTU discovery and fragmentation testing.

3. traceroute: Discover a layer-3 forwarding path from a local host to a remote destination host with TTL-limited ICMP/UDP/TCP probe packets. Useful to troubleshoot network reachability and routing problems.

4. mtr: A variation of traceroute which characterizes per-hop packet loss/jitter with running statistics. Useful to characterize routing path delays.

5. netcat/socat: A swiss army knife of TCP/IP networking, allowing to read/write byte streams over TCP/UDP. Useful to troubleshoot firewall policies and service availability.

6. dig: DNS troubleshooting tool that can generate forward queries, reverse queries, find authoritative name servers, check CNAME, MX and other DNS records. Can be instructed to query a specific DNS server of your choosing.

7. nslookup: Another DNS checking/troubleshooting tool. Works with all DNS queries and records. Can query a particular DNS server.

8. dnsyo: A DNS testing tool which checks DNS propagation by performing DNS lookup from over a number of open resolvers located across 1,500 different networks around the world.

9. lsof: Show information about files (e.g., regular files, pipes or sockets) which are opened by processes. Useful to monitor processes or users in terms of their open network connections or opened files.

10. iftop: A ncurses-based TUI utility that can be used to monitor in real time bandwidth utilization and network connections for individual network interfaces. Useful to keep track of bandwidth hogging applications, users, destinations and ports.

11. netstat: A network statistics utility that can show status information and statistics about open network connections (TCP/UDP ports, IP addresses), routing tables, TX/RX traffic and protocols. Useful for network related diagnosis and performance tuning.

12. tcpdump: A popular packet sniffer tool based on libpcap packet capture library. Can define packet capturing filters in Berkeley Packet Filters format.

13. tshark: Another CLI packet sniffer software with full compatibility with its GUI counterpart, Wireshark. Supports 1,000 protocols and the list is growing. Useful to troubleshoot, analyze and store information on live packets.

14. ip: A versatile CLI networking tool which is part of iproute2 package. Used to check and modifying routing tables, network device state, and IP tunneling settings. Useful to view routing tables, add/remove static routes, configure network interfaces, and otherwise troubleshoot routing issues.

15. ifup/ifdown: Used to bring up or shut down a particular network interface. Often a preferred alternative to restarting the entire network service.

16. autossh: A program which creates an SSH session and automatically restarts the session should it disconnect. Often useful to create a persistent reverse SSH tunnel across restrictive corporate networks.

17. iperf: A network testing tool which measures maximum bi-directional throughput between a pair of hosts by injecting customizable TCP/UDP data streams in between.

18. elinks/lynx: text-based web browsers for CLI-based server environment.

Lire la suite…

Source: BinaryTides

Hardware information

Like for every thing, there are plenty of commands to check information about the hardware of your linux system. Some commands report only specific hardware components like cpu or memory while the rest cover multiple hardware units.

This post takes a quick look at some of the most commonly used commands to check information and configuration details about various hardware peripherals and devices. The list includes lscpu, hwinfo, lshw, dmidecode, lspci etc.

1. lscpu

The lscpu command reports information about the cpu and processing units. It does not have any further options or functionality.

$ lscpu
Architecture:          x86_64
CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order:            Little Endian
CPU(s):                4
On-line CPU(s) list:   0-3
Thread(s) per core:    1
Core(s) per socket:    4
Socket(s):             1
NUMA node(s):          1
Vendor ID:             GenuineIntel
CPU family:            6
Model:                 23
Stepping:              10
CPU MHz:               1998.000
BogoMIPS:              5302.48
Virtualization:        VT-x
L1d cache:             32K
L1i cache:             32K
L2 cache:              2048K
NUMA node0 CPU(s):     0-3

2. lshw – List Hardware

A general purpose utility, that reports detailed and brief information about multiple different hardware units such as cpu, memory, disk, usb controllers, network adapters etc. Lshw extracts the information from different /proc files.

$ sudo lshw -short

H/W path        Device      Class       Description
===================================================
                            system      ()
/0                          bus         DG35EC
/0/0                        processor   Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU    Q8400  @ 2.66GHz
/0/0/1                      memory      2MiB L2 cache
/0/0/3                      memory      32KiB L1 cache
/0/2                        memory      32KiB L1 cache
/0/4                        memory      64KiB BIOS
/0/14                       memory      8GiB System Memory
/0/14/0                     memory      2GiB DIMM DDR2 Synchronous 667 MHz (1.5 ns)
/0/14/1                     memory      2GiB DIMM DDR2 Synchronous 667 MHz (1.5 ns)
/0/14/2                     memory      2GiB DIMM DDR2 Synchronous 667 MHz (1.5 ns)
/0/14/3                     memory      2GiB DIMM DDR2 Synchronous 667 MHz (1.5 ns)
/0/100                      bridge      82G35 Express DRAM Controller
/0/100/2                    display     82G35 Express Integrated Graphics Controller
/0/100/2.1                  display     82G35 Express Integrated Graphics Controller
/0/100/19       eth0        network     82566DC Gigabit Network Connection
/0/100/1a                   bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4
/0/100/1a.1                 bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5
/0/100/1a.7                 bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2
/0/100/1b                   multimedia  82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller
/0/100/1c                   bridge      82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1
/0/100/1c.1                 bridge      82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2
/0/100/1c.2                 bridge      82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 3
/0/100/1c.2/0               storage     JMB368 IDE controller
/0/100/1d                   bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1
/0/100/1d.1                 bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2
/0/100/1d.2                 bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3
/0/100/1d.7                 bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1
/0/100/1e                   bridge      82801 PCI Bridge
/0/100/1e/5                 bus         FW322/323 [TrueFire] 1394a Controller
/0/100/1f                   bridge      82801HB/HR (ICH8/R) LPC Interface Controller
/0/100/1f.2                 storage     82801H (ICH8 Family) 4 port SATA Controller [IDE mode]
/0/100/1f.3                 bus         82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller
/0/100/1f.5                 storage     82801HR/HO/HH (ICH8R/DO/DH) 2 port SATA Controller [IDE m
/0/1            scsi3       storage     
/0/1/0.0.0      /dev/sda    disk        500GB ST3500418AS
/0/1/0.0.0/1    /dev/sda1   volume      70GiB Windows NTFS volume
/0/1/0.0.0/2    /dev/sda2   volume      395GiB Extended partition
/0/1/0.0.0/2/5  /dev/sda5   volume      97GiB HPFS/NTFS partition
/0/1/0.0.0/2/6  /dev/sda6   volume      97GiB Linux filesystem partition
/0/1/0.0.0/2/7  /dev/sda7   volume      1952MiB Linux swap / Solaris partition
/0/1/0.0.0/2/8  /dev/sda8   volume      198GiB Linux filesystem partition
/0/3            scsi4       storage     
/0/3/0.0.0      /dev/cdrom  disk        DVD RW DRU-190A

Check out the following post to learn more about lshw

Get hardware information on Linux with lshw command

Lire la suite…

“inotify”, Remplaçant de “dnotify”, est une technologie, intégrée au noyau Linux (>=2.6.13) , destinée à notifier les événements, modifications, accès, etc, effectués sur le contenu d’un système de fichiers en ce basant sur le contrôle des “inodes” (structures de données contenant des informations sur les fichiers d’un systèmes de fichiers).

« incron« , Pour « INotify CRON », permet d’exploiter les informations « d’inotify » afin d’effectuer une action, commande(s), scripts, etc, en cas de modifications de fichiers ou de répertoires donnés.

Installation de inotify

« inotify » Est intégré au noyau et est activé dans les kernels fournis par les distributions.

« incron » Est, de son côté, empaqueté sur la plupart des distributions mais nécessitera, sur Red Hat et ses dérivées (CentOS, Scientific Linux, etc) l’ajout des miroirs EPEL (« Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux » voir « Ajout des miroirs EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) sous Red Hat like (CentOS, RHEL, SL, …) » sur Admin Linux). L’installation s’effectue via le gestionnaire de paquet de votre distribution.

Sous Ubuntu, Debian et ses dérivés :

# apt-get install incron

Sous les dérivés de Red Hat :

# yum install incron

Sous Gentoo Linux « emerge » se chargera de l’installation tous comme « pacman » le fera très bien sous Arch Linux.

Lire la suite…

weather-forecast-command-line-finger-graph

Checking weather: purpose of the command

There’s no shortage of methods to retrieve a weather report, the web is full of weather resources, everyones iPhone, Apple Watch, and smartphone has a weather app, Siri can tell you the weather, and you can even get the current weather in the menu bar of OS X or from Spotlight on the Mac too.

But for command line users, none of those options are particularly ideal, since it means leaving the command line and the task at hand.

Thanks to an interesting usage of the finger utility, you can quickly retrieve a weather report and weather forecast for virtually any city in the world, right from the command line.

With this trick you’ll see the temperature forecast (in celsius) for the day, wind direction and wind speed, precipitation and precipitation type (rain, showers, sleet, snow, etc), depth of precipitation, and more. This works with any command line that has the finger tool, whether you’re in Mac OS X, linux, BSD, Windows, it doesn’t matter, it will work the same.

To try this out yourself on the Mac, launch the OS X Terminal found in /Applications/Utilities/ and type the following command syntax:

finger (city name)@graph.no

For example, to get the weather forecast for Montreal Canada, you would use the following syntax at the command line:

finger montreal@graph.no

Lire la suite…

Remote Linux Commands

You would like to execute a command on a remote Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris/UNIX host and have the result displayed locally. Once result obtained it can be used by local script or program. A few examples:
=> File system and disk information

=> Get user information

=> Find out all running process

=> Find out if particular service is running or not etc

You can use rsh or ssh for this purpose. However, for security reason you should always use the ssh and NOT rsh. Please note that remote system must run the OpenSSH server.

Syntax for running command on a remote host:
ssh [USER-NAME]@[REMOTE-HOST] [command or script]

Where,

• ssh: ssh (SSH client) is a program for logging into a remote machine and for executing commands on a remote machine.
• USER-NAME: Remote host user name.
• REMOTE-HOST: Remote host ip-address or host name, such as my-site.com.
• command or script: Command or shell script is executed on the remote host instead of a login shell.

Examples

(A) Get disk information from a server called my-site.com:
$ ssh user@my-site.com df -h

(B) List what ports are open on remote host
$ ssh user@my-site.com netstat -vatn

(C) Reboot remote host:
$ ssh root@my-site.com reboot

(D) Restart mysql server (please note enclosed multiple command line arguments using a single or double quotes)
$ ssh root@my-site.com '/etc/init.d/mysql restart'

(E) Get memory information and store result/output to local file /tmp/memory.status:
$ ssh user@my-site.com 'free -m' > /tmp/memory.status

(G) You can also run multiple command or use the pipes, following command displays memory in format of « available memory = used free memory » :
$ ssh user@debian.test.com free -m | grep "Mem:" | awk '{ print "Total memory (used free): " $3 " " $4 " = " $2 }'

See how to configure ssh for password less login using public key based authentication.

=> Related: shell script to get uptime, disk usage, cpu usage, RAM usage, system load, etc. from multiple Linux servers and output the information on a single server in a html format.

Source: NixCraft