June 2011 | Linux Blog

Utility for automatic management and monitoring of Information Technology Systems - Monit

Monit can start a process if it does not run, restart a process if it does not respond and stop a process if it uses too much resources. You can use Monit to monitor files, directories and filesystems for changes, such as timestamps changes, check-sum changes or size changes. You can also monitor remote hosts; Monit can ping a remote host and can check TCP/IP port connections and server protocols. Monit is controlled via an easy to use control file based on a free-format, token-oriented syntax. Monit logs to syslog or to its own log file and notifies you about error conditions and recovery status via customizable alert.

Monit Features
* Daemon mode - poll programs at a specified interval
* Monitoring modes - active, passive or manual
* Start, stop and restart of programs
* Group and manage groups of programs
* Process dependency definition
* Logging to syslog or own log file
* Configuration - comprehensive control file
* Run-time and TCP/IP port checking (tcp and udp)
* SSL support for port checking
* Unix domain socket checking
* Process status and process timeout
* Process cpu usage
* Process memory usage
* Process zombie check
* Check the systems load average
* Check a file or directory timestamp
* Alert, stop or restart a process based on its characteristics
* MD5 checksum for programs started and stopped by monit
* Alert notification for program timeout, restart, checksum, stop resource and timestamp error
* Flexible and customizable email alert messages
* Protocol verification. HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, NNTP, SSH, DWP,LDAPv2 and LDAPv3
* An http interface with optional SSL support to make monit accessible from a web browser

Download or Stream Video/Audio files from Youtube - Gmediafinder

Gmediafinder is a software to search stream an/or download audio or video files form YouTube and other similar sites and you also don't required browser or flash player, Gmediastreamer support full screen mode (double click on the video), visualizations, you can also select the preferred resolution for the playing the video files.

In addition to YouTube, Gmediastreamer supports the following search engines:
Dilandau: A European-run MP3 search engine that allows you to “Download music for FREE”, though with a limited catalogue.
MP3Realm: Now pointing to azmp3s.com, another slightly shady looking MP3 search engine that offers streaming, downloading and a lyrics lookup service. I’ve noticed not all files will stream, for some unknown reason.
Skreemr: An MP3 search engine that claims to deliver music, remixes, podcasts and ringtones and works well.
Tagoo: A Russian MP3 search engine, quite possibly legal in Russia but probably not anywhere else. Some adverts on the site are probably NSFW (not safe for work) but accessing via Gmediafinder gets rid of those anyway!
Imusicz: Another questionable search engine that comes with its own status page that you can check if your results aren’t showing up.

How to Install Gnome 3 on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)

Unity is a shell interface for the GNOME desktop environment developed by Canonical for its Ubuntu operating system. Unity debuted in the netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.10. It is designed to make more efficient use of space given the limited screen size of netbooks, including, for example, a vertical application switcher called the launcher. Unlike GNOME, KDE Software Compilation, or Xfce, Unity is not a collection of applications but designed to be used with existing GTK+ programs.

Ubuntu has traditionally used the full GNOME desktop environment; founder Mark Shuttleworth cited philosophical differences with the GNOME team over the user experience to explain why Ubuntu would use Unity as the default desktop instead of GNOME Shell, beginning April 2011, with Ubuntu Natty Narwhal (11.04).

Recover deleted files using Foremost

Foremost is a console program to recover files based on their headers, footers, and internal data structures. This process is commonly referred to as data carving. Foremost can work on image files, such as those generated by dd, Safeback, Encase, etc, or directly on a drive. The headers and footers can be specified by a configuration file or you can use command line switches to specify built-in file types. These built-in types look at the data structures of a given file format allowing for a more reliable and faster recovery.

Originally developed by the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations and The Center for Information Systems Security Studies and Research and now foremost has been opened to the general public.

Keed track of Configuration file changes under /etc - etckeeper

etckeeper is a collection of tools to let /etc be stored in a git, mercurial, darcs, or bzr repository. It hooks into apt (and other package managers including yum and pacman-g2) to automatically commit changes made to /etc during package upgrades. It tracks file metadata that revison control systems do not normally support, but that is important for /etc, such as the permissions of /etc/shadow. It's quite modular and configurable, while also being simple to use if you understand the basics of working with revision control.

etckeeper installation:
Open your terminal and type following command to install etckeeper:

sudo apt-get install etckeeper

How to reinstall GRUB 2 in Ubuntu using Live Distribution CD

GRUB 2 introduces many new changes. GRUB 2 has better portability and modularity, supports non-ASCII characters, dynamic loading of modules, real memory management, and more and is totally different from its predecessor, menu.lst doesn't even exist, it is replaced by grub.cfg which have little resemblance with menu.lst.

Using a Live distribution
The first thing to do is start the live-cd and open a terminal type the following command to see the partitions on different hard disks:

$ sudo fdisk-l

How to Measure the Throughput of a Network- Iperf

Iperf is a commonly used network testing tool for measuring maximum TCP and UDP bandwidth performance (throughput) of a network. Iperf allows the tuning of various parameters and UDP characteristics. Iperf reports bandwidth, delay jitter, datagram loss.

Iperf allows the user to set various parameters that can be used for testing a network, or alternately for optimizing or tuning a network. Iperf has a client and server functionality, and can measure the throughput between the two ends, either unidirectonally or bi-directionally. It is open source software and runs on various platforms including Linux, Unix and Windows.

Typical Iperf output contains a timestamped report of the amount of data transferred and the throughput measured. Iperf is significant as it is a cross-platform tool that can be run over any network and output standardized performance measurements. Thus it can be used for comparison of wired and wireless networking equipment and technologies in an unbiased way.

How to Create ISO-9660 CD-ROM filesystem images - genisoimage

genisoimage is a pre-mastering program to generate ISO9660/Joliet/HFS hybrid filesystems. genisoimage takes a snapshot of a given directory tree, and generates a binary image which will correspond to an ISO9660 and/or HFS filesystem when written to a block device.

Install genisoimage using command:

sudo apt-get install genisoimage

Scan for Potential Security flaws in source code - Graudit

Graudit is a little script and signature sets that allows you to find potential security flaws in source code using the GNU utility grep. It's comparable to other static analysis applications like RATS, SWAAT and flaw-finder while keeping the technical requirements to a minimum and being very flexible.

Graudit supports scanning code written in several languages; asp, jsp, perl, php and python.

Graudit Usage:
Graudit supports several options and tries to follow good shell practices. For a list of the options you can run graudit -h or see below. The simplest way to use graudit is;

Opensource Profiling and performance tunning for .Net Applications - SlimTune

SlimTune is a free profiler and performance analysis/tuning tool for .NET based applications, including C#, VB.NET, and more. It provides many powerful features, such as remote profiling, real time results, multiple plugin-based visualizations, and much more. The source code is available under the terms of the MIT License.

SlimTune is currently an early beta, but it is fully functional and considered ready for use in most cases. Both x86 and x64 targets are supported, but only sampling based profiling is available in the current release.

SlimTune Features
Live Profiling - Why should you have to wait until your program has ended to see results? SlimTune reports results almost immediately, while your code is still running. See your bottlenecks in real-time, not after the fact.

How to Upgrade Ubuntu Using an Alternate ISO Image

If your computer is not able to run the standard Desktop installation CD, you can use an Alternate installation CD instead. The Alternate CD also allows more advanced installation options which are not available with the Standard LiveCD.

To upgrade Ubuntu from an ISO file, you need the Alternate version CD, NOT the regular Ubuntu Desktop CD. Alternate CD ISO image file of any release can be found here: http://releases.ubuntu.com/.

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