Read an interesting discussion on the lkml list where Linus and friends talked about atime’s performance impacts (http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148). Ingo phrased the problem best with: ‘ For every file that is read from the disk, lets do a … write to the disk! And, for every file that is already cached and which we read from…
Say you want to strace a script.. Well, you can’t, right? Because strace expects ELF (or other object format) executables as a target, or a running process. So one trick is to put a sleep at the top of the process, start it, do a quick ps, then strace -p.. Ugly, but effective in many…
The single most important piece of information processed by top is the
measure of a process’s percentage cpu utilization, known as percent
cpu. Although top is perfectly capable of display and sorting on a
variety of information, by default it sorts by percent cpu. The
reason for this is that most people use top to find out what the cpu
is doing, or more specifically which process is hogging the cpu.
Percent cpu readily reveals this information.
In working on some promo material for Sysadmin Days we started looking at Jesse’s Disaster Recovery class. Over the weekend a total hardware loss at Designwyse came up on #LOPSA. See some pictures showing complete destruction. It occurs to me that it would be handy for LOPSA and System Administrators to have some pictures of…
Happy “Sysadmin Appreciation Day”:http://www.sysadminday.com/ Great gifts for sysadmins include “LOPSA”:http://lopsa.org/ memberships and registrations to “LOPSA Sysadmin Days – Philidelphia”:http://lopsa.org/SysadminDays/ Check it out, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems has posted a “blog”:http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/thank_you entry about Sysadmin Appreciation Day! Thanks, Jonathan, for helping us get the word out about our profession!
NTP 4 introduces some interesting new things that few people seem to know about, are sparsely documented, and are difficult to setup correctly, however they can help with synchronization in the event of total external network failure (even if you don’t have a reference time source). Now, some reference time sources aren’t expensive (others are),…
When someone at a conference discovered that I was the original author for the utility “top” the reaction is always the same: “hey that’s a really cool program”, “thanks for writing it”, or “top really saved the day”. I am glad that in my own little way I was able to contribute to the system…
Register for the website! http://www.austinsug.org/Members.html If you want to be part of the leadership board, contact Jeff. Jeff.blanchard at sun.com. Thanks to Sigma Solutions for providing the food and drink. Next meeting: August 15, 2007. Solaris 10 Dtrace by Jarod Jenson, chief architect at Aeysis. Jarod is the resource Sun brings into companies who need…
No, I’m not talking about using the wit of Walt Whitman or the eccentricities of Emily Dickinson for choosing technology. Nor am I talking about some new program that automates decision making for you. I’m talking about what I see as being the five main dimensions of technology decision making. I am asked repeatedly by…
Things one must remember when dealing with Dell firmware updates…
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