FOSSCasts - Free Linux, Unix, and Open Source Screencasts

#9 Sysstat Part 1: vmstat & iostat

Sysstat provides some smaller utilities that can be used to monitor performance and troubleshoot an under preforming Linux/Unix based system.

In this episode we'll get introduced to two of those utilities - vmstat and iostat and how they can help us keep things running at peak performance.

Next week we'll look at two more utilities that are part of Sysstat - mpstat and sar.

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#8 Customizing Your Bash Command Prompt

The Bash command prompt can be fairly dull by default.

In this episode we add some color to help differentiate between files, executables, symlinks, and directories. We'll also change the format of the command prompt with the current time and better formatting.

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#7 Quick Editing with GNU Nano

GNU Nano is one of my favorite "little" text editors. While Nano is small, it does support some fairly advanced features like syntax highlighting, killing and yanking (copy and pasting), buffer support (think tabs), spell checking, and others.

In this episode we'll configure a good initial Nano setup, show how to navigate around Nano, and go over how to use some of the advanced - not enabled by default - features.

Keep in mind, when I mention the key "meta" this is also known as the "option" key in the Apple world and "ALT" in the Windows world. That is the key I am referring to.

As I recommend in in the screencast, swapping your CAPS and CTRL keys will help quite a bit while using GNU Nano. Consult episode 2 to find out how.

Macroron provided updated instructions to get spell checking working on Fedora 11

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#6 System Monitoring With Monit

Monit is a great open source tool for keeping track of your server or system. Monit can make sure daemons are running, permissions are correct, remote servers are responding, and much more.

In this episode we'll show you how to configure Monit to monitor our webserver, Apache HTTPD, starting it back up after a crash, and emailing us an alert.

If you'd like to try other monitoring utilities check out God, which uses Ruby for configuration, and Reconnoiter, which has some very robust features.

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#5 Command Line Tips #2

In this episode we continue the multipart series with some more of my favorite command line tips including a surprisingly little known cd argument, quickly searching the bash_history, a sudo tip, and how to temporarily start a tiny webserver so we can share files with a single command.

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#4 Command Line Tips #1

In this episode of a multipart series, we go over a couple of tips for the command line including Bash aliases and using pushd and popd to quickly traverse common directories.

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#3 Load Testing with Apache JMeter

Apache JMeter is a great tool to load test your web applications, API, and even databases.

In this episode, we go through how to record a short work flow with JMeter and use that to simulate load on a web application.

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#2 Remapping CAPSLOCK and CONTROL

One of the best changes I've ever made to my computing work flow is swapping my CAPS and CTRL keys. It is much easier on your pinky to hit the CAPS key instead of the standard mapping for CTRL and the CTRL key is used exponentially more than CAPS. In fact, you will likely find that you completely forget about the CAPS key all together.

This is a very easy change to make and have a good effect on your computing for years to come. We'll go though how to do it In MacOSX, Ubuntu Linux, and any Unix/Linux system with Xmodmap.

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#1 Easy Nginx with PHP

Nginx is a great alternative to other webservers like Apache and Lighttpd. If you're looking for something with a bit less overhead and a bit more speed, give it a try.

We'll get Nginx compiled from source on Ubuntu 9.04 and get PHP playing nice with it.