Can some of you guru's post some links to websites you find useful for Linux? I'm not a Linux admin, but our telecom products run on Linux and I'm always looking for some tricks or tools that would be useful. In general, we have root access to all of our telecom systems, so that should open up most every executable to us.

A How-To;

http://mirrors.kernel.org/LDP/HOWTO/Installation-HOWTO/


This is a link that has links to other sites.

http://www.kernel.org/links.html

Probably want to start with getting good with the shell. I find that most people starting *nix seem to bypass this most important step when learning.

Bash, the default shell in every modern Linux distro is an excellent shell. You perform magic through the bash shell. KSH (my favorite) is another wonderful shell with a much smaller footprint than bash and will be mostly found as a default in *BSD.

Bash Cures Cancer (http://bashcurescancer.com)
Bash Guide for Beginners (http://linuxreviews.org/beginner/Bash-Beginners-Guide)
Advanced Bash Scripting Guide (http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html)


Tao of Regular Expressions (http://linuxreviews.org/beginner/tao_of_regular_expressions)
IBM's Speaking UNIX (http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-unix-commandline)
How-To-Forge (http://www.howtoforge.com)


Mother-load of *nix Tools/Apps (http://freshmeat.net)

Digg Linux/Unix (http://digg.com/linux_unix)


MORE LINKS (http://www.brunolinux.com/10-General_Info/Great_Linux_Links.html)


Got anything special in mind? Let me know.
I would dump my entire Bookmarks, but I would be breaking the TOS in a big way.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/ is good on the forum side of things (until we overtake them at least). del.icio.us linux tag (http://del.icio.us/tag/linux?setcount=100) is always fun for mining random sites as people bookmark them.

Thanks for links guys.

JD, shell scripting is definitely an area I need to get familiar with. It would help me out alot with developing better and more robust tests of our software.

Probably want to start with getting good with the shell. I find that most people starting *nix seem to bypass this most important step when learning.

Bash, the default shell in every modern Linux distro is an excellent shell. You perform magic through the bash shell. KSH (my favorite) is another wonderful shell with a much smaller footprint than bash and will be mostly found as a default in *BSD.

Bash Cures Cancer (http://bashcurescancer.com)
Bash Guide for Beginners (http://linuxreviews.org/beginner/Bash-Beginners-Guide)
Advanced Bash Scripting Guide (http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html)


Tao of Regular Expressions (http://linuxreviews.org/beginner/tao_of_regular_expressions)
IBM's Speaking UNIX (http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-unix-commandline)
How-To-Forge (http://www.howtoforge.com)


Mother-load of *nix Tools/Apps (http://freshmeat.net)

Digg Linux/Unix (http://digg.com/linux_unix)


MORE LINKS (http://www.brunolinux.com/10-General_Info/Great_Linux_Links.html)


Got anything special in mind? Let me know.
I would dump my entire Bookmarks, but I would be breaking the TOS in a big way.

A presentation from the 2003 UK UUG with some nice tricks on improving BASH http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2003/papers/bash_tips/index.html
The author (usually known as Smylers) is a Leeds graduate and a bit of a wizard, by all accounts.

Eaux-yeah - why not tarball your bookmark file and post that?

Eaux-yeah - why not tarball your bookmark file and post that?

Or del.icio.us (https://secure.del.icio.us/register) it.

Or del.icio.us (https://secure.del.icio.us/register) it.
Excellent stuff, too. Really is! Highly recommend.
The "Yahoo" ownership part of it all gives me th' willies, though.


I was thinking to myself, I said, "self, didn't you post something about that site at one point?" :hihi:
I had to hunt for it, and yes I did, got zero responses, too.
http://srarchives.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=153236&highlight=del.icio.us
Too bad I don't follow my own advice. Do as I say, not as I do? :dunno:

Anyhow, it's a work in progress, let's just say..


meanwhile, gboudx
try this for now:
http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~parrt/course/601/lectures/unix.util.html (http://www.cs.usfca.edu/%7Eparrt/course/601/lectures/unix.util.html)
every *nix sysadmin BETTER know everything on that page.

There is also an old book published in 1990 (Third Edition in 2003) that is still, IMO, one of the best shell programming books out. It's called "UNIX Shell Programming (http://www.amazon.com/Shell-Programming-Third-Stephen-Kochan/dp/0672324903)" (clever?). I have seen this at "Half-Price Books" a few times.

A presentation from the 2003 UK UUG with some nice tricks on improving BASH http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2003/papers/bash_tips/index.html
The author (usually known as Smylers) is a Leeds graduate and a bit of a wizard, by all accounts.

Eaux-yeah - why not tarball your bookmark file and post that?

Nice link.

It's not the size I was worried about, but the content on some of the site in the bookmarks.
Most of those sites aren't moderated like this one. :mwink:

Excellent stuff, too. Really is! Highly recommend.
The "Yahoo" ownership part of it all gives me th' willies, though.


I was thinking to myself, I said, "self, didn't you post something about that site at one point?" :hihi:
I had to hunt for it, and yes I did, got zero responses, too.
http://srarchives.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=153236&highlight=del.icio.us
Too bad I don't follow my own advice. Do as I say, not as I do? :dunno:

Anyhow, it's a work in progress, let's just say..


The positive side of the Yahoo takeover is stability and stopping Microsoft from buying it, Google might have been better though.

I commend your del.icio.using style, always prefer collections that include notes for the URLs. Will have to borrow some of your links for my neglected unix tags.

I commend your del.icio.using style, always prefer collections that include notes for the URLs. Will have to borrow some of your links for my neglected unix tags.
Cool, I guess you found me? I guess I should point it to others?
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/networkbadge/eauxyeah?name;icon"></script>

I'm getting it, had to delete my account a few time before I started coming up with a style I liked. I have only shared a few Linux bookmarks and will share more this evening.
I need to spend more time there, some things are still kinda confusing. If you have any good del.icio.us suggestions, I am all ears.

Del.icio.us is really a great idea for those that have not tried it.

that didn't work

oh well, go to del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us). My username, obviously, eauxyeah

http://del.icio.us/eauxyeah for the direct link, added you to my network (http://del.icio.us/network/Severum).

I'm pretty liberal with tags, 3-4 per link on average. Tag bundles can be useful for keeping everything in order as your tag cloud grows. When I add a link I'll normally check if an equivalent link is more popular (www. vs @, / vs /index.html) and go with the popular one.

In case Yahoo gets nuked, an easy backup is: curl --user account:password -o delicious.xml -O 'https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all'(or equiv wget)

Got anything special in mind? Let me know.


Here's something we've noticed that skews the stats we capture during traffic tests. We have a cron job that basically issues the "top" command every 10 seconds, 6 times a minute. We use CPU, memory, load average and other info to get a picture of performance, so that's why we need the top stats. What we've noticed is that when first issuing the top command, the system CPU utilization is being reported as being very high, like > 90%. This is incorrect, so we're thinking that top might have some issue with it's calculations when first issued.

Have you ever experienced this, or know why top might be giving this invalid information? We're modifying our approach to gather the stats we need, but I'm curious about why top behaves this way.

Another site for NOOBs'
Command Line for Dummies (http://www.linuxcommand.org/index.php)


:covri:

Here's something we've noticed that skews the stats we capture during traffic tests. We have a cron job that basically issues the "top" command every 10 seconds, 6 times a minute. We use CPU, memory, load average and other info to get a picture of performance, so that's why we need the top stats. What we've noticed is that when first issuing the top command, the system CPU utilization is being reported as being very high, like > 90%. This is incorrect, so we're thinking that top might have some issue with it's calculations when first issued.

Have you ever experienced this, or know why top might be giving this invalid information? We're modifying our approach to gather the stats we need, but I'm curious about why top behaves this way.
Wow, I haven't seen anyone put 'top' in a cronjob. I like and use 'top' all of the time, but for 'live' stats, meaning I leave it on when needed.

The CPU spike you are getting from 'top' is the result of 'top' have to read the entire /proc directory. That's a bunch of information. You will get that every time you start 'top'.

If you're going want to gather system stats from a cronjob, I would recommend capturing snapshots from vmstat and/or iostat (you might have to add iostat, depending on the setup). Both are excellent tools at doing what you are looking for without the expensive startups. They both read from /proc, as well. vmstat, on it's on, will probably give you all the info you need.

I have been messing around with another tool that someone pointed me too a few months ago, called DSTAT (http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/dstat). I have not tried this in a cronjob, but from what I have used of it, it's pretty nice.

I don't know the resources of the machine(s) you are monitoring, but tools like ZABBIX (http://www.zabbix.com), Cacti (http://www.cacti.net), and Nagios (http://nagios.org) are wonderful real-time monitoring applications. They are much more in depth that the simple 'stat' tools, but once you see them in action, you see why.

JD, thanks for the explanation on top. The reason we use top is because we need to capture the cpu and memory utilizations for 2 specific processes, in addition to, overal cpu stats and system load. We need a semi-continous display of this info in order to get a picture of how well our performance is. If it wasn't for needing the stat info on the 2 processes, then uptime and vmstat would give us all we need.

I'm gonna look into those other tools you mentioned. Thanks again.

ps wouldn't suffice for getting the process info?

Second RRD/cacti/mrtg and nagios, very useful.

We need the CPU and Virt/Res/Share memory stats for the processes. Can ps provide that?

ps ux would get vsz/rss/cpu. I suppose could read the data directly from /proc, I'm not that familiar with Linux in that area though.