This is an interesting visualization techniques for software analysis. From the article:
Despite being a very important part of any operating system, file systems tend to get little attention. Linux has three editions for Linux Device Drivers, another three for Understanding the Linux Kernel and two for Linux Kernel Development. The first is a detail analysis of one particular Linux Kernel tree and the second is a shorter one done over a large number of file systems from Linux Kernel 2.6.0 to 2.6.29. After that there is a small section that shows some aspects of the BSD family. After conclusions there is an appendix consisting of three things: the first one explains how the file systems for Linux were compiled, the second one shows timelines for the releases of Linux Kernel, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD; the last is a detailed map of the external symbols of the kernel modules analyzed in the second section.
A Visual Expedition Inside the Linux File Systems
tail is one of the best tool to view log files in a real time (tail -f /path/to/log.file). The program MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). This is one of those dream come true program for UNIX sys admin job. You can browse through several log files at once and do various operations like search for errors and much more.
BASH for loop works nicely under UNIX / Linux / Windows and OS X while working on set of files. However, if you try to process a for loop on file name with spaces in them you are going to have some problem. for loop uses $IFS variable to determine what the field separators are. By default $IFS is set to the space character. There are multiple solutions to this problem.
I’ve already written about creating a partition size larger than 2TB under Linux using GNU parted command with GPT. In this tutorial, I will provide instructions for booting to a flat 2TB or larger RAID array under Linux using the GRUB boot loader.
Linux and other Unix-like operating systems use the term “swap” to describe both the act of moving memory pages between RAM and disk, and the region of a disk the pages are stored on. It is common to use a whole partition of a hard disk for swapping. However, with the 2.6 Linux kernel, swap files are just as fast as swap partitions. Now, many admins (both Windows and Linux/UNIX) follow an old rule of thumb that your swap partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. Let us say I’ve 32GB RAM, should I set swap space to 64 GB? Is 64 GB of swap space really required? How big should your Linux / UNIX swap space be?
If your network is heavily loaded you may see some problem with Common Internet File System (CIFS) and NFS under Linux. By default Linux CIFS mount command will try to cache files open by the client. You can use mount option forcedirectio when mounting the CIFS filesystem to disable caching on the CIFS client. This is tested with NETAPP and other storage devices and Novell, CentOS, UNIX and Red Hat Linux systems. This is the only way to avoid data mis-compare and problems.
