Need to monitor Linux server performance? Try these built-in command and a few add-on tools. Most Linux distributions are equipped with tons of monitoring. These tools provide metrics which can be used to get information about system activities. You can use these tools to find the possible causes of a performance problem. The commands discussed below are some of the most basic commands when it comes to system analysis and debugging server issues such as:
- Finding out bottlenecks.
- Disk (storage) bottlenecks.
- CPU and memory bottlenecks.
- Network bottlenecks.
If you do not control or throttle end users, your server may run out of resources. Spammers, abuser and badly written bots can eat up all your bandwidth. A webserver must keep an eye on connections and limit connections per second. This is serving 101. The default is no limit. Lighttpd can limit the throughput for each single connection (per IP) or for all connections. You also need to a use firewall to limit connections per second. In this article I will cover firewall and lighttpd web server settings to throttle end users. The firewall settings can be applied to other web servers such as Apache / Nginx and IIS server behind PF / netfilter based firewall.
Apache Security Update – a flaw In Apache can be used to carry out DoS. Slowloris is a new Apache DoS tool which can use slow Internet links to bring down Apache servers, rather than flooding networks. Most D/DoS tool requires faster net connections but this tool works with minimal bandwidth. This tool can lead to a DoS attack on Apache 1.x, 2.x, dhttpd, GoAhead WebServer, and Squid, while MS IIS6.0, IIS7.0, and lighttpd are confirmed not vulnerable to this attack.
Fedora Linux version 11 has been released and available for download ( jump to download link ). Fedora Linux is a community-based Linux distribution. Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat, Inc.
One of Fedora’s main objectives is not only to contain free and open source software, but also to be on the leading edge of such technologies. Fedora 11, codenamed “Leonidas”, was released on June 9, 2009. The features include ext4, a 20-second startup, and the latest GNOME, KDE and XFCE releases. Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3’s latest pre-releases are available as well.
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How do I find out if a given PCI hardware is supported of by the current CentOS / Debian / RHEL / Fedora Linux kernel?
You can easily find out find out if a given piece of PCI hardware such as RAID, network, sound, graphics card is supported or not by the current Linux kernel using the following utilities under any Linux distributions.
The Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) is used for the error screen displayed by Microsoft Windows, after encountering a critical system. Linux / UNIX like operating system may get a kernel panic. It is just like BSoD. The BSoD and a kernel panic generated using a Machine Check Exception (MCE). MCE is nothing but feature of AMD / Intel 64 bit systems which is used to detect an unrecoverable hardware problem.
Program such mcelog decodes machine check events (hardware errors) on x86-64 machines running a 64-bit Linux kernel. It should be run regularly as a cron job on any x86-64 Linux system. This is useful for predicting server hardware failure before actual server crash.
The ss command is used to dump socket statistics. It allows showing information similar to netstat command. It can display more TCP and state information than other tools. It is a new, incredibly useful and faster (as compare to netstat) tool for tracking TCP connections and sockets. SS can provide information about:
- All TCP sockets.
- All UDP sockets.
- All established ssh / ftp / http / https connections.
- All local processes connected to X server.
- All the tcp sockets in state FIN-WAIT-1 and much more.
