Troubleshooting

HowTo: Debug Crashed Linux Application Core Files Like A Pro

Posted on in Categories Linux, Troubleshooting last updated June 3, 2010

Core dumps are often used to diagnose or debug errors in Linux or UNIX programs. Core dumps can serve as useful debugging aids for sys admins to find out why Application like Lighttpd, Apache, PHP-CGI or any other program crashed. Many vendors and open source project author requests a core file to troubleshoot a program. A core file is generated when an application program abnormally terminates due to bug, operating system security protection schema, or program simply try to write beyond the area of memory it has allocated, and so on. This article explains how to turn on core file support and track down bugs in programs.

Top 10 Open Source Web-Based Project Management Software

Posted on in Categories data center, Download of the day, GNU/Open source, Links, Linux, Networking, Software, Sys admin, Troubleshooting, UNIX last updated July 19, 2009

Project management software is not just for managing software based project. It can be used for variety of other tasks too. The web-based software must provide tools for planning, organizing and managing resources to achieve project goals and objectives. A web-based project management software can be accessed through an intranet or WAN / LAN using a web browser. You don’t have to install any other software on the system. The software can be easy of use with access control features (multi-user). I use project management software for all of our projects (for e.g. building a new cluster farm) for issue / bug-tracking, calender, gantt charts, email notification and much more.

Obviously I’m not the only user, the following open source software is used by some of the biggest research organizations and companies world wild. For e.g. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses track software or open source project such as lighttpd / phpbb use redmine software to keep track of their projects.

6 Tools To Find Out Website Load Speed

Posted on in Categories Apache, Beyond nixCraft, Business, Hardware, High performance computing, Howto, Linux, Linux desktop, Sys admin, Troubleshooting, UNIX, Windows, windows vista last updated July 15, 2009

Research shows that if your web pages take longer than 5 seconds to load, you lose 50% of your viewers and sales. As a UNIX admin often end users and web developers complain about website loading speed and timings. Usually, there is nothing wrong with my servers or server farm. Fancy java script and images / flash makes site pretty slow. These tools are useful to debug performance problems for sys admins, developers and end users. Here are six tools that can analyzes web pages and tells you why they are slow. Use the following tools to:

  • Make your site faster.
  • Debug site problem, especially client side and server side stuff.
  • Better user experience.
  • Improve the web.

OpenOffice.org Quick Introduction For New User

Posted on in Categories GNU/Open source, Howto, Linux desktop, OpenOffice.Org, Troubleshooting, Ubuntu Linux, UNIX, Windows, windows vista last updated June 3, 2009

OpenOffice.org (OOo) is a freely available, full-featured office suite. OOo is both a software product and a community of volunteers that produces and supports the software. However, new users may get lost while finding help, support and productivity enhancing extensions. This blog post covers OOo new user orientation to to discover support, tutorials, community insights, templates, clip art, extensions, and blogs for OOo.

Linux x86_64: Detecting Hardware Errors

Posted on in Categories CentOS, Debian Linux, fedora linux, Gentoo Linux, Hardware, Howto, kernel, Linux, Linux distribution, Networking, package management, RedHat/Fedora Linux, Shell scripting, Sys admin, Tips, Troubleshooting, Ubuntu Linux last updated June 2, 2009

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.

ss: Display Linux TCP / UDP Network and Socket Information

Posted on in Categories Debian Linux, Howto, Linux, Monitoring, Networking, RedHat/Fedora Linux, Sys admin, Tips, Troubleshooting, Ubuntu Linux last updated June 2, 2009

The ss command is used to show socket statistics. It can display stats for PACKET sockets, TCP sockets, UDP sockets, DCCP sockets, RAW sockets, Unix domain sockets, and more. 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.
  • Filtering by state (such as connected, synchronized, SYN-RECV, SYN-SENT,TIME-WAIT), addresses and ports.
  • All the tcp sockets in state FIN-WAIT-1 and much more.

Missing Memory

Posted on in Categories Howto, Linux, RedHat/Fedora Linux, Sys admin, Troubleshooting, UNIX, Windows server last updated March 13, 2009

Today, I’ve upgraded total 8 servers from 4GiB to 8GiB to improve performance of system by inserting additional memory modules. We started each server and checked for memory count at console. All severs booted normally after the upgrade and services such as SMTP, NFS, CIFS, HTTP started as expected. Shortly, afterwords I got a call from help desk about pop3 server for slow performance.