Posts under ‘Server’

Another of the most useful tools in server administration is the Crontab – you use this to schedule jobs (programs) to run at regular intervals. These tasks can be  varied, from restarting servers, services – creating files, changing permissions, runing batch programs, deleting files etc… Of course sometimes crontab is not the best solution as [...]

Grep is a tool that is used often by system administrators – including myself, however I often have to double check the syntax online – as a result this post is to help me find out how and you of course. first I recommend to change to the directory that you think or know the [...]

I realised after my previous post I realised that it would be worthwhile talking about adding a new partitition.

The first thing you need – or I assume – is that you have a separate hard-drive which is not active (mounted) or can be unmounts using the standard umount command.

We assume the device is sdc (it could be sdb, sda, hda1 etc..).

We had a problem on one of the servers which I help administer. Every now and again RAM usage would max out and SWAP would then be used – this would sometimes max out and bye bye server, normally this happened for only a few seconds and all was fine – however if it lasted more then when SWAP ran out – the server ground to a halt and needed a manual restart.

The server in question is quite busy – but only had 512Meg of RAM (this has since been rectified) historically as it wasn’t that busy at first several years ago has slowly grown as websites on it have grown in popularity and databases have grown.

So an immediate fix was required

Kick-starting an Iphone app review cycle, first up is one of the most useful app’s I have for server monitoring. R-U-ON http://www.r-u-on.com/ is a great service, which has a free level and a paid.  Personally I used the free service for several years, now I use the paid service. The Iphone app works with both [...]

I recently had a little problem when deleting a store of spam e-mails off one of my personal servers. Basically entering the standard death defying command of “rm -Rfv *” while in a directory (this will delete everything recursively – have fun), the system responded “Argument list too long” – cue the first “huh?” moment [...]

After several years of running different solutions on different servers I have found that ASSP is one of the best anti-spam solutions around. However – after some time it still struggles and gets weaker, can anyone recommend any other systems that can work ALONGSIDE it (not replace).

An incident earlier this week has made me review the backup systems in place for my wifes company (www.ihelm-enterprises.co.uk).

One of our clients doesn’t exclusively use us and so had a problem when another host lost a server and had no backups – the client also doesn’t backup frequently and had hoped that the server hosts would have some form of backup – but of course they didn’t.

I have ubuntu (kubuntu) on my desktop – this is nearly always on and is great.

I then have a Mac in the office at work – running Mac OS X.

generally apart from keyboard issues (as i don’t have a Mac Keyboard so sometimes the mappings go wonky) – the Mac is fine – no probs, but in order to access SSH the Mac just doesn’t have anything to touch Putty.