In case you have wondered how to find out which files to delete to free up disk space, wonder no more. JDiskReport can easily visualize the disk usage of a directory tree with pie charts and other diagrams. Very useful for having a quick look at what is eating up the space, and since it supports Java Web Start, you don’t really need to install it if you have Java properly configured.
For after-the-fact monitoring of network usage there are various graphing frameworks such as Cacti, Munin and Serverstats. Sometimes, however, you need to use a real-time network monitoring utilities to see what is going on right now. This post shows some examples of what iftop, iptraf and vnstat can do.
Munin is a highly flexible and powerful solution used to create graphs of virtually everything imaginable throughout your network, while still maintaining a rattling ease of installation and configuration.
Direct paste from the Debian package description. Not much more needs to be said. I’m replacing Serverstats, which I’ve used for over a year, with Munin. Compared to all the trouble I went through to configure Serverstats and write custom plugins for it, Munin seems almost all to easy. A single aptitude install command and it was already running with no need to twiddle with configuration. Very nice.
I only needed to make a small tweak to /etc/munin/plugin-conf.d/munin-node to have it collect smart/temperature data for all my disks:
[hddtemp_smartctl]
user root
env.drives hda sda sdb sdc
Neat example graphs for a live server are also available. Munin seems to be a very good replacement for those who don’t want to twiddle with Cacti.
I recently blogged about trying out Google Analytics. The service is nice, but I’d much prefer to keep my hands on the data than let Google store it. In fact, they aren’t giving you the data, only some reports they believe you want to see. So an open source alternative to Google Analytics would be much wanted, as that would let you keep the data yourself.
I was having some problems with the laptop clock being completely wrong (and that in turn causing a lot of weirdness during boot and before ntp kicked in), but turns out Debian Etch has some problems saving the hardware clock from system time properly when shutting down. Apparently you need to manually run
hwclock --directisa --systohc
to set the hardware clock from system time (after updating the system time with NTP).
Since getting more famialiar with git (the version control system) over last year, I have started increasingly favoring git for my own projects (over, or side-by-side with Subversion (SVN)). This post explains some reasons why.
