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3 Books Giveaway – Learning Nagios 3.0, Hacking Vim and Mastering OpenLDAP

In this eBook giveaway content, you can win any one (or even all three)  PDF version of the books mentioned below.

Nagios, OpenLDAP, Vim Editor Book

Book 1: Learning Nagios 3.0

To win Learning Nagios 3.0 book, answer the following question.  A random winner will be selected from the comment section who answered this question.

Question: What is your favorite System Monitoring tool and why do you like it?

Answer: Leave your response in the comment section.

Book 2: Mastering OpenLDAP

To win Mastering OpenLDAP book, answer the following question. A random winner will be selected from the comment section who answered this question.

Question: What is your favorite killer one line Linux script / command? Explain with examples.

Answer: Leave your response in the comment section.

Book 3: Hacking Vim

To win Hacking Vim book, click on the retweet link below to share the Linux 101 Hacks eBook posts with your twitter followers. A random twitter user who retweets the following Linux 101 hacks posts will be selected.

Click on Retweet above. If you don’t have a twitter account, use this opportunity to create one and get into the twitter madness.

The book giveaway is open to everybody. Winners will be announced on Aug 24th. We encourage you to participate on all three contests that may increase your chance of winning the books.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might also like..

  1. 50 Linux Sysadmin Tutorials
  2. 50 Most Frequently Used Linux Commands (With Examples)
  3. Top 25 Best Linux Performance Monitoring and Debugging Tools
  4. Mommy, I found it! – 15 Practical Linux Find Command Examples
  5. Linux 101 Hacks 2nd Edition eBook Linux 101 Hacks Book

Bash 101 Hacks Book Sed and Awk 101 Hacks Book Nagios Core 3 Book Vim 101 Hacks Book

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Raja August 10, 2009, 1:16 am

    I use Cacti (www.cacti.net), for its ease in setting up trending visualizations.
    Its great colour schemes help appease the management eye for flashy charts as well. 🙂

  • minWi August 10, 2009, 1:39 am

    I use nagios + nagiosgraph, cacti and ntop.
    Nagios to monitor and send alerts for critical services/hosts
    Nagiosgraph to generate statistics
    Cacti to monitor and generate statistics about not critical services/hosts
    Ntop to monitor bandwidht
    And… thas’s all! 🙂

  • simpleman August 10, 2009, 2:13 am

    I use Zabbix, mainly because it has SLA calculate feature i need.

  • Martin August 10, 2009, 2:15 am

    I use Nagios with all the notifications exported to twitter from where i get sms notification for free 🙂

  • dendy August 10, 2009, 2:17 am

    nagios, it was easier to configure, install and using sms for quick respons

  • Jin Younghak August 10, 2009, 2:21 am

    top – it’s simple and not nessary for installation.

  • Kobus Bensch August 10, 2009, 2:27 am

    Q1 I have been monitoring systems form some time now have come across a vast selection of tools. More recently I had the opportunity to work with HP’s version. In all cases, I have always reverted back to one solution: Nagios for monitoring, Cacti for performance. Its stable, powerfull and cutomisable to no end.
    Q2 grep file.txt|awk -F”%” ‘print( $1 & “my text” & $2)|sort|uniq > output.txt (really this line can be extended and changed to allow just about anything, specially when used in conjunction with xargs)
    Q3 Sorry I dont twit, only recently started facebook. No time really.

  • Giuseppe Civitella August 10, 2009, 2:28 am

    The one line command I prefer is:
    find ./deferred/ |xargs grep XXXXXXXXX |awk ‘{ print $3 }’|cut -d “/” -f 4|postsuper -d –
    where PWD is /var/spool/postfix and XXXXXXXXX is some mail’s header.
    This is useful when postfix’s queues are filled by spam messages coming mostly from the same host o containing the same message.

  • markus August 10, 2009, 2:33 am

    I love NAGIOS 3.0 in connection with cacti, because it is so much better than our expensive commercial monitoring tool infovista. Nagios is easy to set up. Using NagiosQL is comfortable.

    regards
    Markus

  • thanhdat August 10, 2009, 2:36 am

    Hi,
    1. I use Nagios and Centreon to monitor my system et network.
    2. My favorite Linux command is awk for pattern matching and sed for subtitution. Ex:
    awk ‘/my_pattern/ {print $1}’ file1.txt # print the first column of lines containing my_pattern
    sed ‘s/old/new/g’ file2.txt # replace all instances of ‘old’ by ‘new’ in the file
    3 . Done

    Regards,
    Thanh Dat

  • Basavaraju SG August 10, 2009, 2:42 am

    top – Process Activity Command:
    —————————————————-
    The top program provides a dynamic real-time view of a running system i.e. actual process activity. By default, it displays the most CPU-intensive tasks running on the server and updates the list every five seconds.
    And also this is the first Monitoring tool in my Linux life.

  • Phaniraj August 10, 2009, 2:50 am

    Nagios … ease & allows my scripts to be included.

  • John Woo August 10, 2009, 2:54 am

    I use Nagios as it provides an easy interface to monitor devices

  • Dorien August 10, 2009, 2:54 am

    Killer command line app?

    Kill -9 666

  • Reinhard August 10, 2009, 2:55 am

    I use Nagios – once running a lot of checks can be done – has big features – it is possible to visualize it with pnp, nagvis aso.

  • Basavaraju SG August 10, 2009, 2:58 am

    Kill :
    ——

    Master of KILLER.

  • Ryan August 10, 2009, 3:40 am

    Nagios
    It is powerful.

  • Rajkiran August 10, 2009, 4:02 am

    According to me Nagios is the best monitoring system available.
    As with this we can monitor just abt anything ranging from a thermometer to traffic signals to complex servers with ease.

  • housetier August 10, 2009, 4:11 am

    I am only interested in vim, at the same time I am very indifferent towards twitter. While I do have an account, I intend to not use it.

    So, no book for me, no twitter crap for you.

  • Laud Mark-Mills August 10, 2009, 4:13 am

    Nagios is my favourite system monitoring tool. The database backend, visualisation, GUI and the user-based features provide effective management and reporting to for system administrators and enterprise managers or system decision makers.

  • Laud Mark-Mills August 10, 2009, 4:16 am

    Nagios is my favourite system monitoring tool. The database backend, visualization, GUI and the user-based features provide effective management and reporting tool for system administrators and enterprise managers and system decision makers.

  • mogwai August 10, 2009, 4:36 am

    I use nagios. You can monitor almost everything you want. But i have a look a icinga, a nagios fork. May the better one win.

  • Jeetendra Sharma August 10, 2009, 4:38 am

    Kill command is user for kill the process
    Ex:-
    # kill 2205
    where kill is command and 2205 is the process ID . When this command is execute then the process id 2205 will kill.

  • Nelson August 10, 2009, 5:48 am

    For question 1, it’s Cacti. I like it’s interface and it looks more simple to use than Nagios.
    For question 2, it’s ldapvi http://www.lichteblau.com/ldapvi Use the power of vim to easily edit/add/modify your LDAP entries.

  • manish garg August 10, 2009, 6:03 am

    I use Ganglia. I know it is limited in functionality but it is very straight forward. I heard of Nagios also. Wants to explore it.

  • Grim August 10, 2009, 6:12 am

    I’d like to get “Hacking Vim”. Retweeted as @grimferryman

    And for “Mastering OpenLDAP” my favourite one-liner:
    convert -font -cronyx-fixed-bold-r-normal–16-120-100-100-c-80-koi8-r -fill black -draw “text 70,60 \” `cal -m|iconv -f utf8 -t koi8-r` \”” from.jpg to.jpg
    It prints calendar on file from.jpg

  • Flynets August 10, 2009, 6:16 am

    monitoring: munin, for semplicity of installation and configuration
    killer one line: kill -9 , because is a serial killer.

  • Roy Hollinger August 10, 2009, 6:16 am

    Monitoring system: monit

    Killer 1 line: Varies depending on the use of the system: work — svn utilities, home — dailystrips stuff.

  • Adam Flaig August 10, 2009, 6:25 am

    Nagios is my favorite monitoring system. It is one of the most open ended monitoring platforms. To me it is the technical equivalent to Silly Putty. You start with a very fun ball of material that you can shape and form into whatever you want. If you needs change it is easy to rip it apart and redesign it on-the-fly.

    I currently use it to passively monitor a fiber infrastructure consisting of over 2000 connections.

  • alred_e_neuman August 10, 2009, 6:30 am

    While, I use Nagios, and it’s a fine tool, I’d like to put forth Monitorix. It’s a Web-based tool which uses rrdtool and perl-rrdtool. It’s very flexible, and can be tweaked and tuned from a single configuration file. It’s also actively developed. While, at present, it has no alerting capabilities, the developer, who’s easily reachable by email or IRC, is very receptive to adding this. He also listens, and is responsive, to the user community. As a light-weight, easily configurable monitoring tool, it’s worth taking a close look at.

  • Enrique Verdes August 10, 2009, 6:40 am

    For monitoring I use and recommend Pandora FMS (http://www.pandorafms.com) Why? Because it’s flexible, modular, with tons of useful features, allows to monitor lots of things, and the development team is very responsive. Pandora is a great tool every sysadmin should take a look at it.

  • Manoj Kumar August 10, 2009, 6:40 am

    Strace is my favorite monitoring tool. Using this tool we can see internal working of any thread.

  • Enrique Verdes August 10, 2009, 6:47 am

    My favorite command is find. Very powerfull when you need to work with lots of files or files with attributes other than file name. I could solve problems that ls couldn’t solve easily.
    To illustrate this: once I’ve had to convert lots of .wav file to mp3 (more than 8.000 files) and find did the magic, because ls complained about too much arguments, so I did a
    for FILE in $(find /somedir -name ‘*.wav’); do
    lame $ARCH /someotherdir/$(basename $ARCH .wav).mp3
    done
    and problem solved.

  • runlevel0 August 10, 2009, 6:54 am

    find $SUPPORT -name * -atime +0 -exec rm {} \;

    This is a one-liner that I use in everyday work. It does find in a given directory ($SUPPORT in this case) and removes any entry which is from the previous day.

    The actual magic of the one liner is that is is run from within .bash_profile so that every time that I log in to my account the out of date content of the directory $SUPPORT is removed. The $SUPPORT directory is located in a Solaris server and is a temporary storage for any kind of stuff, mostly result of searches, output of scripts and so on. As the files are parts of logfiles that I want to look and I do normally not need them the next days.

  • al mic August 10, 2009, 6:55 am

    my favorite monitoring tool is top. it may not be the best, but it helps me just enough
    of course, this is for instant, quick look, monitoring.
    otherwise i’m using nagios.

  • JimmyP August 10, 2009, 7:02 am

    I have tried Zenoss, but found that Nagios allowed for more customization for what I wanted to monitor on our switches and Linux, HP Unix, and Windows servers and desktops. Still learning the in’s and out’s, but appears to do what is needed, especially with the ability to monitor our remote sites.

  • Javier August 10, 2009, 7:02 am

    Nagios

  • Breandan Dezendorf August 10, 2009, 7:07 am

    Question:
    What is your favorite killer one line Linux script / command? Explain with examples.

    Answer:
    find . -type d -exec fs sa -dir {} -acl ptsgroup write \;

    I use that all the time at work for managing AFS directory permissions. It’s also great for actions that need to be run on all directories or all files (for files, substitute ‘-type f’ for ‘-type d’).

  • Breandan Dezendorf August 10, 2009, 7:10 am

    Question: What is your favorite System Monitoring tool and why do you like it?

    Answer: NetDisco Does automatic discovery and device management for most managed switches on the network. Uses both SNMP and CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol) – it will build topology maps and show what is where on a network. Helps you know exactly what you are running – IOS versions, config levels, etc. It even tracks MAC address -> port mappings over time, so you can see a machine moving about, if your polling frequency is set high enough. This has been a life saver for me.

    It even has some delegated switch management stuff, but I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve needed to use it.

  • Rogerio Cruz August 10, 2009, 7:12 am

    I’ve used Nagios because it´s a greater system monitoring, easy to use and configure, for many years the most used system monitoring tool.

    Regards

  • kunkichi August 10, 2009, 7:18 am

    For monitoring tool, I use Nagios for checking service availability and Cacti for long-term trends. Both are great tools, but have different goals. I wish those could be an unified one application. Nowadays, I’m interested in Ground Works.
    My favorite one liner is, when I want to search some keywords from some files using “grep”, “sed”, or “awk”, I prefer “perl -wnl -e ‘~;” than those commands. So, I don’t need to be annoyed dialectal regexp between those commands.

  • Nirav August 10, 2009, 7:30 am

    solarwind orion is good network monitoring and configuration tool. having easiest UI.

  • Scott D. Seem August 10, 2009, 7:47 am

    I currently use Nagios. I want to learn more about the tools. Someone else in my group setup and configured the tool. I have used OVO in the past and it is a little too awkward for my taste.

  • Niall Fleming August 10, 2009, 7:50 am

    I use Nagios Monitoring at work, it’s simple to set up and administer, and very extensible, this month I shall be mostly learning about SNMP traps and making Nagios use that data instead of relying on many disparate monitoring methods such as NRPE, tcp (ping) and so on. It also means I can monitor all my network switches/UPSs etc.

    As for the killer command line, there are lots of super useful combinations of sed, awk and find, but the one thing that sticks out is probably xargs, 1024 command line argument limit!? No problem says xargs! Lose those pesky out of date php sessions with:

    find /tmp -name sess_* -type f -cmin +180 -print0 | xargs -n200 -r -0 rm

    Outstanding. Lose 200 each time, rinse and repeat.

  • victor vargas August 10, 2009, 7:57 am

    nagios with cacti FTW!

  • Terrence August 10, 2009, 8:04 am

    nagios and anything open source.

  • Rajesh August 10, 2009, 8:08 am

    nagios

  • Venki August 10, 2009, 8:13 am

    My favorite system monitoring tool is Nagios, coz its very easy to install and configure and also very user friendly.

  • Shawn August 10, 2009, 8:20 am

    nagios and thanks for this too http://bit.ly/16ZDsU

  • t301000 August 10, 2009, 8:21 am

    nagios

  • Shawn August 10, 2009, 8:28 am

    cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh -l username ip-address ‘cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys’

    adds your public key to another machine so you can use public key authorization

  • xscousr August 10, 2009, 8:37 am

    I’ve been using the OpenSource system OpenNMS for a few years now and have always been more than happy with its functionality. I’ve monitored everything from Cisco firewalls and switches, linux, bsd and Windows based servers, as well as temperature systems. Installations have ranged from 30 – 800 devices.
    A key piece for me is the lack of a custom agent. OpenNMS uses standard snmp (v1/2/3) and has an excellent collection of OID to alerts pre-configured.
    Utilizing SNMP for both statistical collection, trend analysis as well as alerting makes for a very robust but simple to use system.
    Granularity in user management, roles etc also add to this system.
    Integrated asset management and reporting are also a plus.

    Check it out – http://www.opennms.org/

  • SG August 10, 2009, 8:38 am

    I have used CACTI in the past (www.cacti.net) and was amazed at the things it can monitor and do. After reading up on Nagios and seeing it in action (on the web) I am excited to get it set up and deployed in a production enviroment. The customization of this tool is unbelievable.

  • J Peck August 10, 2009, 8:44 am

    Nagios – lots of flexibility

  • Rahul August 10, 2009, 9:00 am

    Hi ,

    I have used Dynatrace and Azul RTPM . While Dynatrace is more on the side of performance monitoring, it will provide detail dashboard depicting cpu, memory and many other system monitoring parameters. Azul RTPM is very specific to Azul appliance.

  • carlos leonzo August 10, 2009, 9:36 am

    Now i used Nagios, because is more powerfull tool and friendly, show the performance and is practical tool. The better is GNU.

    Regards

  • anh Truong August 10, 2009, 9:38 am

    We actually use Big Brother for system monitoring. BB lacks some graphical presentations, so we plan to move to Nagios , Zenoss, or Opennms

  • Marco Dominguez August 10, 2009, 9:40 am

    nagios the best monitoring tool

  • PaulM August 10, 2009, 9:48 am

    Hobbit! The open source cousin to Big Brother. Its amazingly easy to set up and administer. It provides as much or as little detail as you care to see. Easy to acknowledge and manage alerts. All around fantastic product!

  • Peter Calum August 10, 2009, 9:54 am

    NAGIOS is the best monitoring tool i hav e seen, we use it for 120+ servers

  • Peter Calum August 10, 2009, 9:55 am

    Kill -9

  • Ca(OH) August 10, 2009, 10:19 am

    Munin, that it’s all I need (now)

  • Nico August 10, 2009, 10:40 am

    System Monitoring: Zabbix, plugged into our enterprise monitoring solution (monitoring roughly 1 million devices). Nagios is fine for your smaller data centers but it just doesn’t scale – even though I love it.

    Fav one line: $ cat somefile | perl -e ‘while(){ ..progam here … }’

  • Clayton Barthel August 10, 2009, 11:41 am

    Had to rebuild an Oracle server from a backup, and the admin that restored it screwed up all the symlinks.. this is what I did to fix the links:

    find $ORACLE_HOME -type l | xargs ls -l | grep \>\ \/mnt | while read i; do newlink=’echo “${i}” | cut -d ‘>’ -f2- | cut -c6-`; basefile=`echo “${i}” | cut -d’/’ -f2 | cut -d ‘-‘ -f1 | sed ‘s/\ $//’`; rm /${basefile}; ln -s ${newlink} /${basefile}; done

    So basically this generates a list of bad symlinks using find (-type l finds symlinks only), puts the linked file into $basefile and a new version (/mnt removed) into $newlink, and makes the new symlink.

    If you ls -l on a symlinked file it’s output is: symlink > /path/to/basefile, to the cuts remove the ‘>’ character and grabs each side of that into variables which I then use to create the new symlink.

  • Brad August 10, 2009, 12:06 pm

    Question: What is your favorite killer one line Linux script / command? Explain with examples.
    It’s so hard to find just one, or say that one is better than the others. This one is handy.

    ldapsearch -x -h ldapserver -s sub -b “o=la” objectClass=NCPServer cn|grep dn |grep -i nwserver|awk -F= ‘{print “/home/gwrk/abendmonitor/servervs “$2}’|sed s/,ou//|sh

    It does a live ldap search of our eDirectory tree looking for objects that are NetWare Servers onle, then it gets the name only of those servers (with awk) and adds them as an argument to another script and then executes that script using the “sh” command. This way i don’t have to have a static list of servers that could change weekly. It builds the list via the ldapsearch!
    bb

  • Brad August 10, 2009, 12:34 pm

    Question: What is your favorite System Monitoring tool and why do you like it?
    I liked Big Brother the most, it was simple and gave an immediate view to A problem.
    For the past year i’ve been using Groundwork/Nagios which is good. It can monitor not only up/down problems but also if a specific service is running or not and then send notifications about the specific problems. The best thing about Nagios is that it’s pretty easy to setup your own checks to run if you want something that doesn’t already exist.
    A downside to Nagios though is that although there are a lot of options the descriptions of them don’t exactly make sense and you can have a lot of levels of things that can be redundant, like notifications for example. Also, in order to make any changes they must be done through a web interface, I haven’t found any way to automate/script adding servers or service checks or making changes to Nagios. And, once you make changes, you have to “commit” them before they show up in the monitoring system, which can be a pain.
    bb

  • Oki Helfiska August 10, 2009, 12:59 pm

    okihelfiska RT @thegeekstuff Free eBook: Linux 101 Hacks http://tinyurl.com/but63t

  • Krypdojo August 10, 2009, 2:19 pm

    Personal i’m happy with lm_sensors, htop and sar. this provde me with all the hardware systems analysis i need.

  • Krypdojo August 10, 2009, 2:23 pm

    My favorite linux command is du -sh / it’s the one i use the most.

  • Lucas O. August 10, 2009, 3:07 pm

    My favorite monitoring tool is OpenNMS. I like how the console manage SLA.
    Great blog! Good job!
    Rgds,
    LMO.

  • baraka312 August 10, 2009, 4:11 pm

    tcpdump and conky
    cpdump for network activity and conky for system monitoring. of course, thera are several other usefultools: ps aux, iostat, df, du,… depend what you need at that time

    tcpdump -ni ‘dest192.168.10.1’ to see what’s going on between your notebook and proxy

  • Mark Mathieson August 10, 2009, 4:50 pm

    Question: What is your favorite System Monitoring tool and why do you like it?
    My favourite tool would have to be Nagios: we use it extensively to monitor our network, providing real-time views of our Network and live notifications if anything goes wrong. It is configurable down to the finest details and even if you want to monitor something that it doesn’t have a plugin for, you can write your own in Perl! I’ve written a number of plugins for our Network that check our backups, reporting daily on the success of overnight backups on our server farm so that we don’t have to check them manually.
    The only trouble with Nagios is that, because there are so many options, it is sometimes difficult, if not impossible, to work out how it all interlinks and work out which options you need to get the results you want. It will do anything, as long as you can work out how to ask it.
    And that, of course, is why I need the Nagios Book. 🙂

  • John August 10, 2009, 6:20 pm

    gkrelm because its informative, discrete (i.e. unobtrusive and not at all garish), configurable and extensible (if you can be bothered !)

  • mohit sharma August 10, 2009, 9:20 pm

    I prefer to use netlogger for system monitoring…….because it gives a lot of features for having the past history of the system and for tackling many of system performances…such as cpu usage

  • Paul August 10, 2009, 9:58 pm

    What is your favorite killer one line Linux script / command? Explain with examples.

    Hmmm….

    I’m gonna have to say “chown -r ur ./base” 😛
    as in… “all your base are belong to us!”

    yes childish I know, but then again, my other choices were:
    “sudo kill -9” – I call it the “Hammer of God”
    and “rm -rf /” – “Armageddon”

    whatever, I’m in a slap-happy mood tonight, but hey, who couldn’t use a few more techie books?

  • Tomy August 10, 2009, 10:00 pm

    Nagios

  • Sasikala August 10, 2009, 10:14 pm

    1. What is your favorite System Monitoring tool and why do you like it?
    top – which shows all the required information to monitor.

    2. What is your favorite killer one line Linux script / command?
    sed a powerful stream editor……..

    3. Done.

  • Simon August 10, 2009, 10:41 pm

    My favourite systems monitoring tool is Nagios. I like it because it is highly configurable.

  • Sebastian August 10, 2009, 10:43 pm

    My favorite one liner:
    I am doing some web design and application development and every time I have to make sure that I really did change everything I had to change, I use this one:

    find . \( -iname “*.inc” -o -iname “*.php” \) -type f -exec grep -oiHn “figuring.*ldap” ‘{}’ \;

    In this case, it looks up all files that end up in .php or .inc and are located in the present directory and its subdirectories and, within those files, searches for the regexp “figuring.*ldap”

  • Jerome August 11, 2009, 12:23 am

    Nagios because, it is:
    1) opensource
    2) easy to configure
    3) up-to-date

  • Derryl Madtha August 11, 2009, 2:15 am

    Nagios is my favorite monitoring tool. Its easy to configure and customise.

  • Francisco Fiesta August 11, 2009, 2:42 am

    Well, my answer just that I don’t really opt for any, ‘cos I don’t have the luck(?) of using it at work (I don’t work on computing) and I don’t need it actually in my desktop linux (nor in my common life).

    I just use gkrellm daemon at my ByBook World Edition external hard disk in order to monitor its performance whenever It behaves in a lazy way, which usually means that it’s a bit busy doing his homework for me (like sharing with amule, etc). As it is a little machine with a very humble cpu, with no I/O devices but an ethernet wire, it has to be administrated by ssh. And well, my hard disk sometimes makes me feel I’m some kind of a sysadmin, hehehe.

    P.D. I hope to be the winner 😉

  • rad August 11, 2009, 2:56 am

    Nagios, the best tool for its job and it is freeware. Couldn’t ask for more.

  • David Jordan August 11, 2009, 4:42 am

    I use Nagios 3 because it is a more comprehension network monitoring tool than some of the others i’ve tried including big brother and zabbix. Nagios granular configuration really allow you to setup the monitoring to manage you network. The plugins from the community also helps in the analyzing the data.

  • Orlin Vasilev August 11, 2009, 5:56 am

    killall `pidof `

    good when you want to kill your fireFox :)) or to stop something that can “eat” your resources for example loop that makes fork on each iteration and in each iteration is making a new fork with the same code 🙂 – very useful when you want to cut down the university server “by accident”

  • Tom August 11, 2009, 6:30 am

    Nagios has given us the power to monitor at the application level. We have setup Nagios with the NDOutils package. This allows us to store our results in a mysql database. We then grab some of the results(cpu utilization, memory usage, etc…) and graph them, using Cacti.

  • Seraphyn August 11, 2009, 8:03 am

    for i in *; do $something $i; done
    I mean this is one of oneliner. In some cases for rar-files or for do somethin’ one than more time:
    for i in *rar; do unrar x $i; done
    simple but this one does what it needs to do.
    Monitoringtool is nagios. I mean wth, aix; bsd, windows, cisco and so on. Sendmail and other ones are monitored,too. And if not, wrote a Plugin;)
    Book3: No retweet. Post it on the Blog and this went to identi.ca and twitter;)

    Greetings

  • Reynier Lester Claro Escalona August 11, 2009, 8:12 am

    What is your favorite System Monitoring tool and why do you like it?
    history – which shows all the required information of the commands used

    2. What is your favorite killer one line Linux script / command?
    kill -9

    3. Done.

  • Tom Schmitt August 11, 2009, 8:27 am

    XYMON(old hobbit) as it is free and has similar functionality to Big Brother. i am monitoring over 1,000 devices in multiple states with no problems at all thus far.
    Second would be the more technical OPSview that front ends Nagios with great predefined items for monitoring.
    Both have their purpose, XYMON for the higher level (10,000 foot) view, and OPSview using Nagios for the Technical analysis.

  • Tom Schmitt August 11, 2009, 8:31 am

    Remove trailing blanks:
    echo -e “ABC DEF ” | awk ‘{sub(/[ \t]+$/, “”);print}’

  • Gagan Brahmi August 11, 2009, 9:18 am

    Question: What is your favorite System Monitoring tool and why do you like it?
    Ans: Nagios !!! It is very flexible.. you can tweak it the way you want…

  • Michael August 11, 2009, 9:51 am

    Fav System monitoring tool and why?
    Nagios is fairly easy to get started even for a complete noob like myself. The use of config files for set up are an easy straight-forward way to get our business network monitored in a few hours. Tying in with MRTG graphing is a must-have as well!

  • James Barber August 11, 2009, 11:49 am

    up-time software It’s all in one package, does everything, easy to use, cross platform,
    everything you need and easy

  • Robert Fisher August 11, 2009, 12:00 pm

    I like Nagios because of its flexibility. I am able to create my own modules for that little special thing, or download something from the community.

  • anil beniwal August 11, 2009, 12:04 pm

    Zabbix

    As it is versitle enough to monitor almost everything.
    The best thing is its flexibility.

    Best regards
    anil

  • Phil August 11, 2009, 3:00 pm

    1) Nagios as it just works with multiple devices and OS, it is easy to configure and to extend

  • testor August 11, 2009, 3:18 pm

    1. Zabbix, it just works and is just what I need for the monitoring tasks.
    2. killall `pidof …`

  • battlesysadmin August 11, 2009, 4:50 pm

    This is actually two entries in one – they make more sense with each other. I had to restore millions of image files from Amazon S3 cloud storage. On our local servers, there are instances when I can not even run an “ls” because there are so many files to read in.

    I came up with my two new favorite one liners for the restore, which really need to become functions and part of a script, but…:

    get the files from Amazon:
    for i in {01..99}; do wget –continue –tries=0 –timeout=2 http://.s3.amazonaws.com/..com.$i.tar.gz; done

    restore the files from temp area to where they belong:
    for i in `ls *tar.gz`; do tar -xzvf $i; cd disk2; find . -depth | cpio -pdmv /var/www/default/htdocs; cd ..; rm -rf $i; rm -rf ./disk2; done

  • battlesysadmin August 11, 2009, 4:56 pm

    Here is another nice one… not my favorite, but I had a little trouble digging up the information when I needed it. This how to remove the passphrase requirement from an ssl key (you will need the passphrase to run the command).

    openssl rsa -in .key -out .key

    The problem with requiring a passphrase is that httpd won’t start until the passphrase is entered. To make sure httpd will start, you have to feed it the passphrase somehow upon every start, or generate a new key like so.

  • Aravind G V August 11, 2009, 9:33 pm

    I use Nagios because
    1. Open Source Software
    2.Easy to configure basic setup
    3. Easy to develop custom plugin for our applications
    4. Tons of online help is avaliable.
    5. Finally but very important no investment is required for the company to make.

  • vijay August 12, 2009, 1:40 am

    Favourite Network Monitorin gTool is ossim

  • Zoltan August 12, 2009, 3:15 am

    My favourite system monitoring tool is conky. Much flexibility, and I could hook anything I would like to see, bars, numbers, counts. I have loving since I used under win the Samurize, but needed not so heavy and resource hungry application for custom system monitoring.

  • RAJESH PRASAD August 12, 2009, 3:42 am

    Nagios, is best SNMP and advance technology with open source system and monitoring tool which can run in linux/unix domain. with added feature for ALARM Mail agent, Graphical alarm display and many more like advanced mobile alerts. I believe its a best tool for Challenging environment with wide different flavor of systems.

  • Jason August 12, 2009, 6:49 am

    My favorite linux command has got to be ‘find’. It got the best aspects of a for loop, and xargs, but with way more.” What’s that? Somebody with root access wanged up the server and we don’t know what they changed so as to do a pinpoint restore from backups?” Maybe try this why not: `find / -xdev -ignore_readdir_race -mmin -720`

  • MrLucky August 12, 2009, 8:36 am

    My favorite system monitoring tool is Nagios partnered with Groundwork, because of its versatility. You can tailor both Nagios and Groundwork to fit your needs in almost any way possible. Such as integrating new scripts for different types of service checks suitable for your specific needs.

  • Constantin August 12, 2009, 11:31 am

    I like Nagios but Centreon is a new front end for Nagios with a more accessible web front end for configuration.

  • devajeet saikia August 12, 2009, 12:07 pm

    I am new to this field, but as per my knowledge Nagios is the best open source tool for system monitoring.

  • Eldwin August 12, 2009, 12:08 pm

    My favorite killer One liner is:

    svn status | grep \? | xargs svn add

    It isn’t really killer, but it is one of the most helpful commands I use.

  • Eldwin August 12, 2009, 12:10 pm

    I use Network Monitor and RTO Pinpoint for Windows.

  • pst August 13, 2009, 5:11 am

    Hi, well I don’t have a favourite monitoring system yet, but as I heard that even CISCO uses Nagios for their internal network monitoring, I really would like to get deeper in that tool 😉

    ciao,
    pst

  • Tristan August 13, 2009, 5:26 am

    My fav system monitoring tool would be htop. It’s got a great command line interface, and simplifies a lot of commands that I was just typing directly into the console. Have tried Conky also and like the idea, but it just isn’t as functional as htop for my wants.

  • eolo999 August 13, 2009, 8:42 am

    I use Nagios3 and Munin.
    Plus i use syslog-ng for centralized logs and oak ( http://ktools.org/oak ) for logs filtering and log events handling.

  • eolo999 August 13, 2009, 8:45 am

    i really love ssh tunneling:

    ssh -L 80:localhost:80 user@remote_host

  • Sébastien Grenier August 13, 2009, 9:16 am

    My favorite monitoring tool is Nagios with the firefox plugin Nagios Checker. Nagios make big infrastructure easy to monitor and Nagios Checker assure you than you don’t miss anything.

    I don’t have a real “killer one line”, but I like to generate my password with a command that do some pseudo-random password. It’s give a great result and it assure you that your password is not in a dictionnary.
    The command: tr -dc _A-Z-a-z-0-9 < /dev/urandom | head -c16
    (you can ajust the lenght by changing the number after the last "-c")

  • Tarun August 16, 2009, 11:19 am

    1. What is your favorite System Monitoring tool and why do you like it?
    top & glance – Both of these command/tool displays required information to monitor. Although glance is limited to HP and HP-UX platform nevertheless it is a useful monitoring tool.

    2. What is your favorite killer one line Linux script / command?
    The one liner script is used by me most to grep for a particular keyword within all the files present on a file system. —–> find . -name “*” -exec grep -l -i “keyword” filename.txt {} \;

    regards
    Tarun T

  • shakil August 17, 2009, 12:11 am

    easy installation single access point

  • rob August 17, 2009, 9:27 am

    Favorite monitoring tool is nagios. Ability to construct custom check scripts for proprietary and non-standard systems make it invaluable the environments I work in

  • David August 17, 2009, 10:36 am

    One of the best is Nagios but we do use SMARTS, but it is for enterprise…. and it’s big.

    My command line : to find which ip adress in a specific file is responding or not :

    for i in `cat VHecConf.xml|cut -d'”‘ -f4|grep 172`; do ping “${i}”;done

  • robert August 17, 2009, 1:39 pm

    Nagios, es ist die beste monitoring lösung im opensource bereich die bis lang ent wickelt wurde.

  • Cacti August 18, 2009, 1:14 am

    Nagios, Because it is very powerfull tool.
    Its many functions help me sleeping well.
    It report me trouble.
    So I likes nagios. 🙂

  • Reeper August 18, 2009, 2:35 am

    My favorite system monitoring tool is BitDefender Total Security 2009 because it has all the features that is required in a system monitoring tool. It has Anti Spam , Antivirus , Online Protection and many more.

  • a13x August 18, 2009, 9:05 am

    nagios , rrdtool

  • danilo August 19, 2009, 7:03 am

    nagios, because it is easy to use

  • Marcelo Silva August 19, 2009, 8:39 am

    Openldap es una excelente herramienta, yo la estoy integrando con smaba para construir controladores de dominio. Nagios es un excelente sistema para monitorear servidores y redes

    Translation: Spanish » English

    OpenLDAP is an excellent tool, I’m integrating with smaba to build domain controllers. Nagios is an excellent system for monitoring servers and networks

  • Santhosh August 19, 2009, 2:19 pm

    my favourite monitoring tool is Nagios because it can monitor switches,routers & web servers,mail servers & etc and also its a open source tool.

  • greg August 22, 2009, 12:23 pm

    kill -s 9 pid

    example:
    # ps -ef | grep tcsh
    root 14922 14920 0 Aug 20 pts/1 0:00 -tcsh
    root 21435 21433 0 21:17:56 pts/2 0:00 -tcsh
    root 21471 21435 0 21:21:14 pts/2 0:00 grep tcsh
    # kill -9 14922
    #

  • Phil August 22, 2009, 4:56 pm

    top -c

    I like it because it’s quick to type and does a good job showing you when something is killing your machine.

  • Mounir August 24, 2009, 2:56 am

    Nagios with Centreon interface for easy management end user.
    i am working with nagios since several years, i always like the idea of open infrastructure, build your own script, play with the value extract from snmp query and the sample script plug in furnished by nagios.
    I add most of the time centreon interface for the end user to be able to graph on fly and access any graph at any time on the demand in one click, without need of big knowledge linux bash they can add a host or service via the centreon interface.

    Compare to the other propriaty monitoring tool , like IBM director, or hp open view, etc … nagios as open architecture, will give more facility than the other like giving you the capability to monitor a service from the layer 2 to the layer 7 ( query a database, http get , then analyze the latency reply or result).
    They have as well the capability to get the event log windows and analyze the ID event with the capability to apply filter on it.
    You can do a proactive maintenance and auto corrective maintenance.

    IT manager should start to think about that efficient monitoring tool to apply an ITIL strategy (service level engineering).

    And engineer system and network about the facility that nagios can provide as open architecture.

    stop spending money for license with a limited proprietary architecture and go to nagios.

    About my favorite command :

    grep “(word looking for)” file.log | cut -d”/” -f 3 | grep XXXX | cut -d ‘*’ -f1

    netsat -patune | grep port

  • hirak August 24, 2009, 4:41 am

    Openldap is best monitoring tool for me because it is integreted with samba to build domain controoler . and nigos is also best monitoyring tool because it can monitor switches,routers & web servers,mail servers & etc and also its a open source tool.

  • Rajesh August 24, 2009, 11:13 am

    nagios is the best monitoring tool

  • Javier August 27, 2009, 5:17 am

    My favorite monitoring tool is Nagios with the firefox plugin Nagios Checker, is a complete and versatile tool.

    My favorite line… if i had one:
    egrep -ir –include=’*.xml’ ‘text’ /path
    Searches for a string in all files in a path.

  • laclaclac August 29, 2009, 1:42 am

    my favorite killer command: kill -9

  • Lucy Little August 29, 2009, 3:57 am

    My favourite kill command is Kill -9 PID. I perser to use it because it will kill the process completely and cleanly.

  • Espa Chu September 4, 2009, 12:50 am

    Nagios

  • Pambo September 14, 2009, 6:04 am

    Nagios is my favourite tool. It’s the first one that I used and got to know, and I found it so powerful that I stuck to it! Definite winner!

  • Mark September 16, 2009, 11:37 am

    Nagios

  • Pablo September 22, 2009, 8:58 pm

    NAGIOS 3

  • Kurt Oliver September 23, 2009, 8:00 am

    Nagios isn’t just a program. It’s the tool I depend on to keep the big machine running smoothly. I can depend on Nagios to notify network issues when they occur/as they occur. Often, the problem can be fixed before customers/employees know there is a problem. I could not do this without the efficiency of Nagios reporting tools.

  • elhvb November 16, 2009, 8:43 am

    Nagios

  • Udo Edwin Foth November 28, 2009, 6:48 am

    i’ve replaced several other products with NAGIOS – IMHO it was a good decision to do so

  • Raffaello January 28, 2010, 4:38 am

    I’ve been trying almost all of the open source products to manage monitoring of thousands of systems in a distributed manner for our customers. I needed a graph tool integrated too, and a Db. So, Nagios by itself wasn’t enough. So I moved from Groundwork (too complex), to ninja (still in beta), to Centreon (bad documentation) and, at last, I’ve chosen OpsView: simple host,groups and checks managing, graphs, modules, all-in-one. And, last but not least: a very good documentation.

  • Madhu March 9, 2015, 3:54 am

    Find coomand.
    find command with so many examples

  • johnpeter February 23, 2016, 4:25 am

    my favourite system monitoring tool is netstat, because it display every network activity