This is a guest post written by SathiyaMoorthy.

Using ramfs or tmpfs you can allocate part of the physical memory to be used as a partition. You can mount this partition and start writing and reading files like a hard disk partition. Since you’ll be reading and writing to the RAM, it will be faster.

When a vital process becomes drastically slow because of disk writes, you can choose either ramfs or tmpfs file systems for writing files to the RAM.

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Nagios is hands-down the best monitoring tool to monitor host and network equipments. Using Nagios plugins you can monitor pretty much monitor anything.

I use Nagios intensively and it gives me peace of mind knowing that I will get an alert on my phone, when there is a problem. More than that, if warning levels are setup properly, Nagios will proactively alert you before a problem becomes critical.

Earlier I wrote about, how to setup Nagios to monitor Linux Host, Windows Host and VPN device.

In this article, I’ll explain how to configure Nagios to monitor network switch and it’s active ports.
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Around The Geek World is a monthly summary of interesting articles and news around the geek world with my brief comment.

I hope you enjoy this collection of interesting geek articles for October 2008.

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Bugzilla, an open source bug tracking system uses MySQL for the database. When you try to attach a document to the bug that is greater than 1MB in size, you will get the error message shown below. This article explains how to fix this problem by changing the MySQL max_allowed_packet database parameter and bugzilla maxattachmentsize parameter.
 
When a MySQL client or the mysqld server receives a packet bigger than max_allowed_packet bytes, it issues a Packet too large error and closes the connection.
 
MySQL client’s default max_allowed_packet value is 16MB. MySQL server’s default max_allowed_packet is 1MB. For bugzilla attachment, we need to increase the max_allowed_packet size of the MySQL server.
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When you call DELL customer support for any help, they will ask for either Service Tag or Express Service Code. You also need service tag to download drivers and documentations from DELL support website.

When you have physical access to the system, you can easily identify the service tag affixed on the body of the server. DELL support site shows the exactly location of the service tag and express code stickers for various DELL equipments.

When you don’t have physical access to the server, you can get the same information remotely from the OS level. Using Windows or Linux command line you can easily get DELL service tag as explained below.
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In our previous articles, we discussed how to setup ssh key based authentication to perform ssh and scp without password under the following three scenarios:

1. OpenSSH to OpenSSH
2. OpenSSH to SSH2
3. SSH2 to SSH2

In this article, I’ll explain how to perform ssh and scp from SSH2 (local-host) to OpenSSH (remote-host) with no password.
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GNU Midnight Commander (mc) is a powerful text based file manager for Unix.  mc gives an jumpstart for Windows power-users who would like to transition to Unix.  It also has several advanced features to keep experienced Unix users happy.  mc can run from any Unix terminal. If your terminal can execute vi, you can execute mc to view the midnight commander user interface. Midnight commander supports mouse when you are running it under xterm.
 
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