Mohamed Ibrahim’s Blog

Recently, I rediscovered atop. It is an excellent command-line tool (just like top) that shows some advanced statistics including disk usage and swap page faults per process. For the disk usage to work per process a kernel patch is currently required. However, even without the kernel patch if you know which processes running on your server you’ll be able to guess which is utilizing the disk more.

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As usual, I saw the update icon in Ubuntu’s taskbar so I ran apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade, and as I read I found an update for freenx. When dpkg was installing the newer version it said that the configuration file node.conf is different. I pressed D to run diff on them to see whether the old problems were solved or not. I believe this package should be bug free almost for every one.

The package sources I’m using are:

deb http://www.datakeylive.com/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://www.datakeylive.com/ubuntu gutsy main

Yesterday we had a power surge at home. I noticed around 10 am when the website was not responding. When I went back home, I found both the webserver and my gateway machine both having errors and ubuntu halting at “run fsck manually”. Luckily, I was able to fix the webserver without a re-install. I have keep daily backups from both my postgres and mysql databases by dumping them around 4:00 am daily. The dump is stored on a separate hardrive, which gets unmounted after the dump completes.

I had to re-install the gateway machine. On the good side I got to re-install gutsy instead my older feisty installation. No data lost, as I keep my /home always on a separate partition, I only had to re-install the OS.

To prevent future damages and save time, I bought a UPS 900KVA , which should be fully charged when I go back today. Also, I got a KVM switch, instead to moving the monitor, keyboard and mouse connections over the four machines.