This is quickly becoming one of my favourite tools when setting up webservers, after discovering it recently. I have all sorts of monitoring set up and use munin a lot, but vnstat seems to be a very lightweight daemon which gives you insight into the traffic to and from your box. Best of all it integrates well with logwatch, so it will send you a quick report every day so you can see immediately if something is going wrong.
Linux
UFW script for Logwatch
I enabled UFW on an Ubuntu server recently and started getting all manner of stuff in my logwatch reports. It activated a section called 'iptables' and started logging every line in syslog with [UFW BLOCK] in it. It was marginally interesting, but not really worth the space devoted to it, so I decided to write a little script to parse the UFW log and summarise the top Blocked Hosts and top Blocked Ports. Therefore I could easily see if there was a change in pattern.
Power Mutt usage.
I always install mutt when I'm setting up a server, mainly because I use it to send myself files from the command line, for local examination or archiving. Its quicker than using scp, ssh, or (heaven forbid) ftp. Plus you can use it in shell scripts. For example; But recently I was troubleshooting a server … Read more
Dos Boot Disks Under Linux
Sometimes you have no choice and you need to boot into a DOS boot disk — to upgrade your BIOS for example, or to run Seagate's SeaTools, as I had to recently. This can be a headache when you're using Linux. I was having issues with the SeaTools' own boot disk, as I wanted to … Read more
Viewing heavily commented config files
Just a quick one, as I haven't posted for a while. This is a cool trick for getting the juice out of heavily commented files. In particular I used this on /etc/samba/smb.conf, but also good for apache2.conf, php.ini etc. The magic is this. grep -v -e "^#" -e "^;" -e "^$" /etc/samba/smb.conf Basically, ignore all … Read more