Tag: ubuntu
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Ubuntu Server: How to change to the root user
Some guides tell you to enter “su” on Unix systems to get superuser permissions; in Ubuntu, however, this won’t work. As a user with sudo permissions (the user created on install has these) enter the following instead: sudo su Enter your account password and voila, you are logged in as root. You…
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Ubuntu Server Benchmarks: Geekbench
This is one of our favourite benchmarks for Ubuntu Server – it’s cross-platform, meaning that it can be ran on Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server and more. You can get the download link from the following site: http://www.primatelabs.com/geekbench/download/linux/ Currently this works: wget http://d34wv75roto0rl.cloudfront.net/Geekbench-2.4.2-Linux.tar.gz Unzip: gunzip Geekbench-2.4.2-Linux.tar.gz…
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Ubuntu Server Benchmarks: Phoronix Test Suite
The Phoronix Test Suite is another option when it comes to benchmarking your Ubuntu Server – this one doesn’t work out-of-the-box and requires you to choose the types of benchmarks you wish to run and install them either individually or as suites of benchmarks. You can download it at the following link currently: …
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Ubuntu Server Benchmarks: Hardinfo
Hardinfo is one of the command-line benchmarks available for Ubuntu Server – it does have graphical features so it will also be useful for Ubuntu Desktop users, but for the purpose of this piece we will assume you’re at a terminal. It not only runs benchmarks like Blowfish but also shows you a great…
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How to set up SNMP monitoring (snmpd) on Ubuntu 12.04
This one caused a bit of hassle recently – a few online guides don’t seem to work with the current version of Ubuntu. We found that this works, at least in the ~10 or so servers we have tried so far: sudo apt-get install snmpd Back up your snmpd.conf file: sudo…
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Ubuntu: How to update PHP’s timezone
We came across this one recently when setting up a Zabbix server, where the installation would not proceed until the PHP timezone was set. This is quite straightforward – using your favourite editor edit: /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini Look for the Module Settings section or search for: date.timezone (in vi /date.timezone should get…
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How to remove/delete old or unused kernels in Ubuntu
If you have upgraded your kernel you will have found that Ubuntu keeps the older ones around, which can be handy if something breaks in the newer kernel and you have to boot from your old system. Over time, however, these can add up in terms of the amount of space consumed – at…
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Monitoring network usage on Ubuntu
If you want to see how much traffic is passing through your network port there’s a handy tool called vnstat which will tally the amount of data passing through. You can install it with: sudo apt-get install vnstat It will usually add the databases and network ports automatically like so: …
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How to find number of cores in Ubuntu (or other versions of Linux)?
If you’re using a virtual server (whether online or your own physical machine) it can be handy sometimes to check how many CPU cores are available; here are two easy methods of doing this. The first: nproc This will return a single number, whether it be 1, 2, 4 or otherwise. For…
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How to kill a process after a set period of time
Knowing how to limit how long a process will run for is quite useful, particularly when you have daily backup scripts and the like which may at times run more than 24 hours; having multiple processes attempting to synchronize the same files can waste time, bandwidth and CPU power needlessly. The command we will…