today's howtos

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 03, 2024

• Linux Journal ☛ Linux System Monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, and collectd

  In the realm of Linux system administration and development, the importance of efficient and comprehensive system monitoring cannot be overstated. Monitoring the health, performance, and reliability of Linux servers and applications is paramount for ensuring high availability, diagnosing problems, and optimizing resources. Among the plethora of tools available for this purpose, three stand out for their robustness, versatility, and the powerful insights they offer: Prometheus, Grafana, and collectd. This article delves into each of these tools, exploring their key features, benefits, and how they can be integrated to create a formidable monitoring setup.

  [...]

  Prometheus’s architecture is built around its time-series database, which efficiently stores metrics in a format that supports precise and fast queries, even over large datasets. The core of its functionality is the ability to scrape metrics from configured endpoints at specified intervals, using HTTP requests. These endpoints can be anything from hardware sensors to web applications, as long as they expose metrics in the format Prometheus expects.

  One of the standout features of Prometheus is its query language, PromQL, which allows for the retrieval and manipulation of data, enabling administrators to pinpoint issues quickly. Furthermore, Prometheus supports automatic service discovery and dynamic configurations, making it adaptable to environments with changing infrastructures, such as cloud deployments.

• Make Use Of ☛ How to Find the Serial Number of Your Linux PC

  Determining your PC's serial number is generally as simple as checking a sticker on the case. Sometimes, you'll need another way of discovering the serial number, and commands like dmidecode can help.

  [...]

  While your PC's serial number isn't a particularly important characteristic, it's important to know for purposes like making warranty claims. If you have identical devices, their serial numbers are also a reliable tool to distinguish between them.

  You could use serial numbers to restrict software licenses or to track the repairs on a warrantied device. You can even use the serial number to verify that the new part you're purchasing is the same model if you ever need to replace or upgrade a PC component.

• Linux Hint ☛ How to Use Rsync for Efficient File Transfer between Directories in Linux

  Rsync is a command line utility that is famous for its data synchronization features in Linux. You can use it to synchronize the files on the same and different systems. Moreover, it offers features like file compression, encryption, selective synchronization, and more which make it superior to other tools. It can compare the source and target directories to transfer only the newly added and updated files from the source directory.

• Linux Hint ☛ How to Configure Multiple IP Adresses on a Single Network Interface on Debian 12 Desktop/Server

  Usually, you set a single IP address on a single network interface of your Debian 12 desktop/server operating system. At times, you may need multiple IP addresses to be set on your Debian 12 system, but you may not have multiple network interfaces installed on your computer. If that’s the case, you can set multiple IP addresses on a single network interface of your Debian 12 system very easily.

• Linux Hint ☛ Crunch for Linux

  Crunch is a very useful tool especially for penetration testers. In essence, crunch is basically just a wordlist generator or a dictionary file generator. The great part is that it can generate the exact set of words that you ask it to generate and this can be in terabytes at times. The sky is truly the limit with such a tool. In this tutorial, we will learn about crunch.

• Linux Hint ☛ Linux Help Command

  In this guide, we will demonstrate how to use the “help” command in Linux.

• Linux Hint ☛ Linux Type Command

  In this guide, we will learn more about the “type” command in Linux.

• Linux Hint ☛ Linux Which Command

  Title: Linux Which Command

  Excerpt: Practical tutorial on using the “which” command on Linux and how to locate the various executable files and scripts from the PATH variable along with examples.

  Permalink: linux-which-command

• TechTarget ☛ Amazon ECS vs. Kubernetes: Which should you use on AWS?

  IT teams have several options for running containerized applications on AWS. Some organizations will opt for Kubernetes, an open source service that is the de facto choice for container orchestration, while others will want to use AWS' proprietary orchestration service instead.

• The Server Side ☛ Quickly generate, add and setup GitLab SSH Keys

  The Secure Socket Shell (SSH) is the preferred connection mechanism, especially when compared to HTTPS, to connect from Git to a remote server such as GitLab, GitHub or BitBucket.

• HowTo Geek ☛ What Is Swappiness on Linux? (and How to Change It)

  The Linux swappiness value has nothing to do with how much RAM is used before swapping starts. That's a widely reported and widely believed mistake. We explain what it really is.

• HowTo Geek ☛ How to Restore the Minimize and Maximize Buttons in Fedora

  Fedora’s GNOME desktop windows neither have minimize nor maximize buttons. It’s counterproductive because it makes the Linux desktop even more alien to newcomers. Here are two different ways to get them back.

• HowTo Geek ☛ How to Move Ubuntu’s Launcher Bar to the Bottom or Right

  You can now move the Ubuntu desktop's launcher bar from the left side of your screen to the bottom or right instead. This doesn't require obscure terminal commands, either. You can move the launcher with just a few clicks.

• HowTo Geek ☛ How to Launch a Terminal Window on Ubuntu Linux

  If you're using Ubuntu Linux, you'll often see articles recommend you run commands. To do this, you need to type these commands into a Terminal window. Here are several ways to open one—including a quick keyboard shortcut

• HowTo Geek ☛ How to Encode or Decode a base64 String on Linux

  Want to learn how to encode and decode strings using the base64 binary-to-text scheme? This tutorial will show you two methods to encode and decode a string on Linux using the base64 command and the Python programming language.

• Jeff Bridgforth ☛ Choosing HTML elements is hard

  I didn’t start thinking about the semantics of my code until I read Andy Clarke’s book, Transcending CSS. He spent a fair amount of time at the beginning of the book laying a solid foundation of HTML structure that we could then build our creative layouts and styling with CSS.

• Announcing Transcending CSS Revisited

  Transcending CSS Revisited is available to read online for free, with a new foreword by none other than Rachel Andrew. I have no hesitation in saying without Rachel, none of the CSS we now use today would’ve been possible.

• A personal link shortener using mostly S3

  Another consideration is that short keys makes it easier for someone else to iterate through all of them to find what links you’ve shortened. Either don’t shorten secret links, or use a longer keylen.

  The script I use to shorten links is called publish-link. On macOS pbcopy copies standard input to my clipboard. On Linux I’d use xclip -sel clip [...]