Command line bandwidth monitors for Linux

by Ruchira on October 21, 2013

slurm

If you are a Sysadmin, monitoring bandwidth usage on your server is an important task. We agree some of you might have bandwidth graphs on your server monitoring platform or on your server provider’s control panel. But having the ability to monitor the bandwidth in real time helps to solve many problems.

On this post you will find out 2 different, simple command line bandwidth monitor tools to view the outgoing and incoming bandwidth consumption in real time. You will only need one. [click to continue…]

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bittorrent-sync

BitTorrent Sync is the latest addition to BitTorrent product family and to put it simple, it lets you to sync your files between your computers just like Dropbox does. BitTorrent Sync comes handy if you need more space and privacy (PRISM). Dropbox is great I use it everyday and features like camera upload is a life saver. Thankfully to Samsung I have 50GB of Dropbox storage free for 2 years. But the problem is if I need more and more storage, cost goes way up. BitTorrent Sync is totally free except for the costs to run a VPS or Dedicated server as a master Sync device.

BitTorrent Sync uses BitTorrent protocol to sync files between your computers and your master server. While this uses BitTorrent protocol its totally secure and private unlike regular torrents. Files aren’t visible to public as its encrypted by using a private key and only those people who has the private key can view your files. So as long as you keep the private secret (32 character long number sequence) your files are safe. Just like Dropbox, when files added to your sync’d folder it will start to sync the files immediately and when you remove a file on a folder it will be sent to a trash folder on your server so you could recover it later if you made a mistake. You can find more feature details on the main web site.

On this guide, I will explain you how to setup BitTorrent Sync master server. I’m using a 512MB RAM OpenVZ Linux VPS from Ramnode with 120GB of SSD-Cached storage and Debian 7 32bit is installed as the operating system. BT Sync will work fine on any virtualization platform such as KVM,OpenVZ or XEN and it doesn’t require much resources to work. Even if you have 128MB of RAM on your VPS, that’s fine. Also you can use Debian/Ubuntu/CentOS or any other Linux operating system for this guide. [click to continue…]

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disqus

 

I have been having a hard time lately with SEO thanks to WordPress comments system. Google somehow decided to index about 1600 ?replytocom and comments?=true links on my blog resulting duplicate content issues with Google Panda algorithm.  This is how its reflected on Webmaster tools Index Status

index-status

Maybe a bad plugin caused this issue but its really bad for the blog’s SEO. This is also reflecting on the Webmaster tools under “HTML Improvements” saying duplicate title tags and meta descriptions. However harm has been already done and I have decided to 301 redirect the ?replytocom links to the correct pages and implemented parameter handling to rectify this issue.

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ssl

Yesterday I have presented you a nice deal on domain names. And today when I was lurking through lowendtalk forums. I have found this sweet deal on SSL certificates. A company called Centriohost is offering AlphaSSL 256bit wild card domain validation SSL certificates for just $2 a year. This is a great deal since AlphaSSL wild card certs are retailing about $40 to $50 on the internet.

Centrohost already had an offer for $10 a year for that but with their latest promo code “LET2SSL” price comes down to $2 a year recurring. Order yours by this link  and apply the promo code when checkout. You will need a code signing request and you can easily generate from your server or online service like this . According to them setup time is about 20 minutes and you might probably receive one earlier than that. I have got one to play with SPDY protocol and I’m not promoting them or whatsoever. This offer is too hard to pass on that’s why I have decided to share it with you 🙂

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cheap-domainsJust in case if you are looking for to buy new domains now, Namecheap and 1and1 has great promotions going on at the moment. You can get a .me domain for $0.98 on Namecheap.com by following this link – http://www.namecheap.com/domains/personal-domain.aspx Renewels will cost you $18.99 on namecheap after the first year but you can always transfer the domain to another registrar if you want to play cheap. 🙂 Also its interesting that namecheap provides a comodo positive SSL certificate for $1.99 when you purchase a domain from them.

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hidden-password

If you are concerned about your security of being online, you should be already using different passwords for everything that you use. In my case I have few very long passwords and for not much important things I use small memorable passwords. However I don’t store my passwords anywhere, I just remember those. Just today I have forgot the password which I had as my DSL Internet service login password. Changing it requires calling the ISP so I realized that its already saved on the router but its not saved on the browser so I cant take it by going in to the browser settings. I know that there are small javascript codes exist that you can paste on the address bar to reveal the passwords hidden behind asterisks but most of the scripts won’t work with the new browsers.

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Google-page-speed-service

Google Page Speed service is the Google’s answer to Cloudflare and I have decided to give it a try on this blog to see how it works and if it makes my site faster. Normally I’m not much in to CDN’s because I could gain similar performance for less cost by using an tuned nginx setup for static content delivery. However CDN’s will be handy if you need to store lots of files. I’m managing a large social network and on there I use Amazon S3 and Cloudfront CDN for content delivery. Handling a large number of small files such as user photos and thumbnails is a worrying task and Cloud comes to rescue there. I don’t use CDN’s for this blog or any other regular web sites that I have. Just for the sake of experimenting I have tried Google Page Speed Service.

GPSS is still at beta stage and you need an invitation to get in. You can request an invitation here and you will probably receive one in few days if your site is eligible. Setting up GPSS is really is just like Cloudflare. You just have to set a CNAME record for WWW pointing at “pagespeed.googlehosted.com”.

pss-architecture

Like shown on the screenshot above GPSS works by sitting on the middle of your server and end users. GPSS servers cache the images and other scripts to deliver it quickly to the users. And there are many other advanced optimization techniques are used on it. [click to continue…]

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galaxy-tab-3Samsung has just announced the refreshment of galaxy tab series with Galaxy Tab 3.0. Higher end option is the Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 ($399) which packs 1.6Ghz Intel Atom Z2560 processor with just 1GB of RAM and good ol’ 1280*800 LCD TFT display.

Galaxy Tab 8.0 and 7.0 also gets the refreshment and Galaxy Tab 8.0 ($299) packs Exynos 1.5Ghz dual core processor, 1.5GB RAM, Android 4.2, 1280*800 display and Galaxy Tab 7.0 ($199) includes 1.2Ghz dual core processor, 8GB of storage and 1024*600 LCD display.

See there’s nothing new on those models except they are called Galaxy Tab 3 series. Last years specs and nothing surprising than the original Galaxy Tab models. While Samsung likes to include cutting edge hardware on its Phones and the phablets like Galaxy Note, it certainly seems like they have stopped doing same on their tablet line.  [click to continue…]

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