Archive for January, 2009

Yesterday I wrote about CPU Performance Analysis in Linux. I explained how to tell if you are experiencing a CPU bottleneck. This is just a quick followup to show the effect of adding more cpu power. (more…)

A while back I wrote a post Analyzing Linux System Performance and Finding Bottlenecks. I did’t really give a good explanation of determining if you are CPU bound or not so I am writing this post to clear that up. (more…)

Have you ever experienced hard lockups and seen no trace of the cause in your log files? Those situations can be even more of a pain if you do not have physical access to the machine since you will not be able to look for kernel oops on the console. You could buy a serial console or an ip kvm but if you don’t have the need for remote control, but would really like to be able to debug without being physically present you need to check out netconsole. Netconsole sends printk messages over UDP. (more…)

Ever run into a situation where passing the option single to the kernel wasn’t enough to get your root password reset? This is not Debian specific but some distros (including Debian) require that you still enter the root password when booting to single user mode. This is just a quick run through of how to reset your root password without a live cd. (more…)

I was restoring some files from backup today and ran into a few files that had leading slashes. Whenever I see those kind of things I rename the files since they are a pain to work with in the shell.

If you find yourself at a shell and need to work with files that have a leading dash just use the relative path and include the dashed filename in quotes.

mv ./"-somefile.txt" ./somefile.txt