Using atop to view load at system and process level

Atop is a interactive monitor to view load at system and process level. With the use of atopsar, administrators can generate system reports for intervals period.

$ atopsar -c 60 5
(A report is generated on CPU Utilisation every 60 seconds for 5 min)

One of the most interesting feature is the ability to provide disk, network activity among other things.

The atop project website is comprehensive in explaining the usage and advantages

Analysing your DNS Traffic with dnstop

dnstop uses the pcap library to filter all the DNS queries on a computer network and display them on a terminal

Firstly install from repository
# apt-get install dnstop
# dnstop -l 3

Once you are inside the dnstop, you can use the following sort-cut

• @ - Display the source of the query, domain target, volume and percentage of DNS Traffic
• # - Similar to @ but with third level domain name

For more information, see the Dnstop project site

Using Xrestop to troubleshoot X applications

Xrestop is a lesser known "top-like" tool to query information on the clients connected to X11. It shows the X clients programs that are using the most resources organised by pixmap memory usage. In addition, it provides administrators to quickly locate problematic X Windows Application, but not the tool to kill it.

Using htop to influence processes directly

htop is one of my favourite tool to influence process directly. Htop menu does have the feel of Midnight Commander.

Some of the key features of htop is the ability to do

1. sorting (F6)
2. Increase priority of a process or job (F7)
3. Reduce priority of a process or job (F8)

Rsync GUI utility - Grsync

For those who wishes to use a GUI instead of the rsync command line, you will be glad to use the Rsync GUI utility - Grsync

It is neat and give you rysnc options in GUI. The only issue is that it is quite difficuly to schedule a job using Grsync.

To install on CentOS or Fedora
# yum install grsync

To install on Linux Mint,
# apt-get install grsync