25May 2012 by Asim Zeeshan No Comments

How to configure repos to not overwrite base packages?

CentOS, How to, Linux
The greatest fear with adding additional and especially third party repos such as EPEL (we did a blog post on how to install EPEL earlier) is that it MAY overwrite base packages and bring the system to an unstable state. We can fix this issue by installing Yum Priorities plugin on CentOS 5: on CentOS 4 or CentOS 6: Then make sure that the plugin is enabled Now there are two ways to do it, either set HIGHEST priority to CentOS repos OR set lowest priority to other repos. This is done by adding the line In this blog post, I will set 1 as the priority (highest) for my CentOS Base repo So that it becomes Other repos do not need updating since I have assigned CentOS repos with…
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20May 2012 by Asim Zeeshan 2 Comments

Freshclam daemon not running

CentOS, How to, Linux
Normally, I have two things on every Linux box so that I know whats going on NAGIOS monitoring (nrpe) Logwatch Today, I got something in my logwatch email and it was strange because just the other day, I upgraded the clamav to latest version using epel reo. It appears that the latest version has some permission issues on the log file because when I try to run freshclam on command line I get this The solution? The solution is very simple :) just do the following and after that, run freshclam (the service that updates the virus-definition for clamav)
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23Apr 2011 by Asim Zeeshan 1 Comment

vzfree utility to check memory usage in OpenVZ VPS

How to, Linux, OpenSource, Resources, Tips and Tricks, Tutorials, Ubuntu, Virtual Private Server
From the official blog post Gee. It has been a while since I’ve last written here, and it will be a while again for my next post as I will be on holidays from next Monday (visiting families in Hong Kong and Taiwan). Let me share one small utility program that I wrote quite a while ago. We all know that the Linux command free(1) is pretty useless inside an OpenVZ VE, even those with meminfo virtualised. So I basically wrote this little util to grab the data from the dreadful user_beancounters and format them into something useful. It’s written in C and only depends on libc so it’s pretty light weight. It also does a little bit of analysis instead of just dumping the data, which I will explain…
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28Mar 2011 by Asim Zeeshan 2 Comments

Find memory consumed by currently running processes on Linux?

CentOS, How to, Linux, OpenSource, Resources, Reviews, Tips and Tricks, Tutorials, Ubuntu, Virtual Private Server
I always had the question (when I am running plenty of scripts on a linux box as to what is eating up all the memory? Finding memory consumed by current running processes in your favorite linux distro. Luckily, I found a great Python utility (scriplet to be exact). (more…)
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16Aug 2010 by Asim Zeeshan 6 Comments

NAGIOS 3 with notifications on twitter

Experiments, How to, Linux, OpenSource, Resources, Social Networking, Tips and Tricks, Tutorials, Virtual Private Server
I have been experimenting with NAGIOS3 on Ubuntu (I will write a how-to-install on NAGIOS later) and it has served me very good in monitoring my 7 VPS from different providers in different part of the world. I have already recorded 3 hours of downtime from ThrustVPS which is a great deal for me. I now know which VPS has the best time and which ones have hiccups (e.g. my 2Host VPS gave me two unreachable notifications but the VPS was running and still reports the uptime as 4 days). Since I use twitter more, even when Im on the road, notifications via email is a bit slow for me. Luckily I found a great tutorial online to do that. (more…)
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