Benchmarking Your Site with ‘http_load’

by Tweak on May 8, 2010
in Apache, Linux, Servers

http_load is a stunningly useful HTTP benchmarking utility that gives you a rough idea of how many hits per second a server is capable of serving. You simply tell it what pages to grab, and how many “clients” it should run in parallel; it gives you back useful information about the average fetches per second and the average, minimum, and maximum response times. It’s no substitute for a solid profiler to dig into the hows and whys of your application’s performance, but it’s great at telling you when you’re “good enough” to launch.

Installing http_load on OS X

  1. Download from http://www.acme.com/software/http_load/
  2. Open terminal, cd to the directory where the archive is and unzip
    $ tar xvzf http_load-12mar2006.tar.gz
  3. Move to that directory
    $ cd http_load-12mar2006
  4. Run
    $ make
  5. Run
    $ sudo make install

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How to check an MD5 hash on a file

by Tweak on May 5, 2010
in Linux

MD5 is a one-way hash algorithm as defined by RFC1321 and can be used to help determine the integrity of a file by providing a 128 bit digital signature. This digital signature is like a fingerprint for a file, changing just one single byte in a file will result in a different MD5 hash.

MD5 hashes can be used to catalog files on a filesystem and then determine at a later date that the files have not been altered in any way, for example if someone broke into a system and modified system files.

They can also be used to ensure a file downloaded from a website is the same as expected. This can be especially important when downloading a file from a mirror site to ensure you are not installing a modified program which contains a trojan horse or some other nasty. By simply comparing the MD5 hash of the file you have downloaded from the mirror with that from the original website you can determine whether or not the file is exactly the same.
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Check / List Running Services

by Tweak on May 4, 2010
in Linux, Servers

Q. How do I list all currently running services in CentOS / RHEL / Fedora Linux server ?

A. There are various ways and tools to find and list all running services under CentOS / RHEL / Fedora Linux systems.

service command – list running services

service --status-all
service --status-all | grep ntpd
service --status-all | less

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