Tag Archives: tools

Chrome Remote Desktop

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I am more often frustrated by Google the last few years that pleased with them. But they do still provide some pretty awesome tools. For example, Chrome Remote Desktop lets you access a computer over the internet (and lets you to allow another user to access your computer securely over the internet).

Chrome Remote Desktop allows users to remotely access another computer through Chrome browser or a Chromebook. Computers can be made available on an short-term basis for scenarios such as ad hoc remote support, or on a more long-term basis for remote access to your applications and files.

screen shot of chrome remote desktop

Chrome Remote Desktop is fully cross-platform. Provide remote assistance to Windows, Mac and Linux users, or access your Windows (XP and above) and Mac (OS X 10.6 and above) desktops at any time, all from the Chrome browser on virtually any device, including Chromebooks (including Android phones and iPhones). The iPhone app is new.

Some users worry about installing such an app given all the spying and hacking scandals. That is not a completely crazy worry. Google, and others, have been taking advantage of weak user control (and even bugs and work arounds to avoid stated user preferences) to track users and use that information to make money selling ads. With many cool and useful tools there are risk of them being misused. And practices of governments and huge corporations have been so egregious to give a sensible person pause. Still in the right situations this is a pretty cool looking tool (similar things exist but the combination of price [this being free] and simplicity make this interesting).

Related: Chrome Remote Desktop support forum – Using scp (secure copy) to Copy Files Between Computers – Using Rsync to copy Files Between Servers and Computers – Linux/Ubuntu File and Directory Permissions – Governments Shouldn’t Prevent Citizens from Having Secure Software Solutions

Top with Better Display Options

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Scout Realtime is a Ruby Gem that allows you to view top in the browser. One huge advantage is to view charts of activity over time.

Scout Realtime is open source and free.

Related: System Monitoring Tools for VPS – Basic MySQL Performance Monitoring – Keeping Your Hosted Ubuntu Web Server Software Up to Date

Basic MySQL Performance Monitoring

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Basic MySQL Performance Monitoring

regular Ubuntu cli tools

  • mysqladmin status – mysqladmin status -uroot -p

MySQL command line interface tools

[bash]mysql -uroot -p[/bash] to open the command line.

[sql]SHOW GLOBAL STATUS;
SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS;
SHOW PROCESSLIST;
SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE ‘Qcache_%’;[/sql]

cli tools

  • mytop – top for MySQL. Install using: sudo apt-get install mytop (assuming Ubuntu operating system). There is a very useful setting file that can be used to set parameters instead of having to include them in each command. Save the file as ~/.mytop.
  • MySQLTuner – provides suggestions on performance improvements and my.cnf settings by analyzing data on your mysql database server.

Setting considerations

  • If Open_tables (SHOW GLOBAL STATUS will show this) is equal to your [bash]table_cache size[/bash] (set in /etc/mysql/my.cnf) that means it is being capped by your setting. The more MySQL has to read the table from disk the more IO and slower response, so if you have available RAM increasing the table_cache size may well make a big difference.
  • Key_reads/Key_read_request ratio should normally be < 0.01 (per MySQL manual, this means that nearly all key requests are taken from RAM). You can get both values using SHOW GLOBAL STATUS and then calculate the ratio. If the ratio is too high, consider increasing the key_buffer (in /etc/mysql/my.sql).
  • key_writes/key_writes_request should normally be near 1 (per MySQL manual)

Phusion Passenger Tips and Troubleshooting Ideas

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Some tips and troubleshooting ideas for Phusion Passenger

Phusion Passenger manages resources for rails applications – spawning new instances as needed, etc..

  • [bash]passenger-status[/bash] – provide the status of passenger rails processes

Configuring Phusion Passenger

Add lines to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf to change the default settings

  • [bash]PassengerMaxPoolSize 10[/bash] – maximum number of total rails application instances, the default is 6
  • PassengerMaxInstancesPerApp 5 – sets the maximum pool size for any 1 rails application to 10 instances (default is no limit).
  • [bash]PassengerUseGlobalQueue ON[/bash] – sets globaly queing on, it is off by default. You want globaly queuing on if your requests have large differences in response times (slow and fast responses).

Related: Passenger documentation

Troubleshooting

If you try [bash]sudo passenger-status[/bash] and get something like
*** ERROR: Cannot query status for Passenger instance 2280:
Connection refused – /tmp/passenger.2280/info/status.socket
Restarting (not reloading) apache [bash]sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart[/bash] may fix the problem.

System Monitoring Tools for VPS

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Tools for monitoring performance and troubleshooting Ubuntu VPS web servers

  • Munin – graphs of system resources over time. Very nice. Can be a bit difficult to setup.
  • top – system stats
  • iotop – like top, but for io stats. Install [bash]sudo apt-get install iotop[/bash] Useful setup [bash]iotop -b -o -d 30 -t[/bash] -b (batch – so you can keep a running tally of results) -o (only those processes with io) -d (delay and seconds – how often to print out stats) -t (include time in printout)
  • vmstat – stats on memory, io, swap, cpu and system. Example: [bash]vmstat 10[/bash] (prints out stats every ten seconds.
  • iostat

Error logs

  • [bash]sudo nano /var/log/apache2/error.log[/bash]

Apache web server access log statistics

  • Webalizer – [bash]sudo apt-get install webalizer[/bash] GeoIP is required for webalizer [bash]sudo apt-get install geoip-bin[/bash] detailed instructions