Monthly Archives: April 2015

LVM Resize – How to Increase an LVM Partition

Here we show you how to expand an LVM volume or partition in Linux by first resizing logical volume followed by resizing the file system to take advantage of the additional space.

See here if you’re instead trying to do the opposite and shrink an LVM volume.

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LVM Resize – How to Decrease an LVM Partition

Here we show you how to shrink an LVM volume or partition in Linux by first resizing the file system followed by resizing the logical volume.

See here if you’re instead trying to do the opposite and expand an LVM volume.

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How to Upgrade Debian 7 Wheezy to Debian 8 Jessie

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Debian 8 Jessie was released as the latest stable version of the Linux Debian operating system today. While you can install Debian 8 Jessie fresh, you can also upgrade from Debian 7 Wheezy quite easily, which is what we will cover here.

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How to check memory usage in Linux

In the Linux operating system it is important to have enough free physical memory (RAM) available for your processes which need to run. If this memory runs out, swap space will start to be used next, which will result in slower performance as I/O operations will need to be written to disk instead. If both main memory and swap become full your Linux system can completely freeze up.

By checking and monitoring the amount of memory in use and confirming there is enough free memory to service requests we can ensure that processes continue to run optimally.

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How to enable the Telnet Client in Windows 10

By default the telnet client in Microsoft’s Windows operating systems is disabled, this is unfortunate as it is an extremely useful tool which can be used for testing TCP connectivity to external hosts on a specified port.

This is great when you’re trying to troubleshoot network connectivity problems, for example, say we have a web server which should be listening on port 80 to serve HTTP traffic but we are not able to load a web page, by using telnet to connect to the web server on port 80 we can verify the connectivity.

It may be that the connectivity is fine but there is a problem with the web server, or that the web server is stopped and the port is not listening at all, for instance. With telnet we can get a better understanding of what’s going on.

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Free Virtualization Software for Windows

There is a lot of free virtualization software available for your to download and install, here we cover some of the best free options available for you to use in Windows.

These options can be installed within your existing Windows operating system installation, allowing you to run a virtual machine (VM) running an entirely separate operating system within. For example this will allow you to run multiple instances of Linux and Windows desktop clients or servers.

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Best New Features in Windows 10 Preview

When Microsoft first made the Windows 10 Technical Preview available I downloaded the free ISO straight away and booted it up into a virtual machine as soon as possible as I was excited to see what was new. My initial reaction at the time was “finally, something better than Windows 8” and I couldn’t wait to get the final version.

Windows 10 has since gone through many changes through the various new builds that have been released, so I have downloaded and started using the most recent build (10049) to review and share some of the best new features of Windows 10 that I have found so far.

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Compiling NRPE and nagios-plugins for Solaris 11.2

I have some Solaris 11.2 storage servers which run a number of ZFS pools, I wanted to monitor these through NRPE via Nagios. To do this I needed to compile NRPE and nagios-plugins from source, this article covers how this was done.

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