For server machine, you might want to monitor the status of your machine closely. What do you want to know? Yes, CPU, fan, and harddisk are the main components. Fortunately, Linux has strong support for hardware sensors. All sensors are supported by lm-sensors. The original project is to provide support for lm78 but now it aims to support wide range of sensor chips. Ubuntu provides lm-sensors as a ready-to-use package. You can install it in just 3 steps.

1. Install the package
   

   apt-get install lm-sensors

The most favorite remote administration tool is the well-known SSH. However, in some cases, you might want GUI. X window might not be suitable for remote administration. VNC is a good solution. Firstly, you have to install necessary pieces such as VNC server and a window manager of your choice. For me, I would like to try IceWM.

apt-get install icewm tightvncserver xfonts-base mrxvt

Nowadays Java seems to be the most popular application development platform because of its portability and availability of APIs. Anyway, standard Java by Sun only provides pre-package version in RPM format and tar format. In order to install this package on other Linux distros like Ubuntu, deb package should be constructed for easily managing the package later. Fortunately, Ubuntu offers lots of tools to automate these tasks. For a fresh Ubuntu, you can follow below instruction to install Java properly.

Ubuntu is not the same as other Linux distros. Actually, it is totally different concept about usage of root account. In Ubuntu, you will never be asked for root’s password during installation process. Someone might think this is the wrong thing that Ubuntu has pre-defined default password. In fact, it doesn’t even has any password for root account. root account is disabled to login by default no matter what how many times you guess.

Some Linux distros, e.g., LinuxTLE, massively bundled with ICT computers in OEM style, doesn’t allow end-user to change any configuration so they didn’t give root’s password at all. However, root account is one of the most important for all users including end-users. At last, they had to announce the root’s password to all users eventually.

Asus P4P800-E Deluxe is a mainboard for high-end workstation. Actually, it is good enough to be medium-size server, e.g., web server, mail server, database server, and file server. Actually, this problem happened to my friend. He used to install Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition on this machine without properly. However, he decided to switch to Unix compatible OS because he had replaced both system harddisk and data harddisk due to harddisk failure. This machine has 1.5 GB RAM and he decreased virtual memory on system drive (C:) to zero. In addition, he never keep any files or even tried to read files on that drive. That’s why I suggested him to change operating system.

อันนี้เป็น ของเก่าทำเก็บไว้กันลืม

โดยปกติแล้ว เวลาเราลง OS มักจะได้รับคำแนะนำอยู่เสมอๆ ว่าควรจะ create swap partition ให้เป็นสองเท่าของเนื้อที่ Ram ของตัวเครื่อง ซึ่งบางครั้งมันก็ไม่ได้จำเป็นเสมอไป ยกตัวอย่างง่ายๆ หากเรามีเครื่องที่มี ram ซัก 2 GB ขึ้นไป หากทำตามคำแนะนำมันจะต้องเสียพื้นที่ 4GB ให้เป็น swap partition ซึ่งดูๆ ไปแล้วมันต้องบ้าแน่ๆ หากทำแบบนั้นกับ server ที่ไม่ได้ใช้ ram ขนาดนั้น โดยปกติ ผมเองจะทำอย่างมากก็ create swap partition แค่ 1GB นี่ก็โครตเยอะแล้ว