Archives

The foundational building block of any software or a web based application is the data it holds. Imagine the scale and size of data that websites like twitter and Facebook deals with each day, as users are increasing day by day their database is becoming bigger and bigger each minute.

Each and every organization needs to store the very critical information about their product,users,sales etc in an organized way so that they can be retrieved later without pain. Advancement in computer and storage technology has catered this need very efficiently. System administrators deal with very big and critical databases in their day to day life. The major factor that increases the efficiency of retrieval of this data is the "the method used to organize the data".

Although Understanding concepts of RAID is very necessary, including configuration methods and explanation for a specific vendor based RAID controller is not advisable. Because different controller's from different companies use their own proprietry methods to configure hardware RAID.

So we have decided to include a thearitical study of RAID and configuration of different level's of software RAID in Linux. We have already included methods to configure Software raid level 0 & 1.

Read: Software Raid Level 0 configuration in linux

From the different level's of raid available, raid 1 is better known for redundancy without stripping. This level of raid employs mirroring, by completely replicating the entire data block by block on the one disk to the other.

The minimum number of disk required to create a raid 1 array is 2. Maximum disk number can go up to 32. Number of disk's used must always be an even number.

Different types of raid and its internal working is explained in the below post, along with a configuration post on raid 0 in linux.

Read: Raid Working: A complete Tutorial

RAID is one of the heavily used technology for data performance and redundancy. Based on the requirement and functionality they are classified into different levels. Selecting a level for your requirement is always dependent on the kind of operation that you want to perform on the disk.

We already have written an article about the differences and internal details of how different raid levels work. The exact same working model of RAID which is completely done by hardware controller's, can also be managed by software(But the efficiency and performance of a hardware raid is always better).

Read: Different Level's of Raid Explained

When a user is visiting a web page with the help of his web browser, there are multiple steps performed by the user's computer before finally presenting it to the user.

One of the main critical and highly used infrastructure in the internet is the DNS infrastructure. DNS infrastructure is maintained in a distributed architecture, which means there is no single point of failure. The primary purpose of DNS is to convert names(Domain names) into number's (IP address).

Read: How does DNS work

Creating and deleting new partitions in linux a very normal practice. In this post we will be going through simple steps to create a new partition in linux, format it and mount it at your required mount point.

This article will also take you through the steps to delete your required partition, view your hard drive geometry,display existing partition table,display the UUID of a partition and many more about partition creation ,view,help, partitioning command line help and troubleshooting.

The tools used in this tutorial are very as mentioned below.

Analyzing and monitoring network traffic of an entire network infrastructure can be done by plotting graphs based on any RRD tool. However monitoring traffic (both outgoing and incoming) on a Linux machine becomes a priority during crisis. There are pretty good number of open source tools available for Linux, that does this job.

We will be discussing two such tools in this post. The tools discussed in this post presents various important pieces of information about the traffic send and received by the network interfaces in Linux,which can be very useful in finding bottlenecks in network bandwidth.

The information that's made available to the user by these tools are as below.

Hard Disk drives are one of the most complex devices that are attached to a computer system(or a server machine). The complexity of a hard disk is due to the fact that it is a mechanical device, used for storage. Most of the internal parts of a disk drive are moving parts, that moves its head to fetch data for the user.

Due to this movement there is a high chance of failure of the disk drive. Advancement in disk drive's has resulted in removing the mechanical parts to make a solid state drive, normally called as an SSD. However there are yet some shortcomings in SSD drives, due to which, we cannot completely replace mechanical disk drives. Using a single hard disk for a server machine is not at all advisable because that will be a single point of failure(a heavy risk of data loss).

Database is a critical and on demand resource in any IT infrastructure. Database administrators and developers deploy mission critical databases for different applications. However the underlying disk drives where the database is kept, also plays a major role in the overall performance of a database system.

Some databases are heavy in its read operations than write, and some are heavy in write operation than read. Although a well configured RAID disk array fits well for these operations, its advisable to test the performance of a partition/disk drive after its made available to the operating system.

Performance benchmark test results can be very much helpful in taking decisions, regarding the deployment of a database. We have already IO performance benchmarking in Linux.

In this article we will be discussing the foundational protocol of the internet. During 1990 Tim Berners-Lee, was the first one to propose a project called world wide web. The original purpose was to have a fast and reliable information exchange between scientists working in different parts of the world.

HTTP(Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), was implemented first by Tim Berners-Lee in CERN.

HTTP protocol works in a client and server model like many other protocol. A web browser using which a request is initiated is called as a client and a web server software which respond's to that request is called as a server.