UNIT FOUR

Resource Monitoring and Management

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 Resource Monitoring
As stated with in the previous chapter, a great deal of
system administration revolves around resources and their
efficient use.
By balancing various resources against the people and
programs that use those resources
As a result, you will waste less money and make your
users as happy as possible.
However, this leaves two questions:
What are resources?
How do I know what resources are being used (and to
what extent)?

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 Stand-alone systems (Memory, Disk Use, CPU Use)
Before you can monitor resources, you first have to know what
resources there are to monitor.
All systems have the following resources available:
• CPU power (and the bandwidth it enables)
• Memory
• Storage
These resources have a direct impact on system performance, and
therefore, on your users’ productivity and happiness.
At its simplest, resource monitoring is nothing more than obtaining
information concerning the utilization of one or more system
resources.

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 Cont’d…
The systems you will be monitoring will fall into one of two categories:

• The system is currently experiencing performance problems at least part

of time and you would like to improve its performance
• The system is currently running well and you would like it to stay that
way.
The first category means that you should monitor resources from a
system performance perspective
 while the second category means that you should monitor system
resources from a capacity planning perspective.
Because each perspective has its own unique requirements, we will
now look at each category in more depth.

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 System Performance Monitoring
 Performance monitoring is normally done as the first and last two steps of a three-
step process:
 Monitoring to identify the nature and scope of the resource shortages that are
causing the performance problems
 The data produced from monitoring is analyzed and a course of action (normally
performance tuning and/or the procurement of additional hardware) is taken to
resolve the problem
• Monitoring to ensure that the performance problem has been resolved
 Because of this, performance monitoring tends to be relatively short-lived in
duration, and more detailed in scope.

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 Resource Monitoring Tools

 While there are more than those listed here, these tools are
representative in terms of functionality.
 The tools we will look at are:
 Free
• top
• The sysstat suite of resource monitoring tools
 Bandwidth
At its simplest, bandwidth is simply the capacity for data
transfer in other words how much data can be moved from
one point to another in a given amount of time.
Having point-to-point data communication implies two things:
A set of electrical conductors used to make low-level
communication possible
• A protocol to facilitate the efficient and reliable
communication of data


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 Cont’d…
There are two types of system components that meet
these requirements:
• Buses
• Data paths
Potential Bandwidth-Related Problems
There are two ways in which bandwidth-related
problems may occur (for either buses or data paths):
The bus or data path may represent a shared resource.

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 Cont’d…
 In this situation, high levels of contention for the bus will
reduce the effective bandwidth available for all devices on
the bus.
 A SCSI bus with several highly-active disk drives would be
a good example of this.
 The highly active disk drives will saturate the SCSI bus,
leaving little bandwidth available for any other device on the
same bus.
 The end result is that all I/O to any of the devices on this bus
will be slow, even if the device itself is not overly active.

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 Cont’d…
The bus or data path may be a dedicated resource with
a fixed number of devices attached to it.
In this case, the electrical characteristics of the bus
(and to some extent the nature of the protocol being
used) limit the available bandwidth.
This is usually more the case with data paths than with
buses.

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 Potential Bandwidth-related Solutions
In fact, there are several approaches you can take to

address bandwidth-related problems.

Increase the capacity

Spread the load

Reduce the load

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 SCSI (Small Computer System Interface)
Formally known as the Small Computer System Interface
 The SCSI standard defines a bus along which multiple
devices may be connected.
A SCSI bus is a parallel bus, meaning that there is a single
set of parallel wires that go from device to device.
Because these wires are shared by all devices, it is
necessary to have a way of uniquely identifying and
communicating with an individual device.
This is done by assigning each device on a SCSI bus a
unique numeric address or SCSI ID

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 RAID-Based Storage
RAID is an acronym standing for Redundant Array of
Independent Disks1.
As the name implies, RAID is a way for multiple disk
drives to act as a single disk drive.
With this in mind, let us use what we now know about
disk-based storage and see if we can determine the
ways that disk drives can cause problems.
First, consider an outright hardware failure:
A disk drive with four partitions on it dies completely

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 what happens to the data on those partitions?
 It is immediately unavailable (at least until it can be
restored from a recent backup, that is).
A disk drive with a single partition on it is operating at
the limits of its design due to massive I/O loads:
what happens to applications that require access to the
data on that partition?
The applications slow down because the disk drive
cannot process reads and writes any faster.

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 Networked Versus Local Printers
Printer manufacturers have addressed this need by
developing departmental (or workgroup) printers.
These machines are usually durable, fast, and have long-
life consumables.
Workgroup printers usually are attached to a print server,
a standalone device (such as a reconfigured workstation)
which handles print jobs and routes output to the proper
printer when available
Although, some printers include built in or add-on
network interfaces that eliminate the need for a dedicated
print server.

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 Cont’d…
Print servers can use either the Internet Printing Protocol

(IPP) available in Red Hat Linux via the Common UNIX

Printing System (CUPS) or through Samba.
Samba is particularly useful for heterogeneous

environments where departments may use different

operating systems.

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 Mail server and file server
What is a Mail Server?
A mail server is the computerized equivalent of your
friendly neighborhood mailman.
 Every email that is sent passes through a series of mail
servers along its way to its intended recipient.
Although it may seem like a message is sent instantly -
zipping from one PC to another in the blink of an eye -
the reality is that a complex series of transfers takes
place.

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 Cont’d…
Without this series of mail servers, you would only be
able to send emails to people whose email address
domains matched your own
 i.e., you could only send messages from one
example.com account to another example.com account.
Types of Mail Servers
Mail servers can be broken down into two main categories:
outgoing mail servers and incoming mail servers.
Outgoing mail servers are known as SMTP, or Simple Mail
Transfer Protocol, servers.
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 Cont’d…
Incoming mail servers come in two main varieties.
 POP3, or Post Office Protocol, version 3, servers
are best known for storing sent and received
messages on PCs' local hard drives.
IMAP, or Internet Message Access Protocol,
servers always store copies of messages on servers.
Most POP3 servers can store messages on servers,
too, which is a lot more convenient.

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 The Process of Sending an Email
Now that you know the basics about incoming and
outgoing mail servers, it will be easier to
understand the role that they play in the emailing
process.
The basic steps of this process are outlined below
for your convenience.
Step #1: After composing a message and hitting
send, your email client - whether it's Outlook
Express or Gmail - connects to your domain's
SMTP server.
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 Cont’d…
This server can be named many things; a standard
example would be smtp.example.com.
Step #2: Your email client communicates with the
SMTP server, giving it your email address, the
recipient's email address, the message body and
any attachments.
Step #3: The SMTP server processes the
recipient's email address - especially its domain.

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 Cont’d…
If the domain name is the same as the sender's, the
message is routed directly over to the domain's POP3 or
IMAP server - no routing between servers is needed.
If the domain is different, though, the SMTP server will
have to communicate with the other domain's server.
Step #4: In order to find the recipient's server, the
sender's SMTP server has to communicate with the
DNS, or Domain Name Server.
The DNS takes the recipient's email domain name and
translates it into an IP address.

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 Cont’d…
The sender's SMTP server cannot route an email
properly with a domain name alone; an IP address is a
unique number that is assigned to every computer that is
connected to the Internet.
By knowing this information, an outgoing mail server
can perform its work more efficiently.
Step #5: Now that the SMTP server has the recipient's IP
address, it can connect to its SMTP server.
This isn't usually done directly, though; instead, the
message is routed along a series of unrelated SMTP
servers until it arrives at its destination.
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 Cont’d…
Step #6: The recipient's SMTP server scans the
incoming message.
If it recognizes the domain and the user name, it
forwards the message along to the domain's POP3 or
IMAP server.
From there, it is placed in a send mail queue until the
recipient's email client allows it to be downloaded.
At that point, the message can be read by the recipient.

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 How Email Clients are Handled
Many people use web-based email clients, like Yahoo Mail
and Gmail.
Those who require a lot more space - especially businesses
- often have to invest in their own servers.
That means that they also have to have a way of receiving
and transmitting emails, which means that they need to set
up their own mail servers.
To that end, programs like Postfix and Microsoft Exchange
are two of the most popular options.

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 Cont’d…
Such programs facilitate the preceding process behind the
scenes.
Those who send and receive messages across those mail
servers, of course, generally only see the "send" and
"receive" parts of the process.
At the end of the day, a mail server is a computer that helps
move files along to their intended destinations.
 In this case, of course, those files are email messages.
As easy as they are to take for granted, it's smart to have a
basic grasp of how mail servers work.

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 File server
In the client/server model, a file server is a computer
responsible for the central storage and management of
data files
 So, that other computers on the same network can
access the files.
A file server allows users to share information over a
network without having to physically transfer files by
floppy diskette or some other external storage device.
Any computer can be configured to be a host and act
as a file server.

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 Cont’d…
In its simplest form, a file server may be an ordinary
PC that handles requests for files and sends them over
the network.
In a more sophisticated network, a file server might be
a dedicated network-attached storage (NAS) device
that also serves as a remote hard disk drive for other
computers,
Also allowing anyone on the network to store files on
it as if to their own hard drive.

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 Proxy
A proxy server, also known as a "proxy" or
"application-level gateway", is a computer that acts as
a gateway between a local network
e.g., all the computers at one company or in one
building and a larger-scale network such as the
Internet.
Proxy servers provide increased performance and
security.

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 Cont’d…
A proxy server is a dedicated computer or a software
system running on a computer that acts as an
intermediary between an endpoint device
 such as a computer, and another server from which a
user or client is requesting a service.
The proxy server may exist in the same machine as a
firewall server or it may be on a separate server, which
forwards requests through the firewall.

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 Advantage of Proxy server
An advantage of a proxy server is that its cache can
serve all users.
 If one or more Internet sites are frequently requested.
these are likely to be in the proxy's cache, which will
improve user response time.
A proxy can also log its interactions, which can be
helpful or troubleshooting.

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 Here’s a simple example of how proxy servers work
When a proxy server receives a request for an Internet resource
(such as a Web page), it looks in its local cache of previously
pages.
 If it finds the page, it returns it to the user without needing to
forward the request to the Internet.
 If the page is not in the cache, the proxy server, acting as a
client on behalf of the user, uses one of its own IP addresses to
request the page from the server out on the Internet.
When the page is returned, the proxy server relates it to the
original request and forwards it on to the user.

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 Cont’d…
Proxy servers are used for both legal and illegal
purposes.
 In the enterprise, a proxy server is used to
facilitate security, administrative control
or caching services, among other purposes.
 In a personal computing context, proxy servers
are used to enable user privacy and anomalous
surfing.
Proxy servers can also be used for the opposite
purpose:

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 Cont’d…
To monitor traffic and undermine user privacy.
To the user, the proxy server is invisible; all
Internet requests and returned responses appear to
be directly with the addressed Internet server. (The
proxy is not actually invisible; its IP address has
to be specified as a configuration option to the
browser or other protocol program.)

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THANK YOU!!!