Booting into a Linux Live Environment A Linux live CD, DVD, or USB drive allows booting into a temporary Linux operating system without installing anything on the hard drive. This allows full access to drives and filesystems to attempt data recovery without risk of overwriting deleted files on the disk. Creating a Bootable Live USB…
Understanding File Deletion in Linux When a file is deleted in Linux, the operating system does not immediately erase the data. Instead, it removes the file’s entry from the file system index and makes the storage sectors containing the file’s data available for future writes. Until those sectors are overwritten by new files, recovery of…
Losing important data is a dreadful situation for any Linux user. Fortunately, open source tools Testdisk and Photorec provide powerful capabilities for recovering lost or deleted files from Linux file systems and storage devices. Testdisk specializes in recovering lost partitions and rebuilding partition tables, while Photorec ignores disk structures and aims to extract every recoverable…
Finding Out What’s Been Deleted When a file disappears without explanation on a Linux system, the first step is to investigate where it might have gone. There are two approaches to tracking down recently deleted files: Checking the trash folder Many Linux distributions have a trash or recycling bin feature that retains deleted files for…
Assessing Your Legacy Infrastructure The first step in migrating your legacy infrastructure to the cloud is performing a comprehensive assessment of your existing hardware, software, dependencies and pain points. This involves creating a detailed inventory of servers, storage systems, networking equipment, databases, applications, integration tools and any other components currently supporting your workloads. Document hostname,…
Understanding Crontab Output Redirection The crontab utility allows users to schedule periodic jobs on Unix-based operating systems. By default, crontab jobs send their standard output and standard error streams to the syslog service. However, relying solely on syslog has limitations for logging crontab activity. Syslog collects messages from many system services, making it difficult to…
Using Standard Input with Cron Jobs Cron jobs scheduled by the crontab utility allow system administrators to automate common tasks like backups, log rotations, and more. While cron jobs normally operate independently without user input, there may be cases where passing dynamic data into a cron command is helpful. For example, an administrator could create…
What is the Core Issue with Cron Job Logging? Cron jobs run in the background without terminal output, making logging of their activities difficult. However, logging cron job output is essential for monitoring job health, auditing actions, and troubleshooting failures. By default, any output or errors from cron jobs are not captured. To save this…
Updating Systems for Improved Security and Compatibility Maintaining up-to-date systems is critical for organizations to ensure security, stability, and compatibility with modern software and hardware. However, adopting new standards like filesystems, init systems, compilers, and more can require significant evaluation, planning, and coordinated efforts across teams. Evaluating New Standards for Adoption Assessing benefits of adopting…
Finding the Source of System Slowdowns When a system experiences performance slowdowns or high latency, identifying the root cause is key to optimizing and tuning the system. Monitoring key subsystems like CPU, memory, and disk usage over time can uncover areas that are overutilized or experiencing high saturation. Tools like top, vmstat, iostat, and sar…