Previously I have blogged about installing MaraDNS as an authoritative nameserver on CentOS Linux. In this article I am going to look at some convenient shortcut functions that you can use in your MaraDNS zone files.
Linux server administration
MySQL backups with mysqlhotcopy
Previously I have written about MySQL backups using mysqldump. But there is another way to backup MySQL databases and that is by using a perl script included with MySQL called mysqlhotcopy. Things to note about mysqlhotcopy are:
Memory usage of a process under Linux
Finding out the memory usage of a process under Linux can be a bit confusing. That is because Linux doesn’t have one number for a process’ memory usage.
Installing MaraDNS on CentOS Linux
MaraDNS is a lightweight alternative opensource DNS server for Linux. MaraDNS has some really interesting characteristics:
- Low memory usage – On an OpenVZ VPS ( CentOS 5.x host node ) MaraDNS uses about 5MB of RAM as opposed to 90-100MB for the venerable BIND.
- Separation of recursive nameserver and authoritative nameserver – If you only need an authoritative nameserver for your domain names you can skip starting up the recursive nameserver service.
- Ease of installation – MaraDNS is easier to install than other alternative nameservers like tinydns.
- Excellent documentation – The documentation on the MaraDNS site is quite good at explaining things in simple language.
So let’s take a look at how we can get started with MaraDNS on CentOS Linux.
Finding out disk space usage using Linux shell
Finding out your disk space usage using the shell or command line in Linux is easy once you know how. This article takes a look at the different commands that tell you your disk space usage at different levels of the file system i.e. from entire disk volumes/partitions all the way down to individual files and directories.