The Magnet Blog

magnet December 31st, 2008

 

 

Hackfest @ Magnet

 

Venue - Kandivali

Week - Dec: 3rd week

Time - 12 pm - 1 pm

 

We received Hackfest event invitation on Monday 22nd Dec 08, the event was new to most Magneteers. Nirav & Kartik initiated all preparations. Nirav and Vishal gave the background and details about the event. It was going to be an interesting event as it was not just technical crowd puller but even non technical participants were involved.

 

Participants were given freedom of choice in terms of the task they would take up, The best part was task could be anything that would interest you, something that was on your wishlist or something that was not part of your daily task, they could also do it in pair or individually. Everyday one could take up new task or it could be a single task for 2-3 days together as well.

 

What we did different this time was that we interacted with all teams & took their feedback as to what would they like to do in the Hackfest. Based on that, we created tasks for different teams & in total, we had a pool of around 200 tasks, technical & non-technical both. That’s what was liked most by people. They simply picked up tasks & used to start working.

 

1hour everyday, fixed time for all, everyone consciously would work on their tasks or hobbies like painting, programming, hacking, research and development and many more.

 

One more interesting thing was there were awards for the best work.

 

Those 5 days was full of fun, learning, feeling of achievement. It was indeed a heartfelt “HackFEAST”.

 

At the end, the feedback was that people want this hackfest to continue. Some said they wouldn’t mind participating in a 2-day hackfest as well.

• hacking , hackfest
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magnet December 22nd, 2008

Hello, i have come up with this little post, the thing is many a times when we would require and Hardware info of any PC in our oprganisation, like the amount of RAM, no of HDDs connected, the Processor, the motherboard, the motherboard serial no. and etc, whenever such info was required, the Hardware Guy would go to the User’s place and shut down the PC, open up the cabinet and write down all the hardware info on  a piece of paper.

This sounds foolish, when you have a linux PC why you need to do all this. Yes, But this happens in most of the organisations in mumbai who are running linux on their Desktops or Servers.

So Here’s a small post on the Tools, utilities and commands to find the Hardware info without the need to shutdown the PC and open up the cabinet.

Some info that are required by the Desktop admins or the Hardware admins to keep an inventory of the system or for any other purpose :-

The Processor model, type, its frequency, max speed, cache, etc.
RAM
HDD
Motherboard model, chipset, serial no., etc
Soundcard
NetworkCard

Tools :-

1) dmidecode - standardized description of a PC hardware including characteristics such as BIOS serial number and hardware connectors
2) hardinfo - displays information about your hardware and operating system
3) hwinfo - information about the hardware installed on a system
4) sysinfo - displays computer and system information
5) sysutils :- procinfo
6) lspci
7) lshw

Tool 1:-

dmidecode :- you can find many detailed info about the hardware.
# dmidecode -t smbios (will give you all the valid keywords to find the system information)

# dmidecode -t smbios
Invalid type keyword: smbios
Valid type keywords are:
bios
system
baseboard
chassis
processor
memory
cache
connector
slot

# dmidecode -t bios (will give the complete bios information including vendor, release date, and what all things are supported by the Bios

# dmidecode -t processor (will give the info about the CPU vendor, model, capacity, speed, voltage, clock, cache)

# dmidecode -t slot (will give the info of the no. of PCI slots)

Tool 2 :-

hardinfo :- One of the Best GUI utlities to find the complete hardware information. You get each and eery detail about your PC, your CPU, RAM, HDD, OS and others. it only lacks a little in giving the exact info about the CPU.

Tool 3 :-

hwinfo :- A small utility, but may not be that useful for any linux admin as it gives very detailed info with some hexadecial info.

# hwinfo –short

will give the hardware info in very short and linux admins may find this info of some use.

Tool 4 :-

sysinfo :- Again a small GUI utility, But you may find it very useful as it gives out lot of info about your HW that will be required to the sysadmins

It can display Linux distribution release, GNOME version, Kernel version, Gcc version, Xorg version, hostname, CPU: Vendor identification, model name, frequency, level2 cache, bogomips, model numbers, flags, Memory: Total system memory RAM, free memory, swap space total & free, cached, active, inactive memory, Storage: IDE interface, all IDE devices(disks, cd/dvd roms), SCSI devices, Hardware: motherboard, graphic card, sound card, network devices.

Thats still a lot of info for a sys admin

Tool 5 :-

procinfo - provides info that it has gathered from the /proc directory, what i found useful in it was the Bootup info, it shows the Time and Date when the system was booted, rest there were many other info such as irq, swap, user, nice.

# procinfo

Tool 6 :-

lspci - utility for displaying information about all PCI buses in the system and all devices connected to them

I found the following below commands useful.

# lspci -v

# lspci -nn

Tool 7 :-

lshw :- Another small but a very useful utility, as is found, when i ran the following command :

# lshw

It gave a lot of hardware info, i liked the below command :

# lshw -short

it showed me my motherboard model no., processor, amount of RAM and it also dispalyed that i am using 2 x 1 GB RAM’s, the no. of PCI slots, the USB ports, no. of ethernet cards and ports and its vendors, The amount of HDD and the partitions i have created.



These are some of the tools that i have found and tried, would like to hear from you guys reading this stuff, if you have found some tools, commands or utilities which helped you out.
Feel free to post comments or write to us at:

sos[AT]magnet-i[DOT]com.

Thank You
Systems Team

• Technology
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magnet December 7th, 2008

Nirav asked to check Adobe’s Kuler while we were in a meeting along with Harshad. I happened to look at it & my first impression was ‘Wow’. This is something interesting.

Kuler’s main purpose is to allow the designer to quickly view various themes & color combinations that go with each other. It also allows users to create their own themes, where in they would specify various color combinations. These themes are then tagged so they are searchable.

An important thing is that you can search via color codes too like #FF0000. It would also allow you to create your own theme from some existing theme.

And on top of all, it also has an AIR version. So makes life a bit more easier.

This would immensely benefit to our designers. Check it out at: http://kuler.adobe.com/

• Technology
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magnet December 3rd, 2008

The following Blog is a short summary on Redhat and ubuntu and some differences between them, we have also provided a some commands and file names on how to configure network in RedHat PCs and in Ubuntu PCs, so you could understand that configuring network in both of them is different.

 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not free, and its also used for business.Red Hat Linux, assembled by the company Red Hat, was a popular Linux based operating system.
Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994. It was originally called “Red Hat Commercial Linux”[2] It is the first Linux distribution to use the packaging system, the RPM Package Manager as its packaging format, and over time has served as the starting point for several other distributions, such as Mandriva Linux and Yellow Dog Linux.

Red Hat’s Features:
Red Hat Linux introduced a graphical installer called Anaconda, intended to be easy to use for novices, and which has since been adopted by some other Linux distributions. It also introduced a built-in tool called Lokkit for configuring the firewall capabilities.

 It uses .rpm package called Red Hat Package Manager.

Definition rpm: The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful command linedriven package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and updating software packages. Each software package consists of an archive of files along with information about the package like its version, a description, etc.

 

Now What is yum? yum, also called Yellow dog Updater Modified, is a Linux utility which is use to install RPM packages/Binary Files (.rpm files). You can use yum with the following options.

 

Installing packages(.rpm):- To install any .rpm packages follow these command.

# yum install packagename

  # rpm -ivh packagename.rpm

 

Networking

etworking Files are that files by which system get connected in the Network.

By editing these files system will be get connected in Network.

 To set IP Address

# system-config-network

  or in the below file:

# cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scipts/ifcfg-eth0

To set gateway

# system-config-network

or in the below file:

# cat /etc/sysconfig/network

To set DNS

 #cat /etc/resolv.conf

To set hostname

# hostname yourcomputerName

# cat /etc/sysconfig/network

 

Booting Files

 

# cat /boot/grub/grub.confAbout grub.conf :- Grub Conf is a Gnome2 based GRUB configuration editor. It provides an easy to use interface allowing effortless modification of OS’s and the flexibility to configure the most obscure options. Designed to require minimal user interaction while providing tools for the most adventurous user.

To see the version of Operating System:

# cat /etc/redhat-release

To on services permanently:

# chkconfig servicename on

                                                                 Ubuntu Ubuntu is an operating system, like windows.Ubuntu is a Linux distribution that starts with the breadth of Debian and adds regular releases (every six months), a clear focus on the user and usability (it should “Just Work”, TM) and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of support for every release. Ubuntu ships with the latest Gnome release as well as a selection of server and desktop software that makes for a comfortable desktop experience off a single installation CD.

Ubuntu uses the.deb apt package:- Ubuntu uses .deb package for package installation as like .rpm of Red Hat.

Ubuntu also uses apt-get package installer to install packages by using command mode.
To install package Graphically, synaptic package manager.

Installing Packages (.deb)

# apt-get install packagename

# dpkg -i packagename.deb

To install packages Graphically by synaptic:

System -> Administrator -> Synaptic Package Manager

Networking

Some files to get connected system in Network.To set IP Address & Gatway

# cat /etc/network/interfaces

To set DNS

# cat /etc/resolv.conf

To set hostname

# cat /etc/hostname

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• GNU/Linux
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