If you are a Sysadmin, monitoring bandwidth usage on your server is an important task. We agree some of you might have bandwidth graphs on your server monitoring platform or on your server provider’s control panel. But having the ability to monitor the bandwidth in real time helps to solve many problems.

On this post you will find out 2 different, simple command line bandwidth monitor tools to view the outgoing and incoming bandwidth consumption in real time. You will only need one.

Slurm

Slurm is my new favorite in this category. Screenshot above shows how “Slurm” shows you the data. “Slurm” is available on the default Debian/Ubuntu package repository and To install “Slurm” on your Linux server just run

sudo apt-get install slurm

Using Slurm is also very easy. Just run the command below to view statistics like shown above

slurm -i eth0

You need to replace the interface according to your system. For example OpenVZ systems use “venet0” as the ethernet interface and to view stats on a OpenVZ VPS use, “slurm -i venet0”

Nload

Nload is also a very nice command line bandwidth monitor utility just like slurm. However I prefer slurm since it displays more data and its worth to note that Nload doesn’t work correctly on some OpenVZ kernels. So if you have a OpenVZ VPS, Nload might not work correctly and will display wrong results as shown on the above screenshot. However in my experience it works well on KVM,Xen and Dedicated servers.

Nload is also available on the default repository of Debian/Ubuntu. To install Nload just run

sudo apt-get install nload

And to view data run,

nload

When you run Nload it will display the statistics of loopback interface. To monitor the Ethernet port, click the down arrow key on your keyboard. You can navigate between the interfaces by using the up and down arrows.

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BitTorrent Sync is the latest addition to BitTorrent product family and to put it simple, it lets you to sync your files between your computers just like Dropbox does. BitTorrent Sync comes handy if you need more space and privacy (PRISM). Dropbox is great I use it everyday and features like camera upload is a life saver. Thankfully to Samsung I have 50GB of Dropbox storage free for 2 years. But the problem is if I need more and more storage, cost goes way up. BitTorrent Sync is totally free except for the costs to run a VPS or Dedicated server as a master Sync device.

BitTorrent Sync uses BitTorrent protocol to sync files between your computers and your master server. While this uses BitTorrent protocol its totally secure and private unlike regular torrents. Files aren’t visible to public as its encrypted by using a private key and only those people who has the private key can view your files. So as long as you keep the private secret (32 character long number sequence) your files are safe. Just like Dropbox, when files added to your sync’d folder it will start to sync the files immediately and when you remove a file on a folder it will be sent to a trash folder on your server so you could recover it later if you made a mistake. You can find more feature details on the main web site.

On this guide, I will explain you how to setup BitTorrent Sync master server. I’m using a 512MB RAM OpenVZ Linux VPS from Ramnode with 120GB of SSD-Cached storage and Debian 7 32bit is installed as the operating system. BT Sync will work fine on any virtualization platform such as KVM,OpenVZ or XEN and it doesn’t require much resources to work. Even if you have 128MB of RAM on your VPS, that’s fine. Also you can use Debian/Ubuntu/CentOS or any other Linux operating system for this guide.

• First SSH in to your VPS/Dedicated Server with root privileges.
• Next, we have to download the BitTorrent Sync installer and install it

cd /home
wget wget http://btsync.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/btsync_i386.tar.gz

As you can see below I have chosen the 32bit version of the installer because I’m running an 32bit operating system. If you have less than 1GB of RAM its recommended to run 32bit operating system thus the 32bit version of BT Sync. However if you are running a 64bit OS, you can choose the download file from here. Just replace the link on above command with 64bit version.

Since the download is complete, We have to extract the tar.gz file and install it. Below command’s will untar and install it.

tar -xvzf btsync_i386.tar.gz
./btsync

Above screen shows us that BitTorrent Sync is installed ans started. Yes! Its that simple. Now you can access the BT Sync web interface at “yourip:8888”

As you can see, our BT Sync control panel is not password protected. So lets edit the configuration and setup a password and change the port (:8888) if you like.

Below command will show you a example configuration.

./btsync --dump-sample-config

Copy the output of it and lets save it elsewhere and edit it.

nano /home/btsync.config

Above command will create empty btsync.config file and paste the configuration options that you copied earlier.

As you can see on above screen, you can add a password, user name and change the port by editing the text here. To save the options just press Ctrl+O and then Ctrl+X to exit the editor.

Now we need to restart the btsync process to apply changes. To do that you can either restart the server and start bittorrent sync again by running ./btsync or just kill the process and start it again. To do that run

top

and find the pid for the btsync process. Also the assigned pid is shown to you when you first started the btsync process. As my screenshot shows on above, my pid is 1915. So I can kill it by issuing

kill -9 1915

To start the btsync process again with our saved config, Just issue

./btsync --config btsync.config

Now navigate to your web control panel at “yourip:XXXX” (XXXX= the port you choose) and it will ask for login details.

Now the setup is mostly complete. We have to specify a folder in your server to save the synced files. To do that lets create a new folder

mkdir /home/bt

Above command will create a folder named “bt” on the /home directory of your server. Now you can install the BitTorrent Sync application on your computers. This part is basically self explanatory just download the installer for your Mac/Windows PC from the main web site and install the application.

As you can see above, it will show you a secret code when you setup a folder (Just like Dropbox folder) and copy this code and navigate to your server’s btsync control panel and click “Add Folder” and select the path of previously created folder (/home/bt) and on the “Secret” field,  paste the secret code that you copied and click the “Add” button.

Your computer will show up on the control panel and now you have a complete BitTorrent Sync setup correctly. All the content that you put on to your computers btsync folder will be instantly synced to the server.

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I have been having a hard time lately with SEO thanks to WordPress comments system. Google somehow decided to index about 1600 ?replytocom and comments?=true links on my blog resulting duplicate content issues with Google Panda algorithm.  This is how its reflected on Webmaster tools Index Status

Maybe a bad plugin caused this issue but its really bad for the blog’s SEO. This is also reflecting on the Webmaster tools under “HTML Improvements” saying duplicate title tags and meta descriptions. However harm has been already done and I have decided to 301 redirect the ?replytocom links to the correct pages and implemented parameter handling to rectify this issue.

Outsourcing the comments system is now a popular practice even among the biggest players on the web. I have used  disqus in the past on this very same blog but eventually moved back to default comments system to localize everything.  But now thinking about all these problems of using inbuilt comments, I thought its time to move to disqus again.

I had around 9200 approved comments and everything got migrated within few hours by using their WordPress plugin. Disqus is also SEO friendly and Google will index the Disqus comments without a problem. Overall I’m happy about the move but I might change to local comments in the future just to experiment things.

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Yesterday I have presented you a nice deal on domain names. And today when I was lurking through lowendtalk forums. I have found this sweet deal on SSL certificates. A company called Centriohost is offering AlphaSSL 256bit wild card domain validation SSL certificates for just $2 a year. This is a great deal since AlphaSSL wild card certs are retailing about $40 to $50 on the internet.

Centrohost already had an offer for $10 a year for that but with their latest promo code “LET2SSL” price comes down to $2 a year recurring. Order yours by this link  and apply the promo code when checkout. You will need a code signing request and you can easily generate from your server or online service like this . According to them setup time is about 20 minutes and you might probably receive one earlier than that. I have got one to play with SPDY protocol and I’m not promoting them or whatsoever. This offer is too hard to pass on that’s why I have decided to share it with you

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Just in case if you are looking for to buy new domains now, Namecheap and 1and1 has great promotions going on at the moment. You can get a .me domain for $0.98 on Namecheap.com by following this link – http://www.namecheap.com/domains/personal-domain.aspx Renewels will cost you $18.99 on namecheap after the first year but you can always transfer the domain to another registrar if you want to play cheap. Also its interesting that namecheap provides a comodo positive SSL certificate for $1.99 when you purchase a domain from them.

1and1 is also running a promotion for .com registrations at the moment and you can register a .com domain for just $0.99 first year by visiting https://www.1and1.com/domain-names After the first year it will cost you $10.99 to renew. Both registrars are great and if you need a domain name right now just go ahead.

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If you are concerned about your security of being online, you should be already using different passwords for everything that you use. In my case I have few very long passwords and for not much important things I use small memorable passwords. However I don’t store my passwords anywhere, I just remember those. Just today I have forgot the password which I had as my DSL Internet service login password. Changing it requires calling the ISP so I realized that its already saved on the router but its not saved on the browser so I cant take it by going in to the browser settings. I know that there are small javascript codes exist that you can paste on the address bar to reveal the passwords hidden behind asterisks but most of the scripts won’t work with the new browsers.

I have found this neat “Chrome” extension called “Show Password on Focus” which can be downloaded on the Chrome web store here . Just add it to chrome and point the mouse to the password field and it will instantly display the password hidden behind the dots or asterisks. And after installing it will show the passwords as you type on web sites, if your mouse is pointed at the password field. That’s really a neat functionality.

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Google Page Speed service is the Google’s answer to Cloudflare and I have decided to give it a try on this blog to see how it works and if it makes my site faster. Normally I’m not much in to CDN’s because I could gain similar performance for less cost by using an tuned nginx setup for static content delivery. However CDN’s will be handy if you need to store lots of files. I’m managing a large social network and on there I use Amazon S3 and Cloudfront CDN for content delivery. Handling a large number of small files such as user photos and thumbnails is a worrying task and Cloud comes to rescue there. I don’t use CDN’s for this blog or any other regular web sites that I have. Just for the sake of experimenting I have tried Google Page Speed Service.

GPSS is still at beta stage and you need an invitation to get in. You can request an invitation here and you will probably receive one in few days if your site is eligible. Setting up GPSS is really is just like Cloudflare. You just have to set a CNAME record for WWW pointing at “pagespeed.googlehosted.com”.

Like shown on the screenshot above GPSS works by sitting on the middle of your server and end users. GPSS servers cache the images and other scripts to deliver it quickly to the users. And there are many other advanced optimization techniques are used on it.

So after setting up the CNAME google will send you an email welcoming you to the service and you can view the status on your dashboard. And Google lets you to benchmark your site to see the improvements. Here’s a benchmark from India

You can choose the location to do the tests and it makes a huge difference like you see on above when tested from locations, far from where your web site is hosted on. This is because Google has caching servers worldwide. The 4.2 second number you see above is because I’m not using my regular speedy nginx setup at the moment because I’m experimenting the ranking changes when using htaccess and Apache.

After setting up GPSS you might loose your rankings on Google because elements like images are served from google’s domain like 1-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.ruchirablog.com/*************** So because of this very own reason I have stopped using GPSS for now. I can’t risk my ranking positions because of a CDN. And when I stopped using GPSS I have received an email from Google asking for feedback and on there,

Surprisingly Google knows that there is a problem with search rankings, else they wouldn’t include that right? So bottom line is that, GPSS is a great free (at least for now) product and you will save bandwidth and reduce server load by using it. But you might have to face problems with your search rankings. Be sure about what you want to do.

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Samsung has just announced the refreshment of galaxy tab series with Galaxy Tab 3.0. Higher end option is the Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 ($399) which packs 1.6Ghz Intel Atom Z2560 processor with just 1GB of RAM and good ol’ 1280*800 LCD TFT display.

Galaxy Tab 8.0 and 7.0 also gets the refreshment and Galaxy Tab 8.0 ($299) packs Exynos 1.5Ghz dual core processor, 1.5GB RAM, Android 4.2, 1280*800 display and Galaxy Tab 7.0 ($199) includes 1.2Ghz dual core processor, 8GB of storage and 1024*600 LCD display.

See there’s nothing new on those models except they are called Galaxy Tab 3 series. Last years specs and nothing surprising than the original Galaxy Tab models. While Samsung likes to include cutting edge hardware on its Phones and the phablets like Galaxy Note, it certainly seems like they have stopped doing same on their tablet line. 

We really need innovation on this segment like Google done with Nexus 10, which is a product of Samsung. Nexus 10 is still the most powerful and advanced Android tablet on the market and now its nearly an year old. Considering Samsung made Nexus 10 I’m wondering why don’t they push their own tablet line anymore.

I’m an advocate of Android but I think when it comes to tablet’s Ipad just doesn’t has any competition. App’s and everything is just superior on Ipad and these Android manufacturers are one reason that the Android tablet’s aren’t evolving quickly like it did on smartphones. For now lets hope Samsung will at least try to make a change with its upcoming Galaxy Note 10.1

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Recently when I was lurking through Interwebs I have found this neat little service called instantserver.io which lets you to grab a linux virtual private server for 35 minutes. The instance is a Amazon EC2 micro which has 614MB of RAM , 8GB of storage and comes with Ubuntu 13.04.

You just need to click the “Get a free server” button and you will get the login details to your VPS instantly like shown on the screenshot above. As you can see that window also displays the time period on the bottom right and after the time is up, your data will be terminated. To keep it longer you have to pay them

Pricing isn’t that great as the free service but now you know where should you go if you need a linux server for few minutes.

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Android and IOS app update is already available to download and other than the video sharing feature, the interface hasn’t changed much. Surprisingly you cant view videos full screen. As you know same applies for the Instagram photos so I doubt that this will get solved anytime soon. Video is something that I would like to view full screen. Instagram video has 13 filters available and it looks really nice. However your videos will need little bit of time to process depending on the performance of your smartphone.

Twitter which is the owner of Vine might be really upset about this news and they are sending mass emails to twitter users about Vine right now. So go ahead and update your Instagram app and enjoy the 15 second videos

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