Fedora® Linux® TOOLBOX: 1000+ Commands for Fedora, CentOS, and Red Hat® Power Users

Chapter 10. Managing the System

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Checking memory use with free, top, vmstat, and slabtop

• Viewing CPU usage with iostat, dstat, and top

• Monitoring storage devices with iostat, vmstat, and lsof

• Working with dates/time using date, hwclock, cal, and NTP

• Changing GRUB boot loader behavior

• Rebuilding the initial ramdisk

• Dealing with run levels with runlevel and init

• Adding, removing, and listing services with chkconfig and service

• Shutting down the system with reboot, halt, and shutdown

• Checking and changing kernel driver settings with lsmod, modinfo, and modprobe

• Watching hardware settings with lspci, dmidecode, and hdparm

Without careful management, the demands on your Linux system can sometimes exceed the resources you have available. Being able to monitor your system's activities (memory, CPU, and device usage) over time can help you make sure that your machine has enough resources to do what you need it to. Likewise, managing other aspects of your system, such as the device drivers it uses and how the boot process works, can help avoid performance problems and system failures.

This chapter is divided into several sections that relate to ways of managing your Fedora or other Linux system. The first section can help you monitor the resources (processing power, devices, and memory) on your Linux system. The next section describes how to check and set your system clock. Descriptions of the boot process and subsequent run levels follow. The last sections describe how to work with the ...