Monitoring activities and system processes
Tracers
Programs rarely reveal what they are doing in the background, but a few clever tools, of interest to both programmers and administrators, monitor this activity and log system functions.
One class of tools captures the events and function calls of compiled programs (and sometimes even of the entire system), producing logs known as traces. Programmers can use these logs to understand which function calls and actions lead to errors, and repeated entries could indicate race conditions or deadlocks. Reverse engineers might find debuggers useful, and kernel developers could gain insights into the typical processes between user space and the operating system kernel. Admins can use these tools to find out what’s happening on a system, with traces helping them take a closer look at suspicious behavior. For example, if you monitor and log all calls to the system function open, a look at the debugger output could reveal which programs regularly produce temporary files of several gigabytes.
Read full article as PDF:
Price $2.95
Direct Download
Read full article as PDF:
Price $2.95
Tag Cloud
News
-
KDE Announces Software Compilation 4.13
New release comes with better semantic search and improvements to Kontact.
-
Coverity: Open Source Code has Fewer Defects
Annual code quality report shows FOSS is more secure at all project size levels.
-
An Even Smaller Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced an even smaller version of the tiny computer that will fit into a DIMM slot.
-
Freaky Privilege Escalation Attack
A new class of problems lets a malicious app pre-configure an invisible privilege update.
-
Facebook Rolls Out New PHP-like Programming Language
New Hack language adds static typing and other conveniences.
-
Fedora Announces Innovative Crytography Policy System
New crypto policy system will offer easier configuration and more uniform security.
-
Shuttleworth Calls for Declarative Firmware
Ubuntu founder denounces insecurity in proprietary, close-source software blobs.
-
New TLS Attack Takes the S out of HTTPS
Vulnerability affects many Linux web servers
-
Munich Adopts Kolab
The Bavarian capital shuns Microsoft, Google, and other alternatives to implement an open source groupware solution.
-
Canonical Announces Ubuntu Smartphones
Phone vendor partnerships bring Mark Shuttleworth's dream of Ubuntu on a phone a step closer to reality.