The sys admin's daily grind: LUG Camp and Iotop
High-Altitude Euphoria
Immenstadt, Germany, was the site of the 10th anniversary LUG Camp for the founding Linux User Groups from Germany's Allgäu and Augsburg.
The 10th LUG Camp saw the Linux faithful trekking into the mountains. Around 120 Linux fans, including yours truly, met at a school youth hostel in Gschwend near Immenstadt (Figure 1). Nobody had to do without water: The hostel's own waterfall, fed by meltwater from even higher up, cooled the kegs of beer and even served as a shower for some hardy souls.
Although LUG Camp traditionally perceives itself more as a geek family gathering with the focus very obviously on fun, this doesn't mean a complete lack of content: Anybody with the necessary knowledge and desire could take an LPIC exam, and there were some really excellent talks. Incidentally, the thin mountain air of Gschwend didn't worry the participants in the least after the chili contest expanded their lungs to at least twice their normal capacity.
Iotop
Throughput, data this time, is also the domain of the tool that I will look at here. Iotop solves a problem that has often bugged me: The system is slow because its disks are running all the time, but I can't identify the process behind it. Iotop [1] gives me exactly this information.
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