UNIXSysAdmin.net

You know Chargen? And Discard?

Of course you do, in fact, you’ve probably been wondering, “when will someone finally come up with the goods and bridge the gap between these two fast moving technologies in today’s marketplace?”

Well friends, its early days – but I’ve done it. It’s called “discharge” and it bridges the gap between the two technologies, by taking the packets from chargen and feeding them to discard.

The tool is flexible, as in you can choose to connect to any host running chargen, and any host running discard! It can even be the same host, or the host you run the tool on.

Of course, reliability is always a concern, so I have opted ONLY to use the TCP streams based chargen and discard, as UDP is too unreliable a protocol for these higly important, if not, mission critical tools.

Even better, I’m making this tool “discharge” available for free. It’s written in java and has been tested on Windows and Solaris, compiled for java 1.2, for compatability with older OS’, such as Solaris 8.

Make sure you give it 2 hostnames at the command line:

java discharge <chargenHost> <discardHost>

And you’ll be fine for this release (early adopters only!).

You can get the first (and any later releases) here: http://unixsysadmin.net/files

Well, turns out I screwed up the build of the last release and it only ran on a 1.6 JVM, and threw a really awesome error on a 1.5 JVM (but only when it started using the Directory class – I have no idea how I managed to screw that up). Glad I tested it thoroughly, eh!

New Release pretty much only fixes this issue, the code is the same underneath. The updated packages for Solaris and Generic OS’ can be found in the files area.

Sorry for any confusion, my bad.

I have released a bug fixed release of findUsedSpace. This fixes a bug on Solaris 10+ Systems, that contain zones. There was an endless loop when you reached the proc filesystem of a zone, when running from the global.

This RC is likely to have one more minor code clean up before it is released as findUsedSpace 1.0.

There is a feature request for the next release to skip autofs,ctfs,objfs,devfs,dev and any other filesystems on a UNIX (Solaris specifically) platform which isn’t really relevant when you’re trying to figure out what has chewed all the space on a disk.

For those who are unaware what the tool does, it basically allows you to do something very similar to du, by finding how much space a parent directory and all its children are taking up (or a single file), however, it is based on thresholds, and allows you to be very clear on what you are looking for (say, files and directories over 1 gigabyte). It runs at virtually the same speed as native du (tiny little bit slower in my tests, but the difference is negligible).

The other benefit over du is it is pure java, and platform independent. It is tested on Windows and Solaris, but should run on anything. Though written on a 1.6 JVM, it is compiled for a 1.2 JVM, so as even really old systems can run the software.

You can download a Solaris packaged release, or a zip file release from here: http://unixsysadmin.net/files

You’ll notice its packaged as AdeptTools (even though it’s just one tool at this point). The idea was/is that I will gradually write more and more code as new problems present themselves to me, and package it as a toolkit. Not sure if it will work out that way in the end, we’ll see. Due to somethings ending up platform dependent, it may end up that each tool is released separately, and as part of a package if you want the lot.