Overview of sinfo, an advanced monitoring tool for Linux Clusters

Are you facing this situation: it is almost impossible to build a certain network cluster, but to process many different computers and closely track all these computers? What should you do if you are responsible for computers full of rooms and those who are responsible for using these machines? Sinfo may be the tool you are looking. The Freshmeat website is described as follows:

Sinfo is a monitoring tool that uses broadcast solutions to publish information about the running status of each computer on your local network. It supports display of various content, such as the processor, memory usage, network load, and information about the five main processes on each computer. Sinfo uses ncurses to display information at a glance.

Sinfo displays system information about multiple computers for management. You can use the-s option to view more information.

Installation Process

If you use Debian-based systems, such as Debian and Ubuntu, you can use Binary packages and find them in your repo. Considering that the software includes a startup daemon sinfod, I strongly recommend that you use this optional binary file, because many aspects of this process are automated and it is also the version I will discuss here ). However, to ensure that the release is neutral, I also introduced the source version during the installation process as usual.

The requirements for the code library are as follows:

• Ncurses: Version 5.7 of the code library used for terminal processing ).

• Boost: A portable C ++ source code library that uses Boost. Bind and Boost. Signals1.42 ).

• Asio (> = 1.1.0): asio is a cross-platform C ++ code library for network programming version 1.4.1 ).

If you compile the Code through the source code, you also need the above Code Library Development Kit-dev ). The number of development packages under libboost is quite large, so if you encounter any problems during the compilation process, check whether libboost is fully installed.

For those running with source code, once you have completed the code library requirements, you can get the latest tarball file ). Decompress the package, open the terminal in the new folder, and enter the following command:

$ ./configure$ make

If your release uses sudo:

$ sudo make install

If your release uses root:

$ su# make install

Before proceeding, I should explain that sinfo is divided into two parts: common application software and background daemon. The installation of the daemon varies with the release version. For details, refer to the instructions for use in the source code tarball file and the official website.

Use

Sinfo is a "semi-graphic user interface GUI)" command line program, which is actually easy to use, however, advanced users can use the command line parameter option to process some outstanding tasks. To run the program in basic mode, just enter:

$ sinfo

If you only install sinfo on your machine, the information displayed is only the information of your machine. You can view the available memory, CPU usage, host name, and other information on this screen. The appendix at the end of this article lists the applicable shortcut keys. You only need to press a key to switch between different parts of the program.

However, in this case, sinfo is actually a more beautiful top. The purpose of using sinfo is that you can display information from several machines at once to closely monitor the running status of the LAN.

To do this, you can easily install and run sinfo on other computers on the network. After running sinfo, you will find that the information of the two computers is displayed on both computers. Continue to install it on other networked computers, and the list will become longer and longer.

These are just basic functions. What about richer functions? Obviously, Due to space limitations, I cannot describe them here. You should refer to the reference manual page to learn more details.) You may wish to take a look at some of my favorite features.

In the command line, if you have added the-W parameter option or -- wwwmode), it is like this:

$ sinfo -W

The output will change from a normal top-like screen to an HTML output. This is very convenient for those who prefer to use automated Web pages for remote management.

When writing a command line script, you can add the parameter option-s or -- ysteminfo to output a large part of important system information. For example, my two machines display the following additional information:

192.168.1.2   knightro-bigdesktop i686 ↪Linux 2.6.32-27-generic #49-Ubuntu SMP Wed Decpus: 4  MHz:  800.0RAM: 3276.5 MByte   swap: 7629.4 Mbyteload 1min:  0.0   load 5min:  0.1   load 15min:  0.1192.168.1.1   nhoj-desktop x86_64 ↪Linux 2.6.38-8-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Mon Apr 11 0cpus: 2  MHz: 1000.0RAM: 2007.6 MByte   swap: 2047.3 Mbyteload 1min:  0.1   load 5min:  0.2   load 15min:  0.1uptime    0 days, 19:13:03

Such information indicates that sinfo has many potential uses, and I immediately thought that it could be used for monitoring and troubleshooting at a LAN party. If any node has a problem, the host may be able to handle it immediately when trying to isolate it.

Conclusion

Sinfo is well-designed and easy to install. I think this program will soon break into its own place. I hope it will become a common tool as other standard applications do. You may be able to achieve this goal by porting it.

Appendix: sinfo keyboard commands

• Q key-exit sinfo.

• Page up key, Page down key-scroll the screen, one Page each time.

• Up arrow/u key, down arrow/d key-scroll screen, each scrolling row.

• Home Key-jump to the top row.

• S key-switch to display system information.

• O key-switch to display the processes on your machine.

• N key-switch to display network information.

• D key-switch to display Disk Load.

• T key-the switchover shows the main X processes.

• C key-scale the processor load bar chart from log logarithm mode), lin linear mode) switch to full mode ).

To learn more about sinfo, visit the http://www.ant.uni-bremen.de/whomes/rinas/sinfo.

Original article: sinfo-Advanced Network Monitoring