Spry Methuselah
Charly's Column – darkstat
Thanks to its minimal footprint, 20-year-old darkstat hardly generates any noticeable load even on low-powered systems, making it the perfect monitoring tool for Charly's home utility room.
Next to our kitchen, there is a small utility room. I don't think its floorspace is even two square meters. In addition to the usual building services, such as fuse box, there are two firewalls, a web and mail server, network attached storage (NAS), and a large switch.
The tiny router supplied by my Internet provider sits a little intimidated in the corner. I downgraded it to something like the IT equivalent of a flow heater. It opens the connection to the provider and passes it to the firewall. I have switched off everything else, like WLAN, telephony, and the DHCP server; I prefer to do that myself, on my own hardware.
You need to monitor what you run. For long-term monitoring of loads and latencies, I use Munin and SmokePing. But if I just want to have a quick look at what currently is happening on the firewall interface, darkstat [1] is the hero of the day.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
TUXEDO has unveiled a new InfinityBook Pro with an AMD Ryzen AI 300
This new notebook offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.
-
Is This the Year of Linux?
Another major organization has decided to kick Windows and Office to the curb, in favor of Linux.
-
Linux Mint 20 Reaches EOL
With Linux Mint 20 at its end of life, the time has arrived to upgrade to Linux Mint 22.
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
-
KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.
-
Linux Kernel 6.15 Now Available
The latest Linux kernel is now available with several new features/improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Microsoft Makes Surprising WSL Announcement
In a move that might surprise some users, Microsoft has made Windows Subsystem for Linux open source.
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.