Linux Diagnostics Tools

[Computer Hobbyist]

Question, Windows, in any flavor, provides the user with the tools needed to obtain a significant amount of information concerning the computer's health and its available resources. In addition, windows tools such as Scandisk and defrag are useful and effective. Are there comparable Linux tools and if so where can they be found?

CH

[Statica]

What a Windoze concept

One of the reasons that Linux is so ultra-reliable and stable is that it doesnt have half bakes schemes (like FAT32), or archaic concepts like FAT. NTFS is of course a different beast, while it provides a high level of data integrity, it still is prone to fragmentation.

Linux on the other hand, uses native filesystems that are beyond reproach .. for the most part. Most people run ext2, which is very clean and is not prone to excessive fragmentation and thereby doesnt stunt your drive's performance. There is robust allocation optimization (clusting of related inodes and data) and hence it is rarely an issue.

However Linux does ship with a variety of ext2 maintenance tools. The latest version of the package can be got from sourceforge (http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net). They include:
make2fs .. to create an empty partition in ext2
tune2fs .. this "tunes" up your ext2 partition by setting various options such as maximal_mount_count, maximal_check_interval, superuser reserved logical blocks etc
e2fsck is in itself the file checker. It is automatically used by your Linux under 2 circumstances (a) if you shut down your system without umounting partns .. for example, allow your system to idle for a couple of minutes and hit the power button to turn it off, when u restart you should come up with e2fsck running. This is determined because the ext2 partition has the ability to store information on whether it is dirty data or clean data and to run the e2fsck when dirty (b) linux is designed such that it will allow a certain number of mounts before which it does an automatic check for you (check tune2fs)
or you can run it manually
debugfs .. will allow you to do magical things with your fs

Check this out for some information, that is perpetually a work in progress .. now mired.. anyways there's some insight into ext2 or vfs and the concepts of the linux fs that u might wanna read.

HTH

[Computer Hobbyist]

Thanks for the information. It is exactly what I needed. I'll be sure to read all the links.

CH

[OOPS!]

Ha! I posted a reply but Statica, you beat me to it, and answered it much better than I. So I'm editing this post to just say, Ya! what he said!


OOPS!