Backup online data using Backupify

It's time for you to backup all of your online sites, like facebook, flickr, google docs and other sites that you store online. You'll never know when something happens on these sites. And good thing that Backupify is doing this kind of service. They are offering a free account sign-up until January 31, 2010.
Backupify is very easy to use, after sign-up you can configure the sites you want to backup. It's using Amazon webservices, so I think and believe that it's a good quality.

Here are the supported sites:

1. Gmail
2. Google Docs
3. Twitter
4. Flickr
5. Facebook
6. Basecamp
7. Wordpress
8. Delicious
9. Photobucket
10. Blogger
11. Friendfeed

 It will alert you through email when backup is finished. I have tried it and started to like it. With the advent of technology, rule of the thumb is you need to have three backup location, your computer/laptop, your on-line sites and your on-line backup.

Act now and act fast. Backup! Backup! Backup!

Linux howTo: How to check your Computer's temperature

There are times that you want to check your computer's temperature or server. You can check it with a simple command:

   user@linux$ cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temparature

   temperature:                  40 C

   user@linux$

Note that this method works only if ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) thermal zones are supported on your computer.

Linux Tip: Linux monitor processes using kill

One of the tasks of an Administrators or even users of Linux server, workstations and desktop is to monitor running processes. Processes that are important to your production Linux servers. One of the command that I recently learn that can help in monitoring linux processes is the kill -0 command. But wait, kill means terminate the process. How can we monitor the process if we use the kill command?

When you refer to the manual/info of kill, 0 means no signal will be sent, it will not terminate the process. By combining return status(echo $?) with kill -0, you can check if a certain process is running or not.

Open a gnome-terminal and login as root or use sudo for Ubuntu user.
All processes running (UNIX daemon) are at /var/run directory. So when you want to check the process id(pid) of yum daemon, just look into the file /var/run/yum.pid.

    root@linux# cat /var/run/yum.pid
    1755
    root@linux#

Do the following command when checking the status of process:
   
    root@linux# kill -0 1755
    root@linux# echo $?
    0
    root@linux#


If the output of echo $? is 0, that means the process is running. Refer to my other post regarding $? variable here.

To shorten the above procedure, we can just do this:
   
    root@linux# kill -0 $(cat /var/run/yum.pid)
    root@linux# echo $?
    0
    root@linux# 

Daemon is not running ( yums.pid doesn't exist )

    root@linux# kill -0 $(cat /var/run/yums.pid)
    cat: /var/run/yums.pid: No such file or directory
    root@linux# echo $?
    1
    root@linux#

You can now monitor processes with kill -0 command. Just play around, it will help in some unexpected situations.