GKrellM on MacBook Pro

I used to always install GKrellM on my machines as standard, but due to the number of machines I've been having to update and manage recently (work laptop, personal laptop, personal desktop, etc.) it's simply slipped my mind. That is, until recently...


I was performing some pretty CPU intensive tasks at work on my MacBook Pro (3,1); archiving data using 7zip and producing parity data for the resulting .7z files using PyPar2. I was using the top shell utility to monitor the CPU utilisation, but I fancied something a bit more graphical in nature, so I installed GKrellM. Running Fedora, all I needed to do was open a root terminal and type yum install gkrellm to get the software installed.

While configuring the application, I happened to enable to temperature monitors (out of interest). To my surprise, 10+ sensors were available (see the image to the left)! I'm not sure where each sensor is installed in the system, however, so I'll need to do a bit of digging around online to find out that information. Another nice surprise is that I'm able to monitor fan speed too; they're labelled "left side" and "right side" in the application.

I was pleased that this "just worked", because I've tried monitoring system temperature before on other machines, but it's not been as simple as switching it on in GKrellM. I didn't expect it to be so easy on a Mac!

Once I know more about what the temperature sensors are actually monitoring, I'll update the article!

mlocate DB Size Problem

I have just had to resolve an issue with the mlocate search tool on a backup server.
The machine is a small (10GB) VM with an iSCSI volume presented to it for data that is backed up. It turns out the mlocate DB had grown to an excessive size (>1GB!) because it had been including this file system in it's nightly DB refresh.
This meant that the /var file system ended up running out of space, which was causing all kinds of problems:

• The nightly mlocate DB refresh task could not complete.


• Emails could not be sent as the spool directory for sendmail could not be written to.


• Log files could not be written to.


• Performing a system update with yum was not possible.

My solution was to:

1. Remove all files from the /var/lib/mlocate directory.


2. Open the mlocate configuration file, /etc/updatedb.conf and edit the PRUNEPATHS directive; adding the backup file system, /srv to the list of paths that are excluded from being indexed.