Posts in LINUX

2 Minute Tutorials HOW To's LINUX Microsoft Tutorials

Welcome Metricbeat from the beats family

Deploy Metricbeat on all your Linux, Windows, and Mac hosts, connect it to Elasticsearch and voila: you get system-level CPU usage, memory, file system, disk IO, and network IO statistics, as well as top-like statistics for every process running on your systems. Metricbeats is an open-source shipping agent used to collect and ship operating system and service metrics to one or more destinations, including Logstash.

Step 1 – Install Metricbeat

deb (Debian/Ubuntu/Mint)

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
wget -qO - https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch | sudo apt-key add -
echo 'deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/oss-6.x/apt stable main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/beats.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install metricbeat

rpm (CentOS/RHEL/Fedora)

sudo rpm --import https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch
echo "[elastic-6.x]
name=Elastic repository for 6.x packages
baseurl=https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/oss-6.x/yum
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch
enabled=1
autorefresh=1
type=rpm-md" | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/elastic-beats.repo

sudo yum install metricbeat

macOS

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/metricbeat/metricbeat-oss-6.7.1-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz 
tar xzvf metricbeat-oss-6.7.1-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz

Windows

  • Download the Metricbeat Windows zip file from the official downloads page.
  • Extract the contents of the zip file into C:\Program Files.
  • Rename the metricbeat-<version>-windows directory to Metricbeat.
  • Open a PowerShell prompt as an Administrator (right-click the PowerShell icon and select Run As Administrator). If you are running Windows XP, you may need to download and install PowerShell.
  • Run the following commands to install Metricbeat as a Windows service:PS > cd 'C:\Program Files\Metricbeat' PS C:\Program Files\Metricbeat> .\install-service-metricbeat.ps1`   If script execution is disabled on your system, you need to set the execution policy for the current session to allow the script to run. For example: PowerShell.exe -ExecutionPolicy UnRestricted -File .\install-service-metricbeat.ps1

My OS isn’t here! Don’t see your system? Check out the official downloads page for more options (including 32-bit versions).

Step 2 – Locate the configuration file

deb/rpm : /etc/metricbeat/metricbeat.yml
mac/win :<EXTRACTED_ARCHIVE>/metricbeat.yml

Step 3 – Configure the Modules

Setup the data you wish to send us, by editing the modules. Examples of these settings are found in, in the same folder as the configuration file. The system status module is enabled by default to collect metrics about your servers, such as CPU usage, memory usage, network IO metrics, and process statistics:

metricbeat.modules:
- module: system
  metricsets:
    - cpu
    - filesystem
    - memory
    - network
    - process
  enabled: true
  period: 10s
  processes: ['.*']
  cpu_ticks: false

  There’s also a large range of modules to collect metrics see here.

Step 4 – Configure output

We’ll be shipping to Logstash so that we have the option to run filters before the data is indexed.
Comment out the elasticsearch output block.

## Comment out elasticsearch output
#output.elasticsearch:
#  hosts: ["localhost:9200"]

Uncomment and change the logstash output to match below.

output.logstash:
    hosts: ["your-logstash-host:your-port"]
    loadbalance: true
    ssl.enabled: true
Step 5 – Validate configuration

Let’s check the configuration file is syntactically correct.

deb/rpm

sudo metricbeat -e -c /etc/metricbeat/metricbeat.yml

macOS

cd <EXTRACTED_ARCHIVE>
./metricbeat -e -c metricbeat.yml

Windows

cd <EXTRACTED_ARCHIVE>
metricbeat.exe -e -c metricbeat.yml
Step 6 – Start metricbeat

Ok, time to start ingesting data!

deb/rpm

sudo systemctl enable metricbeat
sudo systemctl start metricbeat

mac

./metricbeat

Windows

Start-Service metricbeat

With this, you have installed & configured MetricBeat for your environment. Stay tuned for others from the Beats family and also the ElasticSearch Stack Installation.

Ansible HOW To's LINUX

How to Install and Configure Ansible on Ubuntu 18.04

Introduction Configuration management systems are designed to make controlling large numbers of servers easy for administrators and operations teams. They allow you to control many different systems in an automated way from one central location. While there are many popular configuration management systems available for Linux systems, such as Chef and Puppet, these are often more complex than many people want or need. Ansible is a great alternative to these options because it requires a much smaller overhead to get started. In this guide, we will discuss how to install Ansible on… Read More

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2 Minute Tutorials HOW To's LINUX Tutorials

How to change root password in Ubuntu Linux

By default, the root user account password is locked in Ubuntu Linux for security reasons. As a result, you can not login using root user or use a command such as ‘su -‘ to become a SuperUser.

You need to use the passwd command to change the password for user accounts on Ubuntu Linux. A typical user can only change the password for his/her account only. A SuperUser (root) can change the password for any user account. Your user account info stored in /etc/passswd and an encrypted password stored in /etc/shadow file.

How to change root password in Ubuntu

The procedure to change the root user password on Ubuntu Linux:

  1. Type the following command to become root user and issue passwd:
    sudo -i
    passwd
  2. OR set a password for root user in a single go:
    sudo passwd root
  3. Test it your root password by typing the following command:
    su –

A note about root password on an Ubuntu server/desktop

Enabling the root account by setting the password is not needed. Almost everything you need to do as SuperUser (root) of an Ubuntu server can be done using sudo command. For example, restart apache server:
$ sudo systemctl restart apache2
You can add an additional user to sudo by typing the following command:
$ sudo adduser {userNameHere} sudo
For example, add a user named pankaj to sudo:
$ sudo adduser pankaj sudo

2 Minute Tutorials HOW To's LINUX RHEL

Configuring NTP using chrony

Chrony provides another implementation of NTP and is designed for systems that are often powered down or disconnected from the network. The main configuration file is /etc/chrony.conf  and parameters are similar to those in the /etc/ntp.conf file. – chronyd is the daemon that runs in user space.– chronyc is a command-line program that provides a command prompt and a number of commands. Examples:tracking: Displays system time informationsources: Displays information about current sources. Installing Chrony Install the chrony package by using the following command: # yum install chrony Use the following commands to start chronyd and to… Read More

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2 Minute Tutorials HOW To's LINUX RHEL Tutorials

Create a new swap partition on RHEL system

For the purpose of this post, let’s assume that you do not have any swap configured on your system. /dev/sdc is the drive referenced with no partitions. Since we are going to make a single partition filling the disk, note that any data currently on that disk will be lost. Follow the steps given below to add /dev/sdc1 partition as the new swap partition on the system. 1. Use the fdisk command as root to create a swap partition. # fdisk /dev/sdc A new prompt will appear, type ‘p’ to… Read More

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2 Minute Tutorials HOW To's LINUX

Passwordless Login Using SSH Keygen in 5 Easy Steps

SSH (Secure SHELL) is an open source and most trusted network protocol that is used to login into remote servers for execution of commands and programs. It is also used to transfer files from one computer to another computer over the network using secure copy (SCP) Protocol. In this article we will show you how to setup password-less login on RHEL/CentOS 7.x/6.x/5.x and Fedora using ssh keys to connect to remote Linux servers without entering password. Using Password-less login with SSH keys will increase the trust between two Linux servers for easy file synchronization or transfer. My Setup Environment SSH Client : 192.168.0.12… Read More

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