Why You Should Learn to Run a Server Before You Learn to Code

http://lifehacker.com/why-you-should-learn-to-run-a-server-before-you-learn-t-1497178889

This was a good read!

The reader comments were also very much full of rich details and advice. Everyone nowadays wants to learn to program and only thinks of the glorious moments (creating the perfect, most popular app that will make you tons of money). A perfect programmer would be well-rounded and understand server management as well as coding.

Archiving Logs

I've logs that I gather and put into a directory named /home/status. There's a script that runs commands and directs the output to files within this directory. The script runs every hour of every day. The output is dumped into a directory akin to "070101/", which means 2007-01-01. Each directory would have 24 files. I periodically archive these (by year) into tar.gz files.

Here's how the directory looks:

root@starchild:/home/status/070101# ls
070101.00.starchild.txt 070101.04.starchild.txt 070101.08.starchild.txt 070101.12.starchild.txt 070101.16.starchild.txt 070101.20.starchild.txt
070101.01.starchild.txt 070101.05.starchild.txt 070101.09.starchild.txt 070101.13.starchild.txt 070101.17.starchild.txt 070101.21.starchild.txt
070101.02.starchild.txt 070101.06.starchild.txt 070101.10.starchild.txt 070101.14.starchild.txt 070101.18.starchild.txt 070101.22.starchild.txt
070101.03.starchild.txt 070101.07.starchild.txt 070101.11.starchild.txt 070101.15.starchild.txt 070101.19.starchild.txt 070101.23.starchild.txt
root@starchild:/home/status/070101#

Here are the archives I currently have:

root@starchild:/home/status# du -h sensorstat_logs-200*
748k sensorstat_logs-2005.tar.bz2
3.5M sensorstat_logs-2006.tar.bz2
7.3M sensorstat_logs-2007.tar.gz
root@starchild:/home/status#

This is a listing of the month of January (unarchived):

root@starchild:/home/status# ls -l | grep 0701
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 1 2007 070101/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 2 2007 070102/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 3 2007 070103/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 4 2007 070104/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 5 2007 070105/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 6 2007 070106/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 7 2007 070107/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 8 2007 070108/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 9 2007 070109/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 10 2007 070110/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 11 2007 070111/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 12 2007 070112/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 13 2007 070113/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 14 2007 070114/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 15 2007 070115/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 16 2007 070116/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 17 2007 070117/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 18 2007 070118/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 19 2007 070119/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 20 2007 070120/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 21 2007 070121/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 22 2007 070122/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 23 2007 070123/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 24 2007 070124/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 25 2007 070125/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 26 2007 070126/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 27 2007 070127/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 28 2007 070128/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 29 2007 070129/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 30 2007 070130/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 31 2007 070131/

The command I use to archive the directories within /home/status is:

tar cvjfp sensorstat_logs-2007.tar.gz .

c - creates the archive
v - verbose output once the command is run (this isn't needed, but I like to see what the command is doing.
j - compresses archive
f - uses a file name
p - preserves permissions of files within archive


The "." at the end of the command directs the command to archive everything within the current directory.

Once the files are archived, I can get rid of them using the 'rm' command to free up some space.

I thought all of this would be cool to share...