10 Do's And Dont's For System Administrators

System Administrators have an unenviable job. They have to work odd hours ensuring the computers in your office run without a glitch. And people tend to think of System Administrators only when their machines start misbehaving. Obviously they have their work cut out for them.

CHIMIT (Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology) is a conference that focuses on computer-human interaction for IT workers. Recently they asked what would make the System Administrator's job a wee bit easier than usual.

And the following are the prominent answers they received from the ensuing brainstorming session -
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Linux Ate My RAM - Help!

Help! Linux ate my Memory. Did it indeed?
I was curious where my memory had gone because, when I fired up a terminal and typed the command -

$ free -m

I got the following output.

total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           882        843         38          0         86        424
-/+ buffers/cache:        332        549
Swap:            0          0          0

From a total of 882 MB, 843 MB has been used leaving only a measly 38 MB free for my use. How is that possible ?

Well, I stumbled upon an interesting website which explains in detail just this conundrum.

The website is (and you might have guessed it right!) linuxatemyram.com. And after reading through the website, I figured out that the whole thing is just a play of words. What you consider free is indeed free, but Linux chooses to call it 'used' because this memory is both used for something and at same time available for applications. Since your and Linux's terminology differs, you think you are low on RAM when you're not.Get it ?