Lone in the night

Sar (System Activity Report) is the performance data collector on all unix systems. If it works pretty well to collect data, displaying the result lets a bitter taste; forget any colorfull graphs, its output is only tabs of pure ascii text. However, sar's weakness is also his strength; text is easy to parse and Unix have plenty of powerfull tools to do so. My aim today is to parse the output of sar and to load it into MySQL. Why MySQL? Simply because it's a powerfull free database, and querying MySQL with Excel is easy. The idea is simple: sar > XML > LOAD XML command > MySQL database Step 1 - choosing the output of sar On Solaris, sar -A provides all the results; actually, it is equivalent to successively issue these commands: sar -u (CPU utilization) sar -d (activity for each block device) sar -q (average queue length while occupied) sar -b (buffer activities) sar -w (system swapping and switching activity) sar -c (system calls) sar -a (file access system ro...

I purchased it a while ago, second hand but almost new. It then left home during my broke up, and was recently given back, with its 17" CRT. Dusty and no HDD (my ex kept her secrets), but worthed a restore; the idea was to replace the old Toshiba laptop I use for Cubase. Cleaned up, memory boosted to 1 Gb, SSD and IDE-to-SATA converter, ready to go. I first tried Windows 7, but the lack of compatible video driver forced me to go back to XP. Well, it's a pretty good OS after all, still in use in many places. Once all drivers set, the Dell works pretty well and quite fast. My workhorse sequencer is Cubase SX 2.2, wich was released in the same years; with 1 Gb RAM, it's large enough for my needs. Because I lack a descent audio I/O so far (I use my Novation XioSynth as I/O; I wich to purchase a friend's unused I-ONIX), I mainly use it for MIDI. With twice the horsepower and 4 times the memory (and room to double), it's a good step ahead from my Toshiba. A good p...