The netstat -i command lists your network interfaces in rows, showing traffic statistics for each (since activation) in the columns. This example actually shows just two hardware interfaces: en1 is an Airport card, and en0 is the Ethernet port. The ppp0 interface shown is one that in use by the PPTP VPN client.

You will see some other lines for the IP interfaces, including the "local loop" interface (lo0), and a couple more related to IPv6 networking (stf0 and gif0). At this point, you'll be fine to only focus on the lines for showing "<link>" in the network column. The other pertinent columns are the actual packet-count columns:

Ipkts -- Incoming packets 
Ierrs -- Incoming packet errors
Opkts -- Outgoing packets
Oerrs -- Outgoing packet errors
Coll -- Packet collisions

What you should be concerned with, of course, are any non-zero entries in the error or collision columns. I won't go into troubleshooting your network here, but this page might be a good place to start if something does turn up: http://www.princeton.edu/~unix/Solaris/troubleshoot/netstat.html.

The next important job of the 500.daily script is the rotation of the system log. This log file, system.log, records the status and error messages from the large number of processes that comprise the OS.

In the case where no backups of system.log yet exist, the script makes the first backup, compresses it using gzip, and numbers it 0. This results in a file called system.log.0.gz. By "rotating" this log file on subsequent days, the script will first rename system.log.0.gz to system.log.1.gz, and then create a new system.log.0.gz.

Each day, the script creates a new system.log.0.gz file after incrementing the other backup filenames by one. Once system.log.7.gz is created, however, there will be no ninth backup file. Instead, on the subsequent backup the system.log.6.gz file (renamed to system.log.7.gz) just overwrites the previous system.log.7.gz file.

This procedure, then, ensures that you'll have over a week's worth of logs to refer to in case problems arise, but not so many as to waste disk space, and likely none too large to not view easily.

Next, the script "cleans" the web server log files by deleting any rotated files that have been around longer than a week.

The Weekly Script

As you saw in the /etc/crontab file, cron also calls on periodic each week to look in the /periodic/weekly directory for scripts to run, and the script it will find there is named 500.weekly.

The 500.weekly script performs three important tasks, none of which provides any output to the report except a statement that the command was performed (unless there are any errors to report).

Locate

One of the most useful Unix command line utilities is locate, a lightning-fast file finder. locate does its magic by searching through a database of filenames created by indexing every pathname on your system. Instead of scanning your disks to find a file, locate just whips through its pre-indexed database, and returns results almost immediately.

However, locate results are only as accurate as its database. Files added after the database has been built will not be "located." locate is not the tool for every search, but with weekly database rebuilding, it's great for quickly finding that long-lost file you know is tucked away somewhere on your drive. The first task of the weekly script, then, is to rebuild the locate database.

If you are antsy to try locate for yourself, have a look at the short locate tutorial included in the article found here.

The weekly script updates another important database used by the whatis command. whatis is a nifty little memory jogger that quickly shows you the function of a given command, like this:

[localhost:~] chris% whatis netstat
netstat(1)               - show network status

What whatis displays is, in fact, the first line of a command's "man page". If you're not already familiar with man pages, you should be. These comprise the massive collection of online Unix documentation included with Mac OS X. Look here for a great tutorial on using man pages.

The weekly script, then, creates a whatis database from all man pages it finds, allowing whatis to return an answer faster than you can say, "Duh!"

Last, the weekly script also rotates several other log files, including those for ftp and netinfo.

The Monthly Script

As you also saw in the /etc/crontab file, cron calls on periodic each month to run any script found in the /periodic/monthly directory, which you can see is a script named 500.monthly.

There's actually very little to the monthly script, but what it does provide can be pretty interesting, if you like to know where all your time goes. The monthly script's first task is to run the "connect time accounting" utility ac. ("Connect" here means "logged in.")

When run from the monthly script, ac will report the cumulative time, in hours, each user account has been logged in since the last time the script ran, as well as the total for all users:

Doing login accounting:
	total      714.22
	chris      548.76
	miho       101.77
	andy        54.39
	jonny        9.18
	test1        0.06
	ftp          0.06

ac calculates these totals by reading the current wtmp log file, which logs every login and logout. You can view this list anytime with the last command:

[localhost:/var/log] chris% last 
chris     ttyp2                  Thu Feb 21 16:18   still logged in
chris     ttyp1                  Thu Feb 21 16:16   still logged in
chris     console  localhost     Thu Feb 21 16:02   still logged in
reboot    ~                      Thu Feb 21 16:01

So how does ac know to restart the accounting each month? Well, right after ac reports its findings, the monthly script rotates the wtmp logs, creating a new empty wtmp file to start logging to. The next time the monthly script runs, then, ac will do its accounting based on this new file.

Final Thoughts

You should now have a good idea of what the three cron jobs do and what to look for in the reports. If you're still having problems with anything, make sure to look at the TalkBack sections for all parts of this tutorial, where readers and I have covered most of the common problems and made some corrections.

Also, if you would like to learn lots more about cron, here's another tutorial for you.

Now that your feet (or even your knees) are wet working with Terminal and Unix, you have an entire ocean left to explore. I hope this tutorial has given you the confidence to dive in. There are other articles here on the Mac DevCenter you should now be ready for, as well as plenty more around the Internet.

Chris Stone is a Senior Macintosh Systems Administrator for O'Reilly, coauthor of Mac OS X in a Nutshell and contributing author to Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, which provides over 40 pages about the Mac OS X Terminal.

Read more Learning the Mac OS X Terminal columns.

Return to the Mac DevCenter.

Comments on this article

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1 to 6 of 6

2. Perl Scripts
   2006-01-09 15:19:57  Cruzapete [View]
   
   
4. my mind is now mush
   2003-05-19 12:49:35  anonymous2 [View]
   
   
6. cool
   2003-04-10 15:34:07  anonymous2 [View]
   
   
8. good article but where are the shutdown scripts
   2003-03-31 08:54:49  mpobrien [View]
   
   
10. Thanks - and a question!
    2003-03-30 03:41:30  macmartin [View]
    
    
12. On the topic of the terminal...
    2003-03-21 17:06:35  brianimator [View]
    
    
• Bad font in terminal
  2003-03-24 08:32:36  wadesworld [View]
  
  
• Bad font in terminal
  2003-03-27 07:41:51  brianimator [View]
  
  

1 to 6 of 6