Hardware can be tough to work with, but if you have a dedicated server with us, you don't have to worry about it. Well, maybe a little, we can't know that something is wrong unless you tell us. Click on a type of hardware to learn more
Hard Drives
Harddrives come in three kinds: Sata, Ide, and Scsi. Many type of hardware error will how up under linux if you use the command "dmesg". In fact, almost any type of hardware error or information will show up there.
If you think your drive may be sub par, or you want to test it, here is a good command:
hdparm -tT /dev/hda (or /dev/sda if you you have sata or scsi)
Here is my output on my desktop:
/dev/hda: Timing cached reads: 360 MB in 2.00 seconds = 179.61 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 56 MB in 3.02 seconds = 18.54 MB/sec
Its pretty slow because my particular drive sucks. Yours should be better. If the second measurement is under 40MB/sec, please put in a ticket because none of our servers should be that slow.
Think the drive is going bad, checkout our article on Smart to look deep into a drive.
Network Cards
Nics are wat connect your server to our network. An easy way to see the status of it is a command called ethtool. Here is my output:
# ethtool eth0
Settings for eth0:
Supported ports: [ TP MII ]
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Speed: 100Mb/s
Duplex: Full
Port: MII
PHYAD: 32
Transceiver: internal
Auto-negotiation: on
Supports Wake-on: pumbg
Wake-on: d
Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)
Link detected: yes
You can see that I have a 10/100 nic, and that I am connected at 100/full. If you don't see what you think you should see, please put in a support ticket so we can take care of you. No one should be half duplex.
Ram
To see how much ram you have, use "free -m" (m is for megabytes) Here is mine:
# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1003 952 50 0 84 806
-/+ buffers/cache: 62 940
Swap: 1992 25 1967
You can see I have 1G total, and almost all of it used! This is normal on linux, it will take as much ram as possible and put it towards cache to make it faster. You can see that 806MB of my ram is cache
You can also see that I have 2G of swap, only a little of it is used. This is typical. Swap is not used extensively under normal conditions.
