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This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in 1995; any technical information is probably outdated.

a small hack


Article: 7941 of alt.hackers
From: kim@mso.anu.edu.au
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: a small hack
Date: 02 Jun 1995 21:43:57 +1000
Organization: Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories.
Lines: 42
Approved: trent@NIN.com
Message-ID: rhivqp0x36.fsf@magician.anu.edu.au
NNTP-Posting-Host: 150.203.89.99
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Status: RO


Just a small (Ob)hack I performed today:

Needed to collect some disk i/o stats for a bunch of workstations.
Unfortunately the system supplied iostat command only printed out
stuff like:
                                extended disk statistics
disk      r/s  w/s   Kr/s   Kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b
sd1       0.2  0.0    4.4    0.4  0.0  0.0   29.5   0   0
sd16      0.0  0.1    0.4    3.3  0.0  0.0   74.1   0   0
sd2       0.0  0.0    0.8    0.4  0.0  0.0   31.6   0   0
sd3       0.3  0.5    1.2    4.7  0.0  0.0   25.7   0   1

This is OK, but I need to average over a long time, so if a disk
isnt particularly active, the kB read and write numbers might
be only 0.1 or 0.2 - ie, very low precision, just one sig. fig.

No sources available of course. Solution:

'strings iostat', find the printf string in the executable which looks like
%-8.8s %4.1f %4.1f %6.1f %6.1f %4.1f %4.1f %6.1f %3.0f %3.0f

copy the binary, edit the string to say
%-8.8s %4.1f %4.1f %6.1f %6.1f %4.2f %4.2f %6.1f %3.0f %3.0f

Now my new improved iostat says:
                                 extended disk statistics
disk      r/s  w/s   Kr/s   Kw/s wait actv  svc_t  %w  %b
sd1       0.2  0.0   4.36   0.44  0.0  0.0   29.5   0   0
sd16      0.0  0.1   0.39   3.27  0.0  0.0   74.1   0   0
sd2       0.0  0.0   0.81   0.38  0.0  0.0   31.6   0   0
sd3       0.3  0.5   1.18   4.72  0.0  0.0   25.7   0   1

I was much happier.

Kim.

--
Kim Sebo
Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories, A.N.U.
Email: kim@mso.anu.edu.au or kms100@huxley.anu.edu.au
Phone: Work: +61 6 249-0253



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