ipmitool is linux app that speaks the ipmi protocol to local and remote servers. Here are some example commands to get you started (read the extensive man page for more info):

Get a serial-over-lan console on rcXX: ipmitool -I lanplus -H rcXXipmi -U ADMIN -a sol activate
Get the power status: ipmitool -I lanplus -H rcXXipmi -U ADMIN chassis status
Reboot a machine: ipmitool -I lanplus -H rcXXipmi -U ADMIN power reset
Force PXE boot on the next boot only: ipmitool -I lanplus -H rcXXipmi -U ADMIN chassis bootdev pxe
(This will cause the machine to reinstall all its software on the next boot)
Reboot the IPMI card: ipmitool -I lanplus -H rcXXipmi -U ADMIN mc reset cold
Get sensor output: ipmitool -I lanplus -H rcXXipmi -U ADMIN sdr list
Get the error log: ipmitool -I lanplus -H rcXXipmi -U ADMIN sel elist
NB: Our SuperMicro machines appear to log SMART failures as OEM #0xff, e.g. ipmi

If your Linux server is opening lots of outgoing network connection, you need to increase local port range. By default range is small. For example squid proxy server can come under fire if it runs out of ports.

You can use sysctl command to to modify kernel parameters at runtime. The parameters available are those listed under /proc/sys/. Please note that this hack is only useful for high bandwidth, busy Linux servers or large scale grid servers.

To find current range type

$ sysctl net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range

Output:

net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 32768 61000
Set new local port range

You can set the range with the following command:
# echo 1024 65535 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range

OR
$ sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range=”1024 64000″

You may need to edit /etc/sysctl.conf file, to make changes to /proc filesystem permanently i.e. append the following to your /etc/sysctl.conf file:
# increase system IP port limits
net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65535

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/eth0/disable_ipv6

HTTP GET:
tcpdump -s 0 -A ‘tcp[((tcp[12:1] & 0xf0) >> 2):4] = 0x47455420’

HTTP POST:
tcpdump -s 0 -A ‘tcp dst port 80 and (tcp[((tcp[12:1] & 0xf0) >> 2):4] = 0x504f5354)’

netstat -an|awk ‘/tcp/ {print $6}’|sort|uniq -c

cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

Or permanently:

/etc/sysctl.conf:
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1

pt-tcp-model – Transform tcpdump into metrics that permit performance and scalability modeling.

pt-tcp-model [OPTION…] [FILE]
pt-tcp-model parses and analyzes tcpdump files. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, it read standard input.

Dump TCP requests and responses to a file, capturing only the packet headers to avoid dropped packets, and ignoring any packets without a payload (such as ack-only packets). Capture port 3306 (MySQL database traffic). Note that to avoid line breaking in terminals and man pages, the TCP filtering expression that follows has a line break at the end of the second line; you should omit this from your tcpdump command.

tcpdump -s 384 -i any -nnq -tttt \
‘tcp port 3306 and (((ip[2:2] – ((ip[0]&0xf)<<2)) - ((tcp[12]&0xf0)>>2)) != 0)’ \
> /path/to/tcp-file.txt
Extract individual response times, sorted by end time:

pt-tcp-model /path/to/tcp-file.txt > requests.txt
Sort the result by arrival time, for input to the next step:

sort -n -k1,1 requests.txt > sorted.txt
Slice the result into 10-second intervals and emit throughput, concurrency, and response time metrics for each interval:

pt-tcp-model –type=requests –run-time=10 sorted.txt > sliced.txt
Transform the result for modeling with Aspersa’s usl tool, discarding the first and last line of each file if you specify multiple files (the first and last line are normally incomplete observation periods and are aberrant):

for f in sliced.txt; do
tail -n +2 “$f” | head -n -1 | awk ‘{print $2, $3, $7/$4}’
done > usl-input.txt

Captures network traffic, calculates statistics about usage, and serves reports over HTTP.

Features:

Traffic graphs, reports per host, shows ports for each host.
Embedded web-server with deflate compression.
Asynchronous reverse DNS resolution using a child process.
Small. Portable. Single-threaded. Efficient.
Supports IPv6

vi /etc/network/interfaces

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.0.150
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.0.0
broadcast 192.168.0.255
gateway 192.168.0.1