Comments on How To Monitor Hard Drive Usage In Ubuntu Server Using The Visual Philesight CGI Script

Hey i read this tutorial and had a look at the products website, and it looks good can it look at other ubuntu installations over the network or does it only work with a local installation ??

It parses the HDD locally and then the web display is visible all over your network. Thats the point of the whole thing.

Philesight allows you to remotely monitor hard drive usage on headless servers.

When I ran the 

sudo /usr/bin/philesight --db /usr/lib/philesightdb --index /

command  I kept getting a bdb (LoadError).  I searched for a quick solution but couldn't find one and eventually came across a suggestion for a different app also using Ruby and the Berkeley DB which suggested that I look to run an alternative ruby.

I noticed that in this install guide that libdb4.2-ruby1.8 was installed and guessed that that lib was meant for ruby 1.8 and not the newly installed one that came with the new Ubuntu.  All I had to do in the end was 

sudo update-alternatives --config ruby

and choose to use ruby 1.8 instead of ruby 1.9.1 and my philesight started working again.  I am sure there is a better solution to upgrade the libdb4.2-ruby1.8 to a newer version that plays nicely with Ruby 1.9.1 but I haven't found it yet.  In the meantime I can now monitor my disk space again.

On a clean install off 12.10, Rudy 1.9.1 is provide and not 1.8 anymore. So first you have to install ruby 1.8. You can do this by running

sudo aptitude install ruby build-essential libopenssl-ruby ruby1.8-dev

And then afterwards you can run

sudo update-alternatives --config ruby

And choose the ruby 1.8 version