A brief note on the name of Phoenix Park

The Irish is fionnuisce, which Ó Dónaill & Ua Maoileoin’s dictionary defines as “uisce locha nó abhann”, water of a lake or river. Uisce is water, and fionn (white, fair) in this context means clear. Fíoruisce is spring water (fíor means true, in this context pure).

Uisce beatha, of course is whiskey, which is more commonly called fuisce, which is a gaelicisation of the English, which itself is from the Gaelic uisge. Macbain’s 1911 etymological dictionary of Gaelic notes that “Stokes suggests the possibility of uisge being for *uskio-, and allied to Eng. wash.” Rounds.

“Tiers, tiers and tiers. Rounds.” (Finnegans Wake page 590) Tears when they are copious are uisce cinn, head water.

Tears in general are deora. An exile is deoraí. Exile is deoraíocht. Nice connection, although Macbain, citing Stokes again, says the latter may come from “un-countried”, something like dí-bhrughacht, whereas deor (the singular form) is related to Greek dákru (i.e., δάκρυ) and Latin lacrima (dacrima in early form) and thus cognate with the English.

Quick server load monitor and alert

In crontab:

*/5 * * * * cat /proc/loadavg > /path/to/lafile.txt
1,6,11,16,21,26,31,36,41,46,51,56 * * * * wget -q -O - '[url:]lafile.php'

The loadavg command is thus run every 5 minutes, and the php file is run 1 minute later. The output of loadavg is a single line, eg:

0.75 0.35 0.25 1/25 1747

The 1st value is the average load over the past minute, the 2nd value over the past 5 minutes, and the 3rd over the past 15 minutes. (The 4th value is the number of currently running processes out of the total number of processes, and the last value is the ID of the last process used.)

The php file:

<?php
$loadavg = "";
if (file_exists('/path/to/lafile.txt')) {
   date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');
   $latime = date("g:i:s a, d F Y", filemtime('/path/to/lafile.txt'));
   $loadavg = file_get_contents('/path/to/lafile.txt');
   preg_match('/(\d\.\d\d) (\d\.\d\d) (\d\.\d\d)/', $loadavg, $lamatch);
   if ( $lamatch[2] > 4 ) {
      require_once('/path/to/PHPMailer/PHPMailerAutoload.php');
      $mail = new PHPMailer();
      $mail->setFrom("[from@email]", "Sender");
      $mail->addAddress("to@email", "Recipient");
      $mail->Subject = "Server Load Alert";
      $mail->Body = $latime . ":\n\n 1-minute load average: " . $lamatch[1] . "\n 5-minute load average: " . $lamatch[2] . "\n15-minute load average: " . $lamatch[3];
      $mail->send();
   }
}

The php file gets the modification time and the first 3 values from file.txt, and if the 2nd value (ie, 5-minute load average) is more than the number of CPUs of the server (eg, 4), it sends an e-mail alert.

It may be possible to combine these into a single shell script with the use of awk, but I'm not familiar with it. Also, the mail() function instead of PHPMailer could be used.