Diagnostics

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Contents 1 When your websites aren't behaving as they should 1.1 Validation 2 When your computers aren't behaving as they should 2.1 Advice 2.2 Before the Emergency: Be Prepared 2.3 Emergencies 2.3.1 System Rescue Disk 2.3.2 RIP: (R)ecovery (I)s (P)ossible Linux rescue system 2.3.3 TestDisk

When your websites aren't behaving as they should

• Google Your Site For Security Vulnerabilities by Nitesh Dhanjani

• Check the status of your sites' server.
  • What server am I on?

Our Current Service Notices subforum  Feed

Validation

Validation of code and/or content is usually the key. The king (queen?) of validation tools and standards is the W3C:

• (X)HTML validation
• CSS validation (always check markup code before stylesheet, because that's the manner in which they interact and build upon each other)
• Link checker--validates the status of your site's internal and external links, rooting out link rot
  • All three of the above can be checked at once with the W3C's new Log Validator tool, prioritizing its results in order of seriousness.
  • For beginners, we recommend using the individual checkers first, until you become comfortable and familiar with their output and methods.
    • Manual for the Log Validator
    • Tutorial with screenshots
    • How to install and use the Log Validator
    • How to create new Perl modules for the Log Validator
• Feeds validation--will check either RSS or Atom
• Semantic validation--examines your website from a semantic viewpoint
• RDF validation
• XML Schema Validator
• P3P Validator--checks if the website in question is privacy-protocol-enabled, and, if so, if all is well
  

• WC3 now has a new validation logo chart, with 88px by 31px logo banners in both gold and blue, for the following languages: HTML and XHTML; CSS; MathML; SVG; and XML.

Another source for validation: feedvalidator.org — thanks to Mark Pilgrim ( Feed) and Sam Ruby ( Feed)

• About
• Documentation for specifications, errors, and warnings
• News
• How to download and install locally: based in Python
• Terms of Service

• Performing a traceroute to your sites' server

When your computers aren't behaving as they should

Advice

Our forums have a hierarchy of subforums for just this purpose:

• Computer Help ( Feed)
  • Macintosh ( Feed)
  • Linux ( Feed)
  • Windows ( Feed)

Before the Emergency: Be Prepared

It is possible to control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA and SCSI hard disks.In the hope of anticipating failures, SMART monitors and reports on various indicators of reliability including temperature, number of reallocated sectors and seek errors.

--cgsecurity.org

Open source options for SMART monitoring:

• For Macintosh: SMARTReporter
• For Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Darwin, OS/2: smartmontools

Emergencies

System Rescue Disk

The kernel of the system supports most important file systems (ext2/ext3, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, vfat, ntfs, iso9660), and network systems (samba and nfs).

In other words, be your computer Mac, Windows, or Linux, if it won't boot, this disk will boot it for you, and just might be able to assess, and even repair, the problem. If need be, it can be installed on a floppy or a USB stick. It saved my Ubuntu box this week, by letting me know that the failure to boot was related to the first signs of a slowly-dying hard drive. My data's safe, and I'm back up and running. --Carla Hufstedler 10:45, 1 February 2007 (EST)

• Page principale en français
• Página principal en español

This boot disk is a free service of sysresccd.org.

RIP: (R)ecovery (I)s (P)ossible Linux rescue system

It's available in several versions, including FreeBSD, a version that does not include X, and a network version. It also has an add-on that operates as a CD/DVD backup program. It can even be installed on a thumbdrive.

• self-extracting Windows .exe version

This boot disk is a free service of tux.org.

TestDisk

TestDisk is available for DOS, different flavors of Windows, different flavors of Linux, FreeBSD, and OSX.

• Using the TestDisk Recovery Utility to Recover a FAT32 'Lost' Partition by Daniel B. Sedory
  
• You can use TestDisk, plus PhotoRec (a digital photo rescue utility), dd, and dd_rescue thanks to the Knoppix Live CD.

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDROM and lost pictures (thus, its 'Photo Recovery' name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted.

These boot disks and utilities are free services of cgsecurity.org.

Related wiki links: How to back up your del.icio.us account; How to back up your Flickr account; How to back up your ma.gnolia account; Webmasters' Tools