Free Qantas Frequent Flyer Membership

Note that we're talking about the $89.50 QFF membership and not the Qantas Club that gives you access to the airport lounges. THAT one costs $540 for a one-year membership, PLUS a once-off joining fee of $399. Wow!

Unlike Qantas Club, you can actually get QFF membership for free. As of this writing, there seems to be two registration links:

https://www.qantaspoints.com/join-now
AND
https://www.qantas.com/fflyer/dyn/joinff

Easiest way to get free QFF membership is to register using a foreign country. Membership fee is only charged if you're from Australia or New Zealand. Once the application has gone through, simply log in and change your address/country to the real one.

If you have kids aged 3 to 11, they can join the Joey Club, which comes with free QFF membership. They also get a welcome pack, including a Joey Club passport. Sign them up here.

There are also lots of online codes that gets you free membership, e.g. https://www.qantaspoints.com/join-now?code=FAMILYFREE

If FAMILYFREE doesn't work for some reason, feel free to try the below codes. They are known to work before:

• WOOLWORTHS
• BANKWEST
• CBA
• ANZ
• AMEX
• HSBC
• DINERS
• AVIS
• NAB
• UBER
• DISCOVER
• EVENTS
• JETMAIL
• BUDGET

Do note that these codes seem to only work with the first qantaspoints.com URL, and not the second qantas.com one.

The last time I tried applying for QFF, the website sort of just hangs with a circle that goes round and round forever. The registration page never gave an acknowledgement that the application was received or successful. That said, I did get a QFF card in the post a week later. Other people mentioned that you'll need to fill in ALL the blanks on the web form for registration to work. YMMV.

Memory, CPU and Processes in Linux

Got an alarm about this server having high CPU usage. From experience, I know it's usually due to memory exhaustion.

How to check memory usage in Linux?

[root@server ~]# free
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        2097152      482772     1614380           0           0     1614380
Swap:       2097152           0     2097152
[root@server ~]# free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           2048         471        1576           0           0        1576
Swap:          2048           0        2048

Can also read /proc/meminfo file.

[root@server ~]# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:   2097152 kB
MemFree:    1601748 kB
MemShared:        0 kB
Buffers:          0 kB
Cached:           0 kB
SwapCached:       0 kB
Active:           0 kB
Inactive:         0 kB
HighTotal:        0 kB
HighFree:         0 kB
LowTotal:   2097152 kB
LowFree:    1601748 kB
SwapTotal:  2097152 kB
SwapFree:   2097152 kB

You can use top command to get BOTH memory and CPU usage.
If have a newer Linux distribution, you can also use htop, which organizes the information better.

With top, the processes are sorted according to decreasing CPU usage. If you happen to be running Java apps, expect extra long paths and command lines that are truncated. To see the complete command, use the -vv switch (very verbose) to wrap around the output.

To view the processes organized in a tree diagram, which shows the relationships among the processes, use the pstree command.

Output showing garbled or strange characters? That's probably because the system is using the default UTF-8 language/character encoding. If you're too lazy to change the encoding, just use the -A (ASCII) switch.