Useful Utilities?

kberkit asks: "I've just started as a Web designer/Swiss-army-knife, In the crash course of my travails, I've come across some nifty online tools: traceroute to find out what route and how long my Web pages are taking to load to outside servers; DNS lookup, to figure out what IP address a page is coming from; and online HTML validators to make sure my code is clean. I'm sure this is old hat to a lot of Slashdotters, but I'd be interested in knowing what other online tools others would suggest for us poor schleps who find ourselves expected to work miracles with little budget for proper software." For those of you who like traceroute and ping, may I recommend mtr as a supplement for your toolbox? What other small utilities have you all found useful in your day-to-day work lives?

Comments

Re:traceroute under Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't... It simply isn't under the default path for normal users on a few distributions.

The simplest thing to do would be symlinking it into /usr/bin.

some utils...

[Tumbleweed]

weblint, for one - this checks your HTML for validity. You'd be surprised how many sites, including really popular ones, use amazingly crappy HTML (*cough* Slashdot *cough*).

Another one is pngcrush - if you're creating png graphics, they're probably not as small as they could be - pngcrush will optimize the compression without messing with the # of colours in the graphic. Nice.

Another useful thing is to get a BUNCH of browsers, really old ones, too, for testing. I test from Navigator 2.x through the current, and MS IE 3.x through the current. With MS IE, that requires either multiple partitions or multiple machines - 3.x and 4.x don't install onto the same machine *sigh*. Also - don't forget Windows & Macs! Macs are very different, especially in how they render fonts, so test on Macs (Nav & IE there, too!). I had one site that wigged-out _only_ on Nav 4.5 for Mac. Weird. And scripting can get strange on different versions of IE - once had a site's javascript break _only_ on a particular version of IE 3.x for Windows _NT_ only. Strange strange strange.

You would do very well to code for XHTML rather than HTML - it forces you to get into good coding habits since it's rather particular (to put it mildly) about what's valid and what isn't. XHTML supposedly works down to second generation browsers.

Another good thing to test with is 'Bobby' - this is a program that tests for accessibility (for those with disabilities). Most of the web is an accessibility nightmare, unfortunately.

Okay, that's it - sorry no URLs right now...

A great site performance tool

[crisco]

I find tracert.com a greatsite for multiple site performance checks, up to ten sites at a time for free, all wrapped up in a nifty report.

Only thing, the domain name is misleading, as you don't get a traceroute but a measure of the time it took for a page to completely load.

Its great to compare and check webhosts and such. You find one with a great bunch of features but check it a few times during the day and find that their connectivity is pretty shoddy, now you know why the price was too good to be true.

Re:my .02 dollars

[dubl-u]

Although I'm also fond of WebImage, it hasn't been updated in three years. After I gave these guys my money, I never heard a peep out of them until yesterday, when they spammed me.

Oh, sorry, they put me, without asking, on an "opt-in" news headline list, where they get revenue for every clickthrough. And even better, I can sign people up for it and get money for their clickthroughs! Feh. And when I contacted them, they of course told me that since I had given them my e-mail in 1997 (where the require it on every order), that they had put me on their "marketing" list. And since I was a customer, it couldn't be spam!

So beware of doing business with Group42.

My favorites

[dubl-u]

Given that you're posting around here, I'm guessing you have a Linux box handy. Here are some of my favorite sysadmin tools:

• dig - This is a more advanced tool for seeing what's going on with DNS.
• nmap - A great tool for probing your server to make sure you haven't left anything open.
• Apache Bench (ab) - This simple but effective benchmarking tool comes with the Apache server. It's great to see how your site will perform under load.
• wget - a tool for remotely getting web pages; it's very versatile -- you can even use to save a copy of your whole site, just in case.
• Ethereal - Having trouble figuring out what's going on between the browser and your server? This will capture all the packets and decode them into a nice conversation for you.
• vmstat - want to know why your server is slow? Get used to watching the vmstat numbers while it's fast, so you can see what's different when it's slow. It's raw numbers that are hard to interpret, but it's worth getting to know. Maybe this should be another Ask Slashdot question?
• Netsaint - this is my favorite automatic monitoring package. Once your site is in production, you can set this up to patrol things and make sure everything is working. That lets you get on with other stuff, knowing you'll hear about trouble pronto.
• MRTG - A tool that makes excellent long-term graphs of bandwidth use.
• IPtraf - Where MRTG gives you the broad overview, this gives you the second-by-second nitty gritty.
• perl - Last but most is Perl, a Swiss Army chainsaw of languages. If you'll be doing any web stuff, pick up a copy of Learning Perl and spend a little time with it. Once you learn the magic of regular expressions, you will never again say "that's impossible!" to a problem.

As far as non-sysadmin stuff goes, here are some of my other favorites:

• Bugzilla - this is a free and flexible bug tracking system. Highly recommended, especially for those people who don't think they need a bug tracking system. Our designers thought it was silly to start, but even they use it all the time now.
• CVS - Like bug tracking, most web sites don't think they need version control. Most web sites are wrong! CVSweb is also recommended.
• HTML Tidy - bad HTML in, good HTML out.
• WebTV Simulator - Sure, you and I don't use WebTVs, but a lot of people do. Browse your site with this to see how the other half surfs.
• VMWare - Along similar lines, VMWare is a Windows box emulator. I use it to keep a bunch of synthetic windows machines with a variety of OS versions and browser versions. It makes QA much easier.

And if there are particular tasks that have you stumped, come back and ask again. 'Round these parts, we have big toolboxes.

Re:My favorites

[Cmdr. Marille]

nice roundup just two other tools

Cricket - pretty much the same as mrtg, but a lot more advanced, based on rrdtool, in my opinion a lot more powerful then mrtg and easier to manage

NTOP a sniffer with a web interface, check out one of the newer snapshots. REALLY useful, probably one of the most useful programs i have ever come around(network admin wise) both are web based

Re:traceroute under Linux

[lizrd]

It doesn't... It simply isn't under the default path for normal users on a few distributions.

While the later part of this statement is true and solutions have been suggested by other posters the former part is not true. traceroute does have to be run as root. On most distros it is installed as a suid program. To my knowledge this is safe since it is a well tested program without any expliot problems.
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my .02 dollars

[crovax]

• XML validator
• Merriam-Webster dictionary
• www.wdvl.com/Authoring/
• WebImage
• gifoptimizer.com
• WS_FTP
• Cute HTML
• CGi documentation

The dictionary and gifoptimizer.com are the ones I use the most.

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Spelling by m-w.com.

A stopwatch

[Paul Boutin]

It's great to have tools that estimate the load time of your Web pages, but on every project I've worked on, using an inexpensive handheld stopwatch to measure the waiting times observed by humans (which is, usually, what you really care about) made the difference between a well-trafficked site and one that made surfers reach for the back button -- our server logs would show instant differences in traffic when we put out better optimized interfaces. I just read a study that said 1 in 5 e-shoppers who abandon shopping carts before buying do so because the site was loading too slowly. Automated test software often misses factors such as page layout time, network interaction between server and client (try reading Slashdot posts on Mac IE5), and real-world hiccups that can't be extrapolated by parsing a file from your test server.

Here' an article on site optimization I wrote a couple of years ago.

Syntax Highlighting Code Editor

[StandardDeviant]

I can't count the number of times (in HTML or in any other language) I've accidentally left off the closing part of something (a tag, a comment, whatever) and inadvertantly nullified half of the file. Syntax highlighting is remarkably effecitve at preventing this and making you more productive overall (e.g. questions of "is that the right way to spell that reserved word" are moot when it's a different color when it's right).

On windows, my favorite programmer's editor ($20, 30 day trial shareware) is EditPlus. Small, fast, incredibly featureful and easy to extend. On Unix, Vim is the way to go (small, fast, simple interface you could learn in 10 minutes, syn coloring, etc.). If you're connecting into a remote unix machine to edit your code, check to make sure (ask the admins if need be) that your terminal emulator on the client machine is et right to support color (e.g. xterm-color for the $TERM variable).

If you're using windows and want a good free SSH and SCP (like a secure, network aware version of cp(unix)/copy(dos)), check out PuTTY SSH. Putty supports setting the TERM variable on login like I mentioned above. You can also use SSH to "tunnel" other applications over the encrypted stream (like FTP, checking mail, rsync, CVS, X11, etc etc.), but that's beyond the scope of this post (see the docs or do a web search).

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Why traceroute, like ping, runs suid root.

[yerricde]

AFAIK, both ping and traceroute use ICMP (internet control message protocol). On most systems, the ICMP socket is privileged such that only root can use it. Some systems tend to have sophisticated access control lists, for instance giving ping.exe and traceroute.exe access to a certain number of ICMP packets per minute.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

IPSquint!

[dualspeedhub]

Not really of course, but if you're in Bastard Operator From Hell mode, it's good for having fun with.

"You're still having IP conflict problems? See if you can Ping anything. Hmmm. Is it a Windows box? Run IPConfig - anything unusual? OK, try IPSquint; it's a bit more powerful. You've not got it installed? Odd."

Cue some Moe the Barman style fun as one of the developers goes on the hunt for a mythical app called IPSquint. .