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Useful Utilities?

Posted by Cliff on from the what-tools-work-best-for-you? dept.

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?

4 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. My favorites by dubl-u · · Score: 4

    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.

    1. Re:My favorites by Cmdr.+Marille · · Score: 3
      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

      --

      "Mommy, mommy! The garbage man is here!" "Well, tell him we don't want any!" -- Groucho Marx
  2. my .02 dollars by crovax · · Score: 3

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


    --
    Spelling by m-w.com.

  3. IPSquint! by dualspeedhub · · Score: 3

    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. .