Slashdot Mirror
Sysadmin Toolbox Top Ten
Linux.com is running a user writeup of several handy tools by an up-and-coming Linux user. It is always interesting to see how newer users are approaching system customization. What have some of the more seasoned Linux power-users and sys admins put in their "toolbox top 10", and why?
I only counted 6.
Torsmo
http://torsmo.sourceforge.net/
ImageMagick
http://imagemagick.org/
Aterm
http://aterm.sourceforget.net/
Root-tail
http://www.goof.com/pcg/marc/root-tail.html
Quod Libet
http://sacredchao.net/quodlibet
Transmission
http://transmission.m0k.org/
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
As the author even says in the first paragraph of the article, this is totally not a systems administrator's toolbox. BitTorrent clients, music players and tail aren't super helpful in making disk quotas or setting up DNS.
Not sure how useful Ethereal would be for everyone, but I know i've found it useful in debugging network issues.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
1. /bin/ls /bin/cp /bin/mv /bin/mkdir /bin/sh /bin/sed /bin/awk /bin/grep /bin/kill /bin/vi
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
I don't even need to follow this link to know that it is a waste of most anyone's time. Too many website, too little content. How about a slashdot story about that? The collapse of the web under its own morbid bulk of nothingness and sysadmin tool article crap.
Torsmo is dead and has been for some time. I'm the main dev for Conky, a continuation of torsmo with all its features plus other goodies. See for yourself @ http://conky.sourceforge.net/
Hi there
I find it one of my favourite tools for working on computers...linux or other
ls /usr/sbin/ | head -n 10
where are the rest of the items?
i only use rxvt-unicode. it's the only thing that will properly display the unicode text in the filenames of my Japanese music collection. :)
also, rxvt has another cool feature. aside from its shockingly minimalistic memory usage, run urxvtd and then urxvtc for every term you need open and it uses even less memory. what could possibly be better than that?
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
What a pile of shit article. Since when is a BitTorrent client needed for sysadmin work? Oh, right, he has used Linux since he was 11 so he has 3 years under his belt.
Trolling is a art,
Most of these utilities have little to nothing to do with system administration. There's a BT client, an MP3 player, ImageMagick (?), and a terminal app that he lists as just being "Faster." I realize he's just a kid but these utilities are silly and have little to do with sysadminning.
Signed,
A Curmudgeon
rooooar
Netcat - I use it for almost everything network related and I'm not a networking guru.
Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul Ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul
My absolute must-have tool is a perl script I wrote to rename files using a series of regular expressions. Because it's implemented in perl, the command-line regular expressions can be just as complex as a perl regular expressions. I use it as much as or more than as I use "mv" to rename files.
If it sounds interesting, you can find it here.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
The author mentions tools such as Image Majick. What do those have to do with being a sys-admin?
Has the term become so polluted as to mean anyone who runs a linux box? If this is the case then the term 'sys-admin' has become meaningless.
Probably not 10, but here are my top tools (linux based)...
Knoppix
Ethereal
NTOP
Nagios
nmap
joe
gcc
make
gdb
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
i'd rather say : 'omg hot sysadmin - look ma' i'm using linux - wanabee top ten showoff tools !!!11' this is rather disappointing coming from sites like /. or linux.com
- Cluestick, for lightweight attitude readjustment
- Clue-by-four, when the above doesn't work
- Baseball Bat of Obviousness, last resort
Top three, really.Having extra cables on hand helps. But you need to keep them hidden if you got people walking in asking to "borrow" a cable. I been in situations where I needed a 3' network cable but had to use a 100' network cable because the smaller cables were gone. Now I wish I could shoot all the twits asking for an extra laptop power supply.
This is hands down, by far, the most useless article I've read on Slashdot. And that includes the April 1st articles.
/. as the "sys-admin top 10".
Imagemagick? ATerm? A fucking bittorrent client? What is the definition of sysadmin?
Some guy decides to list apps he likes and it gets on
Bra-fucking-vo.
fak3r.com
Imagemagick, music players and BitTorrent clients? What kind of system administration is going on here?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Is it just me, or is the term "sysadmin toolbox" a bit off?
Sure, torsmo and root-tail are great at monitoring your computer, but calling ImageMagick a sysadmin tool sounds kinda strange to me.
Just my 5c.
Since when is a BitTorrent client needed for sysadmin work?
You're right - it's preposterous to think a sysadmin would want to download distro ISO's quickly.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Snort?
http://www.snort.org/
I'm surprised that's not on the list.
- emacs
- grep
- perl
- sed
- svn
- xml (manipulate XML from the command line)
- tar
- ssh (this one is fun: "ssh server tar -cf - directory | tar -xv")
- for (built-in bash command, one-line scripts from the command line are very useful)
- lsof (what processes have open network ports? why can't I unmount that disk?)
- wget
- ping
- telnet (test SMTP, HTTP, etc servers by hand)
- nmap
See also: Commonly used commandsThe stuff posted in the article was alright, and given the guy is 17, I'll cut him some slack. However, as a professional sysadmin for the last 10 years, I think I can whip up a good list of my favorite tools.
;)
Bash. If you don't know how to write a for-loop in bash to connect to all your hosts and make some changes, you don't know what you're missing.
SSH, with an agent and keys. If you get asked for the password every time you connect to a host with the above bash loop, you're missing on a very powerful tool. Passwords are a once-daily thing for me now, and that's only because my screen lock also kills my ssh agent.
Osiris. Because you should know what's happening on the computers you maintain. File integrity monitoring is a Good Thing. File integrity monitoring with a client/server architecture is a Very Good Thing.
Snort. Use snort. You have no idea what's happening on your network until you use snort. If you have desktop users, load up the bleeding-snort rulesets and be prepared to panic in horror as you see all the crapware flowing over your network.
Perl. With bash-fu. Like this: $ perl -i.BAK -pe 's/(http://192/\.168\.0)\.2/$1.3/' `find . -iname "*.htm"` You'll never look at sed again
Finally, if you've got a boss who will let you, rip out those expensive proprietary firewalls and replace them with OpenBSD on a Soekris solid-state computer. OpenBSD pf is a joy to work with, and for VPNs, ipsecctl can't be beat. You can literally VPN two remote networks together in about five minutes.
Causation can cause correlation
My favorites:
This space intentionally left blank.
The article's title says "My sysadmin toolbox", but the first paragraph says:
"They're not exactly my sysadmin toolbox -- more like my desktop enhancement kit."
Maybe the editor at linux.com is at fault? Who chose the title?
He must not have an users becaseu I fair to see any mention of 3lb deadblow hammer, clue by four, or IBM model "M" keyboard to be used as an attitude readjustment tool.
Intereting that the captcha for this comment is disarm.
fanout and fanterm
We use fanout to run wsadmin.sh and deploy apps across our WebSphere App servers. We were using the NDM but found custom scripts to be much more reliable. It's really handy for JspBatchCompile.sh as well.
Fanterm is just FUN. run fanterm against a list of servers and see how much.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
No snort for those subversive /. types.. ;)
Gui bittorrent clients. MP3 players. This isn't a sysadmin toolkit; this is a catalog of the links on his GNOME desktop.
My sysadmin toolkit is vi and man. If I need to download an ISO and it's available on bittorrent you know what I'll use? BITTORRENT. WTF do you need a gui for to download a file?
Things I wouldn't want to live without:
screen
ssh
bash or ksh; I don't care which
perl
sed and awk (I'm old, I should be using perl more, sue me)
ncftp (I know, it's practically gold-plated effemininity, but I like it)
vim
GNU grep
Everything else, I'm good with whatever the OS provides.
I love you, Brother Bob!
*bro-hug*
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Why wasn't multitail mentioned? MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). It can also monitor wildcards: if another file matching the wildcard has a more recent modification date, it will automatically switch to that file. That way you can, for example, monitor a complete directory of files. Merging of 2 or even more logfiles is possible. It can also use colors while displaying the logfiles (through regular expressions), for faster recognition of what is important and what not. It can also filter lines (again with regular expressions). It has interactive menus for editing given regular expressions and deleting and adding windows. One can also have windows with the output of shell scripts and other software. When viewing the output of external software, MultiTail can mimic the functionality of tools like 'watch' and such.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Aside from distro-specific tools (apt-get/emerge/etc) for package management, the above ten are the first things you should learn to use in a Linux environment.
Not necessarily in that order, though.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Hell, I'm 17 (primary platform since August) and I can give a better toolbox then that dmesg | tail + lsof: works wonders for diagnosing hardware problems. i use it w/ my DSL disc to figure out win-users problems nano (ducks for cover): decent text editor, i know i should be using vim. I personally think vim sucks for creating files, which i do a good bit of (taking notes) ssh: maintaining (or nethack'ing) my machine from a long ways away kill/killall: for when the need arises fish: top-notch shell, tab completion for nearly everything screen: for when i need more than one of above grml live cd: knoppix, but loses kde+friends for loads of console tools fetchmail + mutt: get my kill-lists^W tech support requests and lastly... DROD: when I need a break
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
The order is Function - Daemon - Tools
System Administration - syslog, logcheck - ls, cat, vi, grep, sed, awk, head, more, tail, the ability to pipe commands to commands "|", top, apt-get, dselect, rpm, rug, yum
Network Administration - iptables, snort, scandetd, arpwatch - ping, ifconfig, route, tcpdump, nmap, arp, arping, ethereal, ngrep, ssldump, dsniff, ettercap, hunt.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Managing windows with a Virtual desktop is the only way to play.
:]
By using Virtual desktops, having multiple tail windows open to view an appliation is not so bad.
Personally, I create a folder for each application with startup, shutdown shortcuts and tail execution shortcuts to each significant log file for the application I am testing.
This methodology works with x11 or win32 hacking / administration.
Now that I virtual desktop, I have don't know how I managed without them
JsD
that's all I'd add,
:)
in addition to what was already said.
Not really sysadmin-related.
(gqmpeg's the world's finest mp3 player
- Hubert
What would you recommend for monitoring all workstations bandwidth on different ports, maybe by monitoring switch ports where the workstations connect?
Thanks!
1) strace (Program stalling or not working with ambiguous error messages?)
2) nmap
3) sysstat utilities (sar, iostat, vmstat, etc)
4) python (my automation tool of choice)
5) grep/awk/sed (filtering output etc)
6) Nagios
7) DenyHost (log watcher that blocks hosts via deny.hosts file)
8) snort
9) screen
10) lsof (list open file discriptors (sockets, streams, and actual files))
As for those who keep saying "ImageMagick? What kind admin uses ImageMagick!" Well, I used to work for a e-commerice bookseller. We delt with millions of bookcover images and ImageMagick was a golden for mass manipulation of images. As for MP3 tools, I like my music why I work! Whats wrong with that? It's not essential for the job, but it is for my happiness.
i am a huge linux fan and wished either of my last two companies used it more...but since I was able to break linux in...here are some of the utilities/apps I find/found useful that WERE NOT built in! Sure vi or emacs is useful, but so is notepad and calc.... Webmin SSL Explorer phpMyAdmin smoothwall nagios (huge pia to me to setup though)
You neglect the fact that many Linux distributions now rely on bittorrent in preference to other protocols. Centos comes to mind.
In these cases, I use ctorrent. Very small, non-gui.
I like screen. You can type screen -S screenname and have an installation job run even while you are logged out. Hit Cntrl-A and D to detach. Then just type screen -r to resume a few days later.
Nevermind, you actually read the article and those are the programs mentioned in the article.
No particular order, also avoiding any flames about emacs or vi, I prefer vi from commandline and emacs in X. perl is great for everything but sometimes for something tiny awk/sed is good aswell.
GeekServ Unix Consulting Services (http://www.geekserv.com)
Don't know if he has but I use it for debugging all the time - it has a few bugs, but none are too bad.
I recommend the non sourceforge version for portability. Take a look for nc110.tgz (Google that and you'll get it - It's under the bsd license).
I've installed this on HP-UX (PA 2 and Itanium), Solaris 9, Tru64 versions 4 and 5, MacOS X 10.4 and Interix under Windows. It compiles with gcc and aCC on HP-UX. Can't say I've tried AIX though. Usually it compiles with no extra flags or options.
It is great for low level TCP/IP debugging, and also for very simple, quick mimicry of network systems and replaying of captured data. Also, you can pipe it to a file and capture network data with it!
I've used it on customer sites (take my Powerbook, plug it in - it works) and use it a lot at work. If you pipe a shell script through it you can model a lot of servers.
Anyway - if you need a hand getting it going on HP-UX I have the exact command in my history at work somewhere - drop me a msg/reply and I'll look it up.
I hate to flame, but what exactly does this have to do with system administration? This is more like 'a teenage (nothing wrong with that) linux user's desktop eye candy and mp3 playing tools'. Why exactly, is this a story?
In any case, here is my sysadmin tools (and this is somebody with four years system administration experience, but no means an "aged expert" but no neophyte):
1. Perl. The Swiss army knife of most *any* UNIX task. Self explanatory. (Most useful Perl modules for a sysadmin would be Net:: anything and a rather nifty one is Text::Tmpl, which is a very powerful text [not html specific] templating system. I've used to generate everything: from httpd configs to DNS zones to HTML).
2. rsync - no other file transfer tool ever comes close.
3. rrdtool - will graph anything you give it, which makes diagnosing bottle necks a lot simpler (once there's visual data to go use).
4. netcat (nc) - makes it extremely simple and fast to test network service, setup ad-hoc proxies.
5. tcpdump/ethereal - packet sniffers: self explanatory. Makes it easy to diagnose rather complicated issues.
6. lsof - "list open files". Great for figuring out what is using which files (excellent way to resolve deadlocks).
7. strace - diagnoses system calls. Helps to see why something isn't working the way it should be.
8. gdb - self explanatory, but there's tons of peoples who wouldn't know what to do with a coredump
9. netsaint (now nagios) - easy to setup, easy to deploy on a large network.
10. cvs/svn - useful even for a sys admin, since it allows you to keep track of any scripts/config files in a centralized repository.
11. (not needed for all sys admins, yet still extremely useful): minicom or kermit. For serial console.
Some of these are rather obvious, but this is more what I expected when I hear 'sys admin toolbox', instead of 'list of X11 applications which look cute'.
vi
it can make or break a linux system.sysadmin tools, indeed.
-jpeg
vi or your preffered variant thereof should be at the top of any admins toolbox list.
What is more annoying? A 17 year old trying to sound knowledgeable and important? Or that time you read the 43rd comment in a row about Bittorrent not being a Sysadmin tool? The real irony is that all you repetitive pricks are probably 14 yourselves...
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
54
1) Webmin
2) Webmin
3) Webmin
4) Webmin
5) Webmin
6) Webmin
7) Webmin
8) Webmin
9) Webmin
10) Webmin
http://www.webmin.com/
Many of those modules are really useful.
This article is only on slashdot because OSTG needed some more hits to round out this month's advertisment billing run (which is probably starting next week). I think this is proved by the inclusion of the word "sysadmin" in the title despite the obvious desktop nature of the content. Do you think for one second that this article would have been front page on slashdot if not for OSTG affiliation?
Norton
McAfee
Disk Defrag
Regedit
Spybot
Adaware
ctr-alt-del
Hard Reset
Reinstall Windows
Update
My neice swears by the above
Ehtereal is great and has saved me many hours diagnosing anything from network issues to application layer problems. Here are a few more I use constantly...
Netcat - In the original netcat readme he describes it as one of those tools that should have become a standard tool for Unix admins. Well, as of 2006, its basically achieved that status. It's one of the most useful network tools ever and nowadays most BSD and Linux distros come with it in a standard install.
Grep, cut, sed, awk, tar, gzip, sort, uniq, | (pipes), bash, [insert other small extremely useful command line tool] - These tools let me do things in 10 seconds it would take 10 minutes to do in a gui. I can't imagine these tools not being around in 10 years. They are the computer equivalent to a pencil and paper. So simple, yet so damn useful. It's nice to know that no matter how complex the world gets I can always go to a Unix box and get some real work done with these.
High level scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Bash) - It's nice to be able to scale down. If something's too complex for pipes, I like being able to write a useful, scalable, pipe-able, command line program in 30 lines.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Can any proper sysadmins (ie - people who are responsible for administering computers, preferably remotely) out there recommend a decent tool for snooping / logging my own machines TCP/IP traffic.
On a more general note maybe some nice kind slashdotters out there could actually post their Sysadmin Toolbox Top 10 essential programs.
As a long time linux home user who has just taken on a job where I have to admin a small rack (7, about to become 8) of machines I could do with some suggestions. Most are linux based machines but we have a couple of windows based ones and Remote Desktop sucks.
I dont read
Gotta give the kid some credit. At the rate he's going.. he'll be a real sysadmin one day. At least he's got the determination/will/dedication to learn. -Me
nmap is a "tool" used to break into other computers.
is that neat shaving cream can that contains a secret compartment to hold dinosaur eggs.
That'll work as long as the number of files matching your pattern does not exceed the bash command buffer space, which is suprisingly small on many systems (often 1 or 2 K characters).
Using your own example of renaming a bunch of camera files, this is much more bulletproof, yet still without the fat footprint of perl:
$ ls
MVCD-00050.JPG MVCD-00051.JPG
$ls | sed -n 's/MCVD\(.*\)JPG/mv MCVD\1JPG vacation\1jpg/p' |bash
$ ls
Vacation-00050.jpg Vacation-00051.jpg
If you want to do an entire volume or portion of a directory tree, I guess you could use find like so:
$find . -type f | sed -n 's/\(.*\)MCVD\(.*\)JPG/mv \1MCVD\2JPG \1vacation\2jpg/p' |bash
Note I had to stuff a couple extra backreferences in there to account for the paths. You can configure the number of directories to descend with find's -maxdepth and -mindepth options, and the -type f will prevent renaming of directories and links or indeed anything other than a garden-variety file.
Both examples skip files that don't fit the pattern MCVD(something)JPG silently. In the example with find, the regex should be tightened up to prevent matches on \dir\dir\MCVD\dir\dir\GLOP.JPG patterns but I will leave that as an exercise for the next poster (I'm too lazy to figure out the regex, no doubt something with [^\/] in it).
All this could be done with gawk instead of sed, but sed is probably the fastest way to get around the command line buffer size limitation. A gawk one-liner to do this would be a lot more comprehensible than the gobbleydegook that is sed and/or perl, but probably also a lot longer.
There are also some little-known string substitution operaters in the bash shell, so you could do the whole thing without calling anything but "bash" and "mv" if you really wanted to get clever.
I'd call it a useful, possibly appropriate one-liner. Not real elegant. But as you say, focus on the positive, and usefulness is the most important piece of elegance! Extreme scaleability is not always necessary for the task at hand.
Like you care?
ssh
grep
telnet
tcpdump
ifconfig
iwconfig (when needed)
And the Ubunto live CD! That CD rocks!
Yes this
ls | sed -n 's/MCVD\(.*\)JPG/mv MCVD\1JPG vacation\1jpg/p' |bash
is much easier than this
ren-regexp "s/JPG/jpg/" "s/MVCD/Vacation/" *
give the guy credit for trying to make things a little easier.
Who is John Galt?
Your comparison is not fair; ren-regexp is a script, the one-liner is just utility calls. Expose the code of ren-regexp if you want a fair typing contest.
Regardless, I was actually trying to comment on the other guy's bash loop (which doesn't scale) not on the ren-regexp perl script. I seem to have replied to the wrong post. D'OH!
I have no beef with someone making a script that makes their job more comfortable... especially if they write doco on it, that's true professionalism there! But it's more efficient for me in my job to use native tools rather than constantly porting a custom toolset from system to system. I create and erase various operating systems fairly often, and frequently sign on to other folks' systems just to set something up one time. Thus, for me, my way is less typing.
I was offering another way to do it, and not intending to denigrate anyone. Cool your jets.
tcpflow is amazingly useful. It nicely formats tcp coversations.
I tried to reply to your post with a more robust one-liner, but I somehow stupidly missposted it.
Bash file globbing is something I try to avoid, personally, because it frequently fails in very large directories. It's fine for one-liners when you are reasonably sure you are not going to overrun the line length limitation.
Woohoo, I'm a 17 year old who thinks that photo resizing, mp3 playback and alternatives to [a-z]term programs are what helps me administer servers.... Oh, wait a minute, I'm 17... I probably don't even have a REAL FUCKING JOB YET, so WHAT THE FUCK DO I KNOW?
I've twice tried to reply to the guy who offered the bash loop one-liner, pointing out that his code won't scale and offering alternative techniques.
Each time my post has showed up in the wrong place.
I give up. I dunno if the problem is my browser (FFox current stable) or with slashcode.
But anyway, I just thought you might wonder about the incoherent postings from me, and thought I'd offer an explanation. Since this post will probably end up appended to something about Natalie Portman dripping with hot grits, it's really just a symbolic gesture... but I tried.
Linux.com has been running these articles for a while now. Just search their site for "my sysadmin toolbox" and you'll get a bunch of articles from different folks. Most of the other articles are more technical in nature and some of them are from professionals that work with linux for a living.
It's actually a nice set of articles for those trying to pick up a few tricks here and there.
The submitter posted the most recent article, which happens to be more towards desktop use. There are much more appropriate examples, like this article here.
My top nine are all perl. The tenth is a sledge hammer.
Hard liquor would have made the list, but I use that for more than sysadminning.
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
dd
xxd
hping2
zcat
grep
strings
apropos
touch
nc
md5sum
You know what I found even better than Etheral: Nethack.
Yep, a user complains, I monitor the situation in Nethack for a while. Call the
user back, ask if the problem has resolved itself and 9 times out of 10, it has.
Nethack has gotten me out of some pretty tight spots. Just, a word of advice, don't eat your pet.
head defaults to showing ten lines; you don't need '-n 10'.
1. ruby (manipulating files is easier than perl, yeah, every other admin hates me for it)
:)
2. vi (emacs has more 3 finger salutes than a windows box with bad memory)
3. perl (I am not a bigot, best tool for the job)
4. ksh (for when you need a sh type script, this is the most portable)
5. ls, sort, uniq, cut, wc, ps, etc....
6. zsh (the last shell you will ever need, even bash does not compare)
7. screen (soooo handy when you need to patch boxes at 3 am, set things up so you hit enter and then go to sleep while your boxes patch)
8. cfengine (have more than 5 boxes? you need this, you just don't realize it yet)
9. guinness (you aren't an admin without a good ale or beer)
10. white russians (when the guinness fails)
11. a bat (keeps the users away
> If you want to do an entire volume or portion of a directory tree, I guess you could use find like so:
>
> $find . -type f | sed -n 's/\(.*\)MCVD\(.*\)JPG/mv \1MCVD\2JPG \1vacation\2jpg/p' |bash
Try that on files/directories containing spaces...(at your own risk)...
Max.
I couldn't have put it better myself.
You sir, made an old time unix geek smile.
Thank you.
Any tool to fix this problem? http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?sto ryid=127
Fantastic! I love it.
Reminds me of a story of the developer whose application had a very simple fixed speed animation in the main window. User complained of poor performance, so he recompiled the app with a faster animation. User then reported massive performance improvement.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
This is my list of utilities that I find that I'm most likely to want to use, that aren't already available on the system I'm working on:
:-). :-). ;-).
- rsync: keep files up-to-date over low bandwidths. great for to-disk backups with dirvish.
- netcat: open up an ad-hoc communication path between 2 machines.
- strace: I think this process is doing X, but is it really ?
- tcpdump: who is my computer talking to, and what are they saying ?
- wget: rather than downloading files with a browser, I often find it more efficient to "right-click/copy-link-location", then, in a console, cd to the directory where I want the file to go (I'm usually there already) and "wget -nd ". also useful for looking at http headers.
- xd: hex dump - much easier to read than the standard od. can also use it to modify binaries, if you're brave
- knoppix: my system won't boot, and I need an OS right **NOW**.
- openvpn: just starting to use this a bit lately, to bypass pesky firewalls
- sar: what's the load on the machine throughout the day ?
- dhcpstatus: thought I'd mention this 'coz I wrote it
Sorry if my addition to your title sounds harsh or off-hand, but I found the article to be interesting - and some of the comments also. I generally find Slashdot articles to be interesting and informative and, when I find something which doesn't interest me, I just skip it.
A care not a jot (or a tittle, for that matter) for their billing cycle or for their affiliations - not my business. All I ask of them is an interesting read, and the subject of this article interests me. Sounds like an interesting young fellow too - gives some hope for the up-coming generation, I think
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
I don't exactly know how much softwares I'm using, but in any case I don't want to limit myself to 10 just because /. has said so
When fiction hits reality, dreams have no air-bag.
SMART package manager, Checkinstall, and Kommander.
./configure make make install to drop random files all over the place.
Everything goes on my system via RPM. Sometimes I get the RPMS from APT, sometimes from YAST, sometimes from YUM, somtimes from a directory of RPMs.
Sometimes my RPMs are build from source tarballs (checkinstall). But this way, every piece of software on my system is managed via RPM, and this makes a huge difference from allowing
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
What did any of those have to do with system administration? A BitTorrent client, a music player, and X applications to show system activity aren't what I think of when I think "system administration". Someone needs to explain to this kid what real (read: people who get paid good money for their work) admins do in the way of adminly tasks, and how completely incongruous his list is.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
He seems to be a really big fan of putting everything to the desktop.. which may be just fine, but.. what the hell kinda busy ass background are you going to put up with? and everyone else has already noted that the title for this is terribly misleading. virtually none of these are real sysadmin tool (in the way nc or egrep or tar or ssh are tools).
even the magic 8 ball has an opinion on email clients: Outlook not so good.
I'm talking about the "Business" legitimacy, because this article is promoted as "Systems Administration", a business role (don't waste your time arguing that home users perform "Systems Administration" too, nobody but pros call it that). Say my CTO does a bit of research on his own, wanting to verify that effective tools exist for this new "Linux" thing I want to bring in. If he finds this, he's going to be rightfully concerned. While you might argue that the original site had no legitimacy, Slashdot (perhaps wrongly) does carry a certain amount of legitimacy.
Proper use of vocabulary is an important aspect of legitimacy, just take a look at all those Phish emails take reveal their dubious nature through their poor use of language. I applaud the promotion of tools for the home user, and I applaud the involvment of the young generation in the Open Source movement. I discourage the mis-identification of information almost as strongly as I discourage the distribution of bad information.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
/bin/kill should be at the top of the list, not #9.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Slashdot - the perfect place to file bug reports??
>> If you want to do an entire volume or portion of a directory tree, I guess you could use find like so:
>>
>> $find . -type f | sed -n 's/\(.*\)MCVD\(.*\)JPG/mv \1MCVD\2JPG \1vacation\2jpg/p' |bash
>Try that on files/directories containing spaces...(at your own risk)...
Like I said, that regex needs to be tightened up quite a bit. In the example, none of the files that needed to be renamed contained spaces so it should be something more like \(.*\)MCVD\([^\/\ ]*\)JPG which is pretty nasty due to all the escaping.
However, if you look into it (did you do the test?) you might find there is no problem; sometimes space-infested filenames move clean in a pipeline in Real Life [tm], I suppose because they get passed through the ARG array, or because bash does its substitutions on the command line first, before execution. I didn't do the test (still lazy) so I dunno... but your warning is well made, and best heeded!
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/