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.
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
a perl script I wrote to rename files using a series of regular expressions.
You realize that Larry Wall already wrote that a long time (14 years) ago and bundled it with the Perl sources, and it's installed on pretty much any Debian-based system (including Ubuntu), right?
$ head `which rename`
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
# This script was developed by Robin Barker (Robin.Barker@npl.co.uk),
# from Larry Wall's original script eg/rename from the perl source.
#
# This script is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
# under the same terms as Perl itself.
#
# Larry(?)'s RCS header:
# RCSfile: rename,v Revision: 4.1 Date: 92/08/07 17:20:30
$ tar ztf perl_5.6.1.orig.tar.gz | grep rename
perl-5.6.1/eg/rename
Whoops!
The 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
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I would add /usr/bin/sort to that list. I don't think I would be able to live without being able to do:
du -ks * | sort -nr
to find out how much each sub-directory is taking up.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
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.
Of course I know that, silly monkey. I've been a sysadmin and perl coder for eons. It was the limitations in those existing ren scripts that led me to create one with an expanded feature set (such as the ability to chain multiple regexps serially on the command line). :)
:)
Try out my version and compare it if you'd like. I only offer it to share resources with fellow sysadmins.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
If that's all the script did you'd have an excellent point. However, it's not and you don't.
It's funny. I usually share this and a couple other scripts on various website, including Slashdot, every few months. I'm always thrilled by others who take the time to post and share their related programs as well, discussing the different features they've implemented and why. This is the first time I've been hit with a barrage of disparaging remarks by simply offering code to the community. It's a strange thing to see in "linux.slashdot.org".
Michael.
Linux : Mac
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.
You can do the samething with mv.
/myjunk /dev/null
/bin/mv is going to perform a rename(2), which will fail with EXDEV if the source file is on a different file system from /dev, or fail with EACCES if you do not have write permissions to /dev, or succeed by replacing your null device (a character special file) with the source file.
mv
No, you can't.