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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.
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.
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.