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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.
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.
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
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!
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
- Cluestick, for lightweight attitude readjustment
- Clue-by-four, when the above doesn't work
- Baseball Bat of Obviousness, last resort
Top three, really.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.
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)
- 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
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.
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.
s/IBM model "M"/Sun Type 5/g
Without a doubt the most glorious keyboard in the world.
neuro at well dot com (when I post, it's my opinions, no-one elses)
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.
Ok, first, where'd you learn math? The guy says he is 17, and has used Linux since he was 11. Where I come from, that's 6 years, not 3. Second, he states in the first paragraph that is is more of a desktop enhancing toolkit rather than a sysadmin toolkit. The most you could rant about there is that he should have named the article more appropriately. Also, bittorrent is getting to be a useful sysadmin tool. It is valid method for getting ISO's of your distro of choice. And, although a client isn't necessary for this, tools like Systemimager are starting to use the torrent protocol for distributing images in a cluster install.
IANAL... But I play one on
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.
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.
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.