Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sysadmin Toolbox Top Ten

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the pick-your-poison dept.

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?

6 of 304 comments (clear)

  1. Nothing to do with systems administration by ximenes · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. My Top Ten by DrDitto · · Score: 5, Insightful

    1. /bin/ls
    2. /bin/cp
    3. /bin/mv
    4. /bin/mkdir
    5. /bin/sh
    6. /bin/sed
    7. /bin/awk
    8. /bin/grep
    9. /bin/kill
    10. /bin/vi

  3. Top 10? Here it is... by yuretz · · Score: 5, Funny

    ls /usr/sbin/ | head -n 10

  4. Toolbox? by Stavr0 · · Score: 5, Funny
    Let's see... *rummage* *rummage* *rummage*
    • Cluestick, for lightweight attitude readjustment
    • Clue-by-four, when the above doesn't work
    • Baseball Bat of Obviousness, last resort
    Top three, really.
  5. In no particular order: by commonchaos · · Score: 5, Interesting
    • 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 commands
  6. Tools for *actual* sysadmins by algae · · Score: 5, Informative

    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