I agree with Qbertino.
Trac (http://www.edgewall.com/trac/) will allow you to integrate Wiki/Versioning/Tickets/Roadmap/Timeline. This will work best in amongst the software developers, but may not be something the functional analysts will find familiar or easy. Although, I would imagine heavy adoption of this across the whole company would be the best situation for increasing productivity amongst the software developers.
If you're looking for something to handle the duties of Sharepoint and Microsoft Word, get Knowledge Tree and consider the professional version w/ Windows and Microsoft Office integration. This won't offer any direct benefits for developing software but will handle document management quite well, including versioning, checkout, etc.
Think about how you could use both. This will probably be your best solution.
Hey, thanks for replying to my question. I'm not sure what I was thinking with DNS actually. I must have been thinking of something particular to how our network is or how servers are setup, but I'm not sure. Either way, I may just been absent minded at the time, but I can't think of anything would be logical. =)
Will MSN be the default site/source used for search and homepage in IE 7, and MSNBC for news, etc. like MS has always done? I would assume that it would be... I think that has always been a problem with IE... in many ways. The dominance of using MS-created products instead of popular/superior third party resources. To get the most enjoyable experience you had to customize and tweak everything to make things convenient... like the Links toolbar in IE is annoying b/c it is filled with Microsoft related products and services that people rarely take the time to think of its usefulness.
As with any study, the same data can result in two (or more) different conclusions for the two parties looking at the information.
For instance, take a look at this sentence, "...Linux administrators took 68 per cent longer to implement new business requirements than their Windows counterparts." What if the Linux systems had 68% more functionality or more responsibility than required by the Windows systems?
Also, consider that many Linux systems are more crucial than the functions held by Windows systems. Even if the Linux and Windows systems carry the exact same responsibility and functionality, it can be expected that the Linux systems will require less maintenance to keep the machines running and reliable.
Furthermore, if we accept as fact that Linux does require more time than Windows, does the extra time spent implementing the Linux systems go without worth? Is the extra time spent worth it in the long run? In my experience, I would say yes.
Furthermore, I would love to see an article that focuses on some "lesser known tools" or "extremely useful that would save you a lot of time but no one talks about."
I don't think the tools he mentions are that interesting at all. In fact, many of the tools have nothing directly to do with sysadmin activities at all. I love abcde too, but what does have to do with Linux administration. GNU Screen does the same things as the default terminals that come with KDE (kterm) or Gnome (gnome-terminal), specifically one window tabbed consoles and detaching. The use of emacs or VIM or even nano is preference/needs based and could be the focus of an entire article, as it has been done before.
The only tool that was mentioned I found that I thought was worth mentioning was rsync. This is simply because it is not as well known as other tools. Although, its use has spread. I find people using scp or something else, manually or scripted, for things that would be handled much more efficiently with rsync.
To be fair, dig was worthy of mention, for the simple fact that many people who have become used to using nslookup don't know that another tool exists, perhaps even on their machine, that they may find more advanced. Also, pwgen could be useful, but not crucial by any means. I guess some of these tools may solve some annoyances people may have, but not necessarily working to improve or make the role of a sysadmin dramatically easier.
It would have been more useful to mention some monitoring tools or some web applications. For instance, tools that I would mention that help syadmin activities include the following:
- Cacti (http://www.cacti.net/ is a PHP application that uses RRDtool/SNMP to monitor server performance and usage (like disk space, CPU, load average, logged in users, and a lot more). - phpMyAdmin/phpPgAdmin/phpLDAPadmin - syslog-ng/php-syslog-ng (http://freshmeat.net/projects/php-syslog-ng/) - Gregarius (http://www.gregarius.net/) is an a nice web RSS reader. I use this to keep up with the latest version of software releases, a lot of times using the RSS feeds available for all SourceForge.net projects, or otherwise using a feed that may be available on the software's website. Tiny Tiny RSS is another nice RSS reader (http://bah.spb.su/~fox/tt-rss/)
Since I work on a university campus, web applications help a lot b/c I can be in any lab or at home or on any PC and know exactly what is going on with all systems and even the development of the software that is used on them (RSS). But web applications are usually considered useful because access to them is easy and sometimes leave less room for human error.
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I agree with Qbertino. Trac (http://www.edgewall.com/trac/) will allow you to integrate Wiki/Versioning/Tickets/Roadmap/Timeline. This will work best in amongst the software developers, but may not be something the functional analysts will find familiar or easy. Although, I would imagine heavy adoption of this across the whole company would be the best situation for increasing productivity amongst the software developers. If you're looking for something to handle the duties of Sharepoint and Microsoft Word, get Knowledge Tree and consider the professional version w/ Windows and Microsoft Office integration. This won't offer any direct benefits for developing software but will handle document management quite well, including versioning, checkout, etc. Think about how you could use both. This will probably be your best solution.
Hey, thanks for replying to my question. I'm not sure what I was thinking with DNS actually. I must have been thinking of something particular to how our network is or how servers are setup, but I'm not sure. Either way, I may just been absent minded at the time, but I can't think of anything would be logical. =)
Will MSN be the default site/source used for search and homepage in IE 7, and MSNBC for news, etc. like MS has always done? I would assume that it would be... I think that has always been a problem with IE... in many ways. The dominance of using MS-created products instead of popular/superior third party resources. To get the most enjoyable experience you had to customize and tweak everything to make things convenient... like the Links toolbar in IE is annoying b/c it is filled with Microsoft related products and services that people rarely take the time to think of its usefulness.
As with any study, the same data can result in two (or more) different conclusions for the two parties looking at the information.
For instance, take a look at this sentence, "...Linux administrators took 68 per cent longer to implement new business requirements than their Windows counterparts." What if the Linux systems had 68% more functionality or more responsibility than required by the Windows systems?
Also, consider that many Linux systems are more crucial than the functions held by Windows systems. Even if the Linux and Windows systems carry the exact same responsibility and functionality, it can be expected that the Linux systems will require less maintenance to keep the machines running and reliable.
Furthermore, if we accept as fact that Linux does require more time than Windows, does the extra time spent implementing the Linux systems go without worth? Is the extra time spent worth it in the long run? In my experience, I would say yes.
and some applications I find useful.
Furthermore, I would love to see an article that focuses on some "lesser known tools" or "extremely useful that would save you a lot of time but no one talks about."
I don't think the tools he mentions are that interesting at all. In fact, many of the tools have nothing directly to do with sysadmin activities at all. I love abcde too, but what does have to do with Linux administration. GNU Screen does the same things as the default terminals that come with KDE (kterm) or Gnome (gnome-terminal), specifically one window tabbed consoles and detaching. The use of emacs or VIM or even nano is preference/needs based and could be the focus of an entire article, as it has been done before.
The only tool that was mentioned I found that I thought was worth mentioning was rsync. This is simply because it is not as well known as other tools. Although, its use has spread. I find people using scp or something else, manually or scripted, for things that would be handled much more efficiently with rsync.
To be fair, dig was worthy of mention, for the simple fact that many people who have become used to using nslookup don't know that another tool exists, perhaps even on their machine, that they may find more advanced. Also, pwgen could be useful, but not crucial by any means. I guess some of these tools may solve some annoyances people may have, but not necessarily working to improve or make the role of a sysadmin dramatically easier.
It would have been more useful to mention some monitoring tools or some web applications. For instance, tools that I would mention that help syadmin activities include the following:
- Cacti (http://www.cacti.net/ is a PHP application that uses RRDtool/SNMP to monitor server performance and usage (like disk space, CPU, load average, logged in users, and a lot more).
- phpMyAdmin/phpPgAdmin/phpLDAPadmin
- syslog-ng/php-syslog-ng (http://freshmeat.net/projects/php-syslog-ng/)
- Gregarius (http://www.gregarius.net/) is an a nice web RSS reader. I use this to keep up with the latest version of software releases, a lot of times using the RSS feeds available for all SourceForge.net projects, or otherwise using a feed that may be available on the software's website. Tiny Tiny RSS is another nice RSS reader (http://bah.spb.su/~fox/tt-rss/)
Since I work on a university campus, web applications help a lot b/c I can be in any lab or at home or on any PC and know exactly what is going on with all systems and even the development of the software that is used on them (RSS). But web applications are usually considered useful because access to them is easy and sometimes leave less room for human error.
interesting