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UNIX Hints & Hacks |
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Appendix D: Administration Tools and Recommended Organizations |
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Some of the best tools and resources available to system administrators are not commercial products but are available free on the Internet. This appendix contains a list of 30 freely available system administration, networking, and security tools that many top UNIX administrators utilized over the years. If you plan to use any of these tools, it is best to fully test them on a development system and not a production system first.
After the tools list, you'll find a list of fantastic organizations that UNIX administrators should think about being a part of. They can provide a wealth of information in helping you as a computer professional stay current in the industry.
AMANDA The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver. The AMANDA Web site describes this as "a backup system that allows the administrator of a LAN to set up a single master backup server to back up multiple hosts to a single large capacity tape drive. AMANDA users native dump and/or GNU tar facilities and can back up a large number of workstations running multiple versions of UNIX. Recent versions can also use SAMBA to back up Microsoft Windows 95/NT hosts." http://www.amanda.org
lsof Lists open files that are locked to running processes. This is a great tool for finding running processes and keeping you from unmounting a particular filesystem. It is also a useful tool in diagnosing which files may be out of control or running wild. ftp://vic.cc.purdue.edu/pub/tools/unix/lsof/README
Majordomo Described on the Majordomo Web site as "a program which automates the management of Internet mailing lists. Commands are sent to Majordomo via electronic mail to handle all aspects of list maintenance. Once a list is set up, virtually all operations can be performed remotely, requiring no intervention upon the postmaster of the list site." http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/
Mirror The Mirror 2.9 Reference Manual provides the following short description of this utility: "Mirror is a package written in Perl that uses the ftp protocol to duplicate a directory hierarchy between the machine it is run on and a remote host. It avoids copying files unnecessarily by comparing the file timestamps and sizes before transferring. Amongst other things, it can optionally rename, compress, gzip, and split files." ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/archives/perl/mirror/index.html
Perl A general-purpose programming language invented in 1987 by Larry Wall. It has become the language of choice for World Wide Web development, text processing, Internet services, mail filtering, graphical programming, systems administration, and every other task requiring portable and easily-developed solutions. It is a must to learn if you are a system administrator. http://www.perl.com/pace/pub/perldocs/latest.html
Procmail The Procmail FAQ describes this utility as "a mail processing utility that can help you filter your mail, sort incoming mail according to sender, subject line, length of message, keywords in the message, etc." There are so many ways that mail can be manipulated with this program that the list is too great for this book. It is a must-have. http://mirror.ncsa.uiuc.edu/procmail-faq/
RDist As the MagniComp RDist home page says, "this program will maintain identical copies of files over multiple hosts. It preserves the owner, group, mode, and mtime of files if possible and can update programs that are executing." http://www.magnicomp.com/rdist/
Sendmail This is a replacement for the sendmail that the vendor installs on your system. This version includes all of the latest patches. http://www. sendmail.org/
SysInfo "Displays various types of information about a host's hardware and operating system (OS) software. It is intended to provide information in both human readable and program parsable formats that can be used by system administrators. SysInfo can also obtain hardware asset information and OS configuration information." (From the MagniComp SysInfo home page) This program or one similar should be ran one every system in your environment. http://www.magnicomp.com/sysinfo
SymbEL (SE) The Sun Microsystems SymbEL Web site describes this as "an interpreted language that provides an extensive toolkit for building performance tools and utilities. If you are fed up with the limitations of vmstat, iostat and sar, then this is tool for you." http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/performance/se3/
TTY-Watcher The TTY-Watcher Readme document describes this utility as one which "allows a user or administrator to monitor every tty session on the system, as well as interact with them." ftp://coast.cs.purdue.edu/pub/tools/unix/ttywatcher/
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UNIX Hints & Hacks |
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Appendix D: Administration Tools and Recommended Organizations |
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