Linux.com | My sysadmin toolbox

Here's a useful Top 10 list of system administration tools courtesy of Linux.com. These kinds of fluff pieces have two uses: one, stroking your ego by showing that, no, you aren't the only person in the world who uses vzigfinder-3.48; and two, by letting you crawl out from under your rock so you can learn that there's some neato tools you've never heard of before.

No one cares about some sysadmin's toolbox. So here's mine. You'll note a good bit of overlap between mine and his:

1. OpenSSH: A totally free, state-of-the-art secure remote access server/client combo. Don't leave /home without it.

2. rsync: Get files from here to there, in pieces if necessary. Superior to both scp and FTP.

3. bzip2: An elite compression utility that makes gzip look gay by comparison.

4. daemontools-0.76: Dan Bernstein's own personal answer to /etc/rc.* and inittab. You can run just about any program under its supervision and control it with the "svc" command.

5. NTP: David Mills's protocol will synchronize a computer's system clock. An unsynchronized computer is a fucking waste of electrons.

6. GNU screen: Fucking awesome. If you don't like it, then you don't use it. I would barely call what I do with it "usage", and I still think it's the best thing since sliced bread.

7. djbdns-1.05: DNS tools for people who think Paul Vixie needs to be shot. Another Dan Bernstein ubertool, you can use as much of djbdns as you want and still be happy. Don't want a server? Don't install it. Don't want a resolver? Don't install it. You'll still have dns{ip,ipq,q,qr,name,mx,txt,trace}. These tools are all replacements for ISC's "dig" command that don't require screwy syntax. And another thing: djbdns has had zero security vulnerabilities since its inception in 2001.

8. checkmail: I plead guilty on this one. You've never heard of checkmail because I'm actually the one who wrote it. It's a Python script that checks for new messages in a recursive Maildir-style mail store. If you want it, ask nicely.

9. formail/reformail: These two unrelated programs are great for hacking apart e-mail messages. I'll use either of them in conjunction with safecat to turn an mbox into a Maildir.

9.5. safecat: The best way to put stdout into a unique filename on disk. safecat is Leonard Budney's attempt to take Maildir-writing out of the hands of qmail and Postfix and put it into scripts.

10. sudo: Invaluable! sudo doesn't just let me become the superuser without having to enter a password, it lets me become other people. Need to turn on a vacation feature for Jim? "sudo -u jim /var/qmail/bin/vacation". Can't live without it.