JRRZZ blog

I’ve read this article about the ten(?) most handy pieces of software you can use on a Linux box. I do not agree. I’m making a list of tools a sysadmin should have on his desktop. Here’s a list that makes more sense:

GNU tools

Ehm, imagine a Linux box without them. Does the term “GNU/Linux” ring a bell?

htop

Top is nice. Htop is better. Why? You can sort, tree view and kill within an nice colorful ncurses interface.

netcat

What ever you want to do on your network, netcat is your friend. It’s a transparent TCP tunnel for binary safe data transport. You can put data into it and take the same data out of it on the other side of the world. It does a lot of other tings too like network sniffing.

The P in “LAMP”

You need a scripting language like Python, Perl or PHP on your machine. You could use Bash for all your scripting but that’s simply not advisable. Ok, Ruby counts for all of you Ruby users.

Bash

Yes, I’m into Bash. What gives? This shell just works as I’d like it to work.

Aterm

I have to admit, this is the best X terminal emulator. Light, customizable and ehm, well, just good.

Fluxbox

You need a window manager to manage your Aterms. Fluxbox is light, fast and very workspace efficient. When you learn to work with the window tabbing thingy function you’ll be hooked. It works well with the X.org composite extension too.

OpenSSH

The Sysadmin has to admin his boxes on a distance without having to lay down lots of serial cables to access their shells. To make it secure and simple I’d use OpenSSH.

Mozilla Firefox

To visit my blog and Slashdot of course.

dnetc

The distributed.net client. All the real Sysadmins have some kind of heavy monster below their desks and only run XMMS and some Aterms on top of Fluxbox. Where do the other gigaflops go? Right: Distributed.net.

Tags: Tech //