Comment Hate to flame... (Score 1) 304
I hate to flame, but what exactly does this have to do with system administration? This is more like 'a teenage (nothing wrong with that) linux user's desktop eye candy and mp3 playing tools'. Why exactly, is this a story?
In any case, here is my sysadmin tools (and this is somebody with four years system administration experience, but no means an "aged expert" but no neophyte):
1. Perl. The Swiss army knife of most *any* UNIX task. Self explanatory. (Most useful Perl modules for a sysadmin would be Net:: anything and a rather nifty one is Text::Tmpl, which is a very powerful text [not html specific] templating system. I've used to generate everything: from httpd configs to DNS zones to HTML).
2. rsync - no other file transfer tool ever comes close.
3. rrdtool - will graph anything you give it, which makes diagnosing bottle necks a lot simpler (once there's visual data to go use).
4. netcat (nc) - makes it extremely simple and fast to test network service, setup ad-hoc proxies.
5. tcpdump/ethereal - packet sniffers: self explanatory. Makes it easy to diagnose rather complicated issues.
6. lsof - "list open files". Great for figuring out what is using which files (excellent way to resolve deadlocks).
7. strace - diagnoses system calls. Helps to see why something isn't working the way it should be.
8. gdb - self explanatory, but there's tons of peoples who wouldn't know what to do with a coredump
9. netsaint (now nagios) - easy to setup, easy to deploy on a large network.
10. cvs/svn - useful even for a sys admin, since it allows you to keep track of any scripts/config files in a centralized repository.
11. (not needed for all sys admins, yet still extremely useful): minicom or kermit. For serial console.
Some of these are rather obvious, but this is more what I expected when I hear 'sys admin toolbox', instead of 'list of X11 applications which look cute'.
In any case, here is my sysadmin tools (and this is somebody with four years system administration experience, but no means an "aged expert" but no neophyte):
1. Perl. The Swiss army knife of most *any* UNIX task. Self explanatory. (Most useful Perl modules for a sysadmin would be Net:: anything and a rather nifty one is Text::Tmpl, which is a very powerful text [not html specific] templating system. I've used to generate everything: from httpd configs to DNS zones to HTML).
2. rsync - no other file transfer tool ever comes close.
3. rrdtool - will graph anything you give it, which makes diagnosing bottle necks a lot simpler (once there's visual data to go use).
4. netcat (nc) - makes it extremely simple and fast to test network service, setup ad-hoc proxies.
5. tcpdump/ethereal - packet sniffers: self explanatory. Makes it easy to diagnose rather complicated issues.
6. lsof - "list open files". Great for figuring out what is using which files (excellent way to resolve deadlocks).
7. strace - diagnoses system calls. Helps to see why something isn't working the way it should be.
8. gdb - self explanatory, but there's tons of peoples who wouldn't know what to do with a coredump
9. netsaint (now nagios) - easy to setup, easy to deploy on a large network.
10. cvs/svn - useful even for a sys admin, since it allows you to keep track of any scripts/config files in a centralized repository.
11. (not needed for all sys admins, yet still extremely useful): minicom or kermit. For serial console.
Some of these are rather obvious, but this is more what I expected when I hear 'sys admin toolbox', instead of 'list of X11 applications which look cute'.
