League of Professional System Administrators - System management

func

doug — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:12:32 -0800

Short Description:
a generic remote launcher shell and building block tool

Home Page:
fedorahosted.org/func/

Release Date:
Thu, 2008-02-21 22:00

Status:
Active

Long Description:

Func allows for running commands on remote systems in a secure way, like SSH, but offers several improvements.

Func allows you to manage an arbitrary group of machines all at once.
Func automatically distributes certificates to all "slave" machines. There's almost nothing to configure.
Func comes with a command line for sending remote commands and gathering data.
There are lots of modules already provided for common tasks.
Anyone can write their own modules using the simple Python module API.

pdsh

doug — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:58:40 -0800

Short Description:
Pdsh is a high-performance, parallel remote shell utility

Home Page:
computing.llnl.gov/linux/pdsh.html

Release Date:
Mon, 2007-01-22 21:00

Status:
Stable

Long Description:

Pdsh is a high-performance, parallel remote shell utility. It has built-in, thread-safe clients for Berkeley and Kerberos V4 rsh and can call SSH externally (though with reduced performance). Pdsh uses a "sliding window" parallel algorithm to conserve socket resources on the initiating node and to allow progress to continue while timeouts occur on some connections.

Pdsh is similar to DSH, part of the IBM PSSP software offering, but offers improved performance and handling of error conditions. It runs on a variety of platforms (including as a replacement for DSH on AIX/PSSP), but is primarily developed on Linux.

hobbit

doug — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:08:00 -0700

Short Description:
Hobbit is a tool for monitoring servers, applications and networks

Home Page:
hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/docs/about.html

Release Date:
Sun, 2005-02-06 11:00

Status:
Stable

Long Description:

Hobbit is a tool for monitoring servers, applications and networks. It collects information about the health of your computers, the applications running on them, and the network connectivity between them. All of this information is presented in a set of simple, intuitive webpages that are updated frequently to reflect changes in the status of your systems.

Hobbit is capable of monitoring a vast set of network services, e.g. mail-servers, web-servers (both plain HTTP and encrypted HTTPS), local server application logs, ressource utilisation and much more.

SecureLinx Spider

doug — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:08:04 -0700

Short Description:
SecureLinx Spider provides secure KVM over IP (keyboard, video, mouse) management of servers over an IP network

Home Page:
www.lantronix.com/data-center-management/kvm-solutions/securelinx-spider.html

Release Date:
Wed, 2007-04-18 19:00

Status:
New

Long Description:

SecureLinx Spider™ provides secure KVM over IP (keyboard, video, mouse) management of servers over an IP network. Unlike traditional KVM switches on the market, Spider offers a flexible, scalable and affordable CAT5-based remote access KVM solution in a cable friendly, compact “zero-footprint” package.

The latest addition to the SecureLinx family of IT/data center management products, this KVM over IP solution eliminates server-to-switch CAT5 cable distance limitations, and gives system administrators non-intrusive and cost-effective 24/7 access to servers across a wide variety of IT/network environments: from mission critical servers in high-density data centers, to servers distributed over corporate campuses, multi-floor buildings, remote/branch office sites. Management access, from BIOS to applications, from any web browser anywhere, at any time… guaranteed.

ifinput

jm — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 16:12:20 -0700

Short Description:
A wrapper command to run another command if there is any output on stdout

Home Page:
www.generalconcepts.com/resources/software/

Release Date:
Wed, 2001-02-14 15:00

Status:
Stable

Long Description:

Often Unix system administrators need an easy way to redirect any stderr output generated from crontab entries to a specific email address. With the ifinput binary, it's simple. For example:

20 8 * * * /usr/local/sbin/daily_stuff.sh 2>&1 | /usr/local/bin/ifinput mailx -s "Error: daily_stuff.sh" system-errors@foo.org

Just arrange the crontab entries so that the periodic jobs don't generate stdout unless there's something interesting there. Then redirect stderr to stdout and pipe both to ifinput.

ifinput can be used in a variety of different scenarios, not just cron jobs.
The source code is available here: http://www.generalconcepts.com/resources/software/gctools-1.0.tar.gz
It has a very small footprint and will compile without issue on most unix systems.

shmux

doug — Thu, 31 May 2007 21:01:41 -0700

Short Description:
shmux is program for executing the same command on many hosts in parallel

Home Page:
web.taranis.org/shmux/

Release Date:
Sun, 2002-07-07 21:00

Status:
Mature

Long Description:

shmux solves a fairly simple problem that can be addressed
with a few lines of shell or Perl. This may lead you to think that using
shmux is total overkill, but shmux is a powerful tool
that offers many time and life saving features, so read on!

When used in a script:
- Ability to define what is and what is not an error for the command
  being run (based on exit code and output content)
- Output and exit codes are saved into files to facilitate use from a
  script.
When used interactively (directly on the command line, or from
within a script/wrapper):
- Well formatted output
- Standard error output displayed in bold
- Real-time status shown
- Ability to pause, resume, quit cleanly
- Automatically pause on error, allowing the user to cleanly stop
  before more goes wrong

tentakel

doug — Tue, 29 May 2007 06:17:09 -0700

Short Description:
Tentakel is a program for executing the same command on many hosts in parallel using ssh

Home Page:
tentakel.biskalar.de/

Release Date:
Mon, 2004-01-19 06:00

Status:
Mature

Long Description:

Tentakel has the following features:

Parallel execution of commands on several hosts.

Format strings that control how the output of the remote commands is about to be displayed and how the output of different hosts should be separated from each other.

A powerful configuration file that can be used to define groups of hosts. Such groups can contain other groups. Each group can be assigned a remote method, a username and a format string.

Easy extensibility to allow for different remote methods (currently only ssh and rsh are supported).

It does not try to be a complex Distributed Resource Management System (DRM) like the Sun Grid Engine or Condor. Tentakel aims to be useful mainly for administration purposes.

sar2rrd

doug — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 07:25:58 -0700

Short Description:
sar2rrd.pl is a Perl script that can be used to generate RRDTool graphs from sar output.

Home Page:
www.trickytools.com/php/sar2rrd.php

Release Date:
Thu, 2006-11-30 07:00

Status:
Stable

Long Description:

sar2rrd.pl is a Perl script that can be used to generate RRDTool graphs from sar output.

It creates a PNG Graph for each statistics group collected by sar. Version 2.0 handles both Linux and Solaris sar output. Each statistics of the group is represented as a single line in the graph.

Only the filename to parse is mandatory. This filename if produced by a command such as "sar -A -f filename"

Without any additional parameters, sar2rrd.pl creates graphs for the period of time specified in the given filename.

Before running the script, make sure the path to "rrdtool" command is correct.

Keyplex

drwilco — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 08:34:30 -0700

Short Description:
Keyplex is a keyboard multiplexer for X11 terminals. It will spawn a number of terminals, and relays all keystrokes to them.

Home Page:
keyplex.sourceforge.net/

Release Date:
Thu, 2007-03-08 08:00

Status:
New

Long Description:

Keyplex is a keyboard multiplexer for X11 terminals. It will spawn a number of terminals, and when it has focus it relays all keystrokes and mouse-button2 (paste) to them. Because the terminals can be used individually as well, this tool is ideal to simultaneously administrate multiple systems.

runit

doug — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 21:16:11 -0800

Short Description:
a UNIX init scheme with service supervision

Home Page:
smarden.org/runit/

Release Date:
Sat, 2002-06-01 08:00

Status:
Mature

Long Description:

runit is a cross-platform Unix init scheme with service supervision, a replacement for sysvinit, and other init schemes. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, MacOSX, Solaris, and can easily be adapted to other Unix operating systems. runit is discussed on the <supervision@list.skarnet.org> mailing list.

To subscribe send an empty email to <supervision-subscribe@list.skarnet.org>.

Mailing list archives are available at skarnet.org, and gmane.org. The program runit is intended to run as Unix process no 1, it is automatically started by the runit-init /sbin/init-replacement if this is started by the kernel.