League of Professional System Administrators - Operating System

10 Ultimate Rules for Effective System Administration

spp — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:04:18 -0700

I saw on one of the news sites (Slashdot or OSNews, forget which exactly) a story about the following 10 Essential Rules for System Administrators. These are mostly pretty basic and many of them are not really SA specific. I'm not certain that "backup regularly" and "test your backups regularly" are deserving of being two separate rules; I consider that testing backups is part of the overall backup process.

One thing I thought was kind of interesting was the timing of this coming out with the number one rule being "Keep it Simple" and my first Black Belt System Administration topic "A punch is just a punch", which is not specifically about system design but about sticking with the basics.

Radmind

umeditor — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 08:46:27 -0800

Short Description:
Remote Administration Daemon

Home Page:
radmind.org

Release Date:
Tue, 2002-03-26 21:00

Status:
Mature

Long Description:

A suite of Unix command-line tools and a server designed to remotely administer the file systems of multiple Unix machines. For Mac OS X, there's also a graphical interface.

At its core, radmind operates as a tripwire. It is able to detect changes to any managed filesystem object, e.g. files, directories, links, etc. However, radmind goes further than just integrity checking: once a change is detected, radmind can optionally reverse the change.

Each managed machine may have its own loadset composed of multiple, layered overloads. This allows, for example, the operating system to be described separately from applications.

NMAP

dklein — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 09:50:04 -0800

Short Description:
Fast enumeration of network services

Home Page:
insecure.org/nmap

Release Date:
Sun, 2007-01-14 10:00

Status:
Active

Long Description:

Nmap is a powerful tool for discovering hosts on a network and enumerating what service they are offering. This can be used to find vulnerable systems, to locate rogue services on your network or simply for a first step in troubleshooting.

screen

scm — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 12:25:36 -0700

Short Description:
screen - screen manager with VT100/ANSI terminal emulation

Home Page:
www.gnu.org/software/screen/screen.html

Release Date:
Sat, 2000-01-01 00:00

Status:
Mature

Long Description:

Ever been disconnected from your ssh session while in the middle of something? Ever wished there was a way to reconnect to that lost ssh session? Screen is for you..

Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes. In fact, when you execute screen, you can imagine that you turned on another screen to the server that you're working on. You then execute your process on that virtual screen, detach your connection from it and return, whenever you please, to that screen in order to continue working.

Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells. Each virtual terminal provides the functions of the DEC VT100 terminal and, in addition, several control functions from the ANSI X3.64 (ISO 6429) and ISO 2022 standards (e.g., insert/delete line and support for multiple character sets). There is a scrollback history buffer for each virtual terminal and a copy-and-paste mechanism that allows the user to move text regions between windows. When screen is called, it creates a single window with a shell in it (or the specified command) and then gets out of your way so that you can use the program as you normally would. Then, at any time, you can create new (full-screen) windows with other programs in them (including more shells), kill the current window, view a list of the active windows, turn output logging on and off, copy text between windows, view the scrollback history, switch between windows, etc. All windows run their programs completely independent of each other. Programs continue to run when their window is currently not visible and even when the whole screen session is detached from the users terminal.

Graphing with R

stuartf — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 07:15:49 -0700

I wanted to know who was using our DNS servers for recursive lookups from off campus. Getting all the data together for this wasn't hard, but once I had it it was difficult to read, so I made a graph of it. Here's how:

First I got all the data into a csv file one datapoint per line and a header line, it looks like:

asn, queries, hosts, name 11888, 0.031, 0.006, Television Internacional S.A. de C.V. 5552, 0.006, 0.006, DIALNET-UK DIALnet PLC

The asns and names are pulled from Cymru, queries is the average number of queries from that netblock per day since we started monitoring, and hosts is the average number of unique IPs querying per day since we started monitoring. Getting the data into this format is left as an exercise for the reader (you probably want to graph something completely different anyway.

Dtrace quick reference

doug — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 12:59:34 -0700

Short Description:
DTrace Quick Reference Guide

Home Page:
developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/dtrace_quickref/dtrace_quickref.html

Release Date:
Thu, 2006-09-21 12:00

Status:
New

Long Description:

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing facility that is built into the Solaris OS. DTrace can be used by administrators and developers, and can safely be used on live production systems. DTrace enables you to examine the behavior of user programs as well as the behavior of the operating system. Users of DTrace can create custom programs with the D scripting language. Custom programs provide the ability to dynamically instrument the system. Custom programs provide immediate, concise answers to specific questions about the behavior of particular applications.

phpLogCon

doug — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 20:54:20 -0700

Short Description:
phpLogCon is a web interface to syslog and other network event data.

Home Page:
www.phplogcon.com

Release Date:
Wed, 2005-08-10 20:00

Status:
Active

Long Description:

phpLogCon is a web interface to syslog and other network event data. It provides easy browsing and some basic analysis of realtime network events. Depending on the applications feeding the database, it can process Windows event log entries and even SNMP trap data - just to name a few.

phpLogCon is part of Adiscon's MonitorWare line of monitoring applications. It runs both under Windows and Unix/Linux. The database can be populated by MonitorWare Agent, WinSyslog or EventReporter on the Windows side and by rsyslog on the Unix/Linux side. phpLogCon itself is free, GPLed software (as are some other memebers of the product line).

rsyslog

doug — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 20:47:42 -0700

Short Description:
Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd supporting, among others, MySQL, syslog/tcp, RFC 3195, permitted sender lists, fil

Home Page:
www.rsyslog.com

Release Date:
Fri, 2005-09-23 20:00

Status:
Active

Long Description:

Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd supporting, among others, MySQL, syslog/tcp, RFC 3195, permitted sender lists, filtering on any message part, and fine grain output format control. It is quite compatible to stock sysklogd and can be used as a drop-in replacement. Its advanced features make it suitable for enterprise-class, encryption protected syslog relay chains while at the same time being very easy to setup for the novice user. An optional web interface - phpLogCon - can be used to visualize all data online.