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Absolutely Fabulous Free and Open Source Tools for Unix Geeks
It takes a lot of really good tools to effectively shepherd a herd of
computer systems. Here's a list of some of the tools I can no longer
live without.
- FreeBSD - free open-source Unix-type operating system
- zsh - the shell with the mostest
- Emacs - minutes to learn, decades to master
- Perl - unix-flavored cross-platform scripting language
- screen - a must-have if you spend time at the command line
- gpg - pretty good privacy
- Bacula - cross-platform backup software
- Tomcat - Java servlet container
- truss and ktrace - trace system calls
- mrxvt - lightweight, powerful multi-tabbed terminal emulator for X
- Xterm256 - 256 color xterms
- dtrace - serious dynamic tracing fu for the Solaris (and FreeBSD)
- lsof - list open filehandles in use by a process
- Fuse and SSHFS - great for mounting FileSystems with only an SSH account on the remote host
- Fink - open source package management for OSX
- mplayer and VLC - excellent open-source video players
- Xen - run multiple guests operating systems on a single machine (i686-class CPUs)
- XmlStarlet - command line utilities to transform, query, validate, and edit XML
- monitoring
- Nagios - open source host, service, and network monitoring program
- GRID::Panoptes - self-deploying agent-based monitoring system, just add ssh, perl and POE
- ZoneMinder - linux powered home security
- network
- tcpdump - sniff raw data travelling across the network
- ssldump - analyze ssl connections - decrypt if private keys available
- Ethereal - extremely powerful network capture and analysis tool
- nmap - security scanner
- rdate - synchronize your system's date and time with public time servers
- samba - windows file and print server compatibility
- ClusterIt - run commands on many machines at the same time
- OpenVPN - securely tunnel IP networks over a single port
- nget - command line nntp multipart file grabber - gather parts across multiple servers and groups
- NetworkAudioSystem - the audio equivalent of an X server
- dig - a tool for debugging DNS issues
- ssh - the swiss army knife of secure remote access
- fsh - re-use ssh tunnels to save cpu
- rsync - efficient synchronizing of local and remote file trees
- RDist - maintain identical copies of files over multiple hosts
- OpenSSL - full-featured cryptography toolkit
- web
- Apache - secure, efficient, extensible HTTP server
- Analog - apache log file analyzer
- wget - command line tool to retrieving files using HTTP(S)/FTP - mirror remote sites.
- curl - cURL groks URLs, http transfer debugger
- lftp - excellent command line ftp/sftp/etc client
- visualization
- RRDTool - excellent tool for storing and graphing time series data
- drraw - draw round robin archives on the web - perl cgi
- TouchGraph - for visualizing links
- GraphViz - simple automated generation of graphs, flowcharts, etc.
- GnuPlot - for visualizing data sets and scientific data
- gdmap - TreeMap visualization software for hard drives utilization
- dia - gtk+ based diagram creation program
- database
- collaboration
- TWiki or some other wiki
- Irssi - terminal-based IRC client
- Jabber - secure open-source instant messaging servers and clients
- Bugzilla - web-based bug and issue tracking system
- mail
- SpamAssassin - reduce your daily serving of spam
- FetchMail - full-featured, robust, well-documented remote-mail retrieval and forwarding utility
- mutt - a small but very powerful text-based mail client
- squirrelmail - excellent webmail (IMAP) client
- version control
- Subversion - excellent version control fu
- svk - decentralized version control system, works with subversion
- others
- mtree - map a directory hierarchy - file integrity checking
- xmltv - download and process your own local tv listings
Updated Sat May 19, 2007 6:41 PM
