20 IT Tools Every Sysadmin Should

Know
Knowing the right tool to the right job is something that can save
you hours of extra work and tedium. We've compiled a list of of some
of the best general purpose sysadmin tools for troubleshooting,
testing, communicating and fixing the systems that you need to
keep running.

WireShark

http://www.wireshark.org/

Wireshark is the world's foremost network protocol analyzer. It lets

you see what's happening on your network at a microscopic level. It
is the de facto standard across many industries and educational
institutions.

Wireshark is cross platform and works on OS X, Windows and Unix.

FileZilla
https://filezilla-project.org/

Filezilla is an GPL licensed FTP client and Server. It's ability to

connect to SSH secured hosts makes it a great choice if you need to
give access to client more comfortable with GUI than CLI
interfaces.

Fiddler
http://www.telerik.com/fiddler

Fiddler is a proxy server that is meant to run locally to allow for

developers to debug web applications. If you have multiple different
applications or processes that can modify the values in a form it's
great to be able to see the actual output as transmitted.

If you're working with a remote API, you can also compose and
replay requests as needed.
Sysinternals Suite

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545021.aspx

The Sysinternals Suite is a collection of general sysadmin tools for

file and disk, networking, process management, security and
collecting system information on Windows hosts.

One of the most popular and immediately beneficial utility is

Autoruns.exe which will identify programs that start automatically.

Mosh
http://mosh.mit.edu/

SSH users will be familiar with the frailty of their remote sessions, a
single wifi hiccup and they go down. Mosh is a secure replacement
protocol that allows for the resumption of sessions as well as
generally improved performance. Mosh is available for almost every
platform, including a Chrome plugin for even more portability.
Autossh
http://www.harding.motd.ca/autossh/

Designed more for SSH tunnels than interactive sessions, Autossh

will restart dropped SSH sessions and tunnels.

If you'd like a perpetual session, use with "screen".

Cliforgot

http://cliforgot.com
Generate full command line commands and options for many
Windows sysadmin commands. It is interactive documentation that
you can copy and paste.

Clonezilla

http://clonezilla.org/

If you're administering or provisioning a larger number of computers,

it is very beneficial to create a master image and then push it to all
of the target machines, which is exactly what the open source
Clonezilla does.

The multi-cast feature of Clonezilla SE let you update machines in

massive parallel batches.

Clusto

https://github.com/clusto/clusto

A python based server cluster management tool, Clusto lets you

maintain an abstracted interface for interacting with your
infrastructure.

Clusto stores data in any database that you can interact with via
SQLAlchemy, easing your management as you can get started with
anything you have in place.

Ansible
http://www.ansible.com

Ansible bills itself as the simplest way to automate IT provisioning

tasks.

Ansible Playbooks are the programmatic method of bundling

instructions to be run, which you can then replay on any number of
servers you're connecting to over SSH.

Chef

http://www.opscode.com/chef/

Chef helps automate your server infrastructure via Chef clients

installed on each node in your network. Periodically the clients poll
the central Chef server and check their internal config against the
instructed configuration - if discrepancies are found it then runs the
commands to bring them into compliance.

Chef's constant compliance checking is very helpful in quickly

recovering if manual changes are made by sysadmins.

Puppet

http://puppetlabs.com/

Puppet allows for declarative configuration of servers via their ruby

DSL. If you already know ruby it's easy to dig into Puppet and
manage any number of servers.

If you want to get an easy taste for Puppet, they offer a

preconfigured VM that you can play around with.
Dnsmasq

http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html

Dnsmasq is a much lighter weight DNS resolver for local networks

than BIND, or other 'heavyweight' servers. It is ideally suited for use
in low resource environments like routers and firewalls.

It caches requests locally but falls back to an upstream DNS

provider.

Bugzilla

http://www.bugzilla.org/

Primarily used to report and process software bugs, Bugzilla has

expanded to allow for quality assurance management and the
submission and review of patches.

Buzilla integrates with many source control systems, letting you

setup two way communications so that you can close bugs with
commits, etc.

Sysdig

http://www.sysdig.org/

Sysdig is an open source, system level management tool. It lets you

capture, filter and save the different processes that are active
within a Linux machine at any given point.
Sysdig makes some common tasks, like tracking any file opened in a
directory in real time trivially easy.
Lua scripts can be used to modify and extend the core Sysdig functionality.

TreeSize

http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/
Treesize is a NTFS file space viewer that helps visualize space usage in a
Windows Explorer like view.

Treesize works off of the Master File Table of the target machine,
letting you read results faster and without the need for content read
permissions.

7-Zip

http://www.7-zip.org/

An open source windows compression utility. 7-zip works extremely

fast on even very large zip files and can produce self extracting
archives in the 7z format.

Notepad++

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/

An excellent Open Source Windows text editor with regular

expression support, syntax highlighting and a tabbed interface.
If you're moving between machines, checkout Notepad++ Portable
which you can run from a share or a USB drive.

KeePass

http://keepass.info/

An opensource password manager, KeePass lets you generate

strong random passwords per site or application. Stored securely,
KeePass lets you maintain secure passwords without have to
remember hundreds of 20 character plus password or even worse -
writing one down.

If you need to share your password file with others, or access it

from multiple locations, keep it on a DataAnywhere share.

Netcat
http://netcat.sourceforge.net/

Often described as the 'swiss-army' knife of network utilities, netcat

is tremendously useful for anything dealing with sending or
receiving network port information.

Example: if you need a one-shot webserver on port 8080

{ echo -ne "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\nContent-Length: $(wc -c <some.file)\r\n\r\n"; cat some.file;

} | nc -l 8080
Process Explorer
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

Track, identify, start and stop processes that need manipulation on

a Windows machine. Additionally, it is a great way to track down
memory leaks and find rogue processes.

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