Hello everyone. I was wandering about what system administration tools you people use. Tell me/us about all the important tools that you think are important in order to administrate buisiness computers in or outside of a network. Define every tool, as in why you choose that specific one, and which tools are essential in order to administrate a system/network succesfully.

In my case for my company, my most important tools in order to maintain our system are:

For the *nix boxes and network :

ping - to see if hosts are up and/or lagging

traceroute - to see which ways packets travel in order to reach their destination

ethereal/tcpdump - to see what kind of packets are in transit

rsync/tar - for backups (in my case we have a seperate backup server)

nslookup - to test and query dns

vi - edit important files, and setup scripts

ipconfig - to see and edit NIC configurations such as ip, GW, netmasks, up/down

sudo - allow certain users to perform certain administration tasks

saint - my personal favourite security testing util

nmap - just to check for open ports easily

john - detect weak passwords for our users (so i can tell them to change it if its not strong)

netstat - to monitor active connections

Xlogmaster - to see whats trying to connect to our servers and react accordingly

dns - to test and query dns


For the win boxes (mainly only clients) :

Languard - to test security from a win system (just to compare it to saint)

port-pro - to see active connections and which process they belong to.

vnc servers - to be able to administrate the clients from my box in the basement

ping/netstat/traceroute offcourse.



Those are the tools i need on a daily basis in order to keep my boss happy and to make sure that our network and computers are functional. I did not include in this list programms such as AV, firewalls etc...since they are not essential administration tools.

So.......what is it that you use in order to administrate systems/networks.

Cheers