Josh's SysAdmin Toolbox
From Admin-SIG
Right now this is an unfinished article I started for a presentation I didn't end up giving.
| Table of contents |
Backround and Credentials
My name is Josh Gentry. My first foray into higher education resulted in a degree in English Lit from Northwestern University. Then came seven glorious years of food service. I do not blame this on the English degree, as some do. I blame it on being aimless and unmotivated.
Somewhere around 1998 I took James Hart's Intro to Unix class at the Technical Vocational Institute in Albuquerque, NM. That was my introduction to open source software, Unix, and basic Unix system adminisitration. In the summer of 2000, I accepted a postion in Tech Support at Southwest Cyberport, the world's premier Internet service provider. Within 6 months I was promoted to System Administrator, and have been a system and network administartor for SWCP since that time.
What this article is
I ripped off this idea from Linux.com (http://www.linux.com). Once a week they have a user contributed article for "My sysadmin toolbox." An admin lists a set of their best tools and describes them. I'm going to do that here. I'm starting this as the foundation for a presentation on newbie system administration, so the first section will be fundimental tools. I will expand in the future.
Assumptions and Biases
My focus is on the administration of Unix-like computer systems. There are open source admin tools for other operating systems, but I don't know them. Over time, this article will expand to cover tools for non-Unix systems, and also network administration. When I talk about Linux distrobution specific tools, I will be talk about Debian. That's the flavor I use.
I will assume the reader is not a complete Unix novice. I expect that you can login to an account and know some basic shell commands, such as ls, cd, pwd.
Unix Philosophy
Currently a place holder.
Fundimental Unix System Administration Tools
df
du
top/htop
grep
netstat
ifconfig
ls
stat
file
chmod
chown
gpg
shell/Perl
More Advanced
configure/make
package manager -- apt
syslog -- /var/log
lsof
countfield
wiki
