Linux Power Tools - Great Tools to Make System Administration Easy

World War II - Germany decided to attack Poland.Poland had many great warriors. They all prepared to fight the Germans.They were all ready with the best armor, the best and well trainedhorses, and ofcourse the best weapons , swords , spears .... Andthe Pols were brave and were ready to give their lives for theircountry. Sadly they did just that... give their lives. The Germanshad tanks... It is very important to have the right weapons when onegoes for a war.

In the same way it is very important for system administrators to havethe right tools to to work smart. Linux is a great desktop OS fordevelopers as well as systemadministrators. Let us take a look at some of the utilities which makesthis a great environment for system administrators and developers. Mostof the content below is taken from the Home pages of these apps and theI make no claims on the originality. My aim is to introduce the readerto thewonderful tools that are available in a Linux/BSD desktop environment.

Konsole

Let's start from what most people think Linux is all about - a textbased shell. Konsole is whatis known as an X terminal emulator, often referred to as a terminal ora shell. It gives you the equivalent of an old-fashioned text screen onyour desktop, but one which can easily share the screen with yourgraphical applications. What makes Konsole special?Konsole's advanced features include simple configuration and theability to use multiple terminal shells in a single window, making fora less cluttered desktop. Konsole is also available as kpart andcan thus be easily embedded in other applications, like practiced byKate and Konqueror.

As most system administrators need log into servers on a regular basisthe konsole gives them a benefit over the Windoze command prompt. Inwindows one needs to use a program like putty to log in using SSH. Alsoas linux is the desktop OS the techs can use the man pages on the localsystem.

One can also try out the various commands locally. Consider a simpleexample.

Is it

$ ln sourcefile destinationfile

or is it

$ ln destinationfile sourcefile

Such things can be easily found out locally without carrying outexperiments on the server. Many techs believe that servers are placeswhere they can experiment. However, such experiments can lead to majorlosses to the customers due to one small error. A system administratormust understand that people have immense faith in them when they givetheir entire data to them and they cannot risk carrying out simpleexperiments on servers.

Some screenshots of the konsole can be seen at the konsole site

Personal Information Manager / Groupware

There are two popular choices here. Evolutionfrom Noveland the Kontactfrom KDE. Both these an email client, calendaring, meetingscheduling, a task list, contact management and syncing functionality.Kontact is essentially the regular KDE PIM components which have beenput in together i.e. kmail, korganizer, knotes etc.. It is very a veryneat package and is stable and light. Both these are veryfunctional and can connect to many groupware servers.

Klipper

Klipper is the KDE clipboard utility. It stores clipboard history, andallows you to link clipboard contents to application actions. Klippercan perform actions on the contents of the clipboard, based on whetherthey match a particular regular expression. For example, any clipboardcontents starting with "http://" can be passed to the web-browser asURLs to open.

Copying text is as simple as highlighting the text. And to paste thetext all one needs to do is click on the center mouse button. This canbe particularly useful for sys-admins as they use a sequenceof commands from time to time. Having these in the clipboard and usingthem often can make the work a lot easier.

Gaim / Kopete

Communicating via an instant messenger is an essential these days.Linux has a very clean solution for this. Both Kopete(http://kopete.kde.org) and Gaim (http://gaim.sourceforge.net/) arecapable ofhandling multiple IM protocols such as supporting AIM, ICQ, MSN,Yahoo, Jabber, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus SameTime. Gaim isa multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X,and Windows. It is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSNMessenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise Messenger,and Zephyr