[Lopsanj] Report from the LOPSANJ Princeton cluster group

[William Bilancio]

The cluster group that met in Princeton was outrageously fun.  We had 8
members make it to the Princetonian diner for good food and informative 
and fun conversation.

A lot of topics were discussed ranging from "migration to Microsoft 
Services", Wan Accelerators, off site tape storage, and of course the 
main question of the night "tools you can't live without" which fathered 
a list of 26 responses and they are as follows in no particular order:

1. Rsync -- http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/
Rsync is an open source utility that provides fast incremental file
transfer.  It was also mentioned that the Rdiff-backup is good to and is 
based on rsync.

2. Vim -- http://www.vim.org/
Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text
editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with
most UNIX systems.  Vim is often called a "programmer's editor," and so
useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE.  It's not
just for programmers, though.  Vim is perfect for all kinds of text
editing, from composing email to editing configuration files.

3. Emacs -- http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time
display editor.

4. XEDIT --
XEDIT is a visual editor for VM/CMS using block mode IBM 3270 terminals.
It is much more line-oriented than modern PC and Unix editors. For
example, it supports automatic line numbers, and many of the commands
operate on blocks of lines. One of the features is a command line which
allows the user to type arbitrary editor commands. Because IBM 3270
terminals do not transmit data to the computer until certain special
keys are pressed (such as enter and function keys) XEDIT is less
interactive than many PC and UNIX editors. For example, continuous
spell-checking as the user types is impossible.

5. Tail --
Tail is a program on *nix systems used to display the last few lines of
a text file or piped data. This program is great for watching log files
in real time.

6. Perl -- http://www.perl.org/
Perl is a stable, cross platform programming language.
It is used for mission critical projects in the public and private sectors.
Perl is Open Source software, licensed under its Artistic License, or
the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Perl was created by Larry Wall.
Perl 1.0 was released to usenet's alt.comp.sources in 1987
PC Magazine named Perl a finalist for its 1998 Technical Excellence
Award in the Development Tool category.
Perl is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

7. PDF Reader -- http://tinyurl.com/23v86m (Google search of PDF Reader)
Any PDF reader is a  tool that needs to be in any Sysadmin's tool box.

8. syslog-ng -- http://www.balabit.com/products/syslog_ng/
syslog-ng, as the name shows, is a syslogd replacement, but with new
functionality for the new generation. The original syslogd allows
messages only to be sorted based on priority/facility pairs; syslog-ng
adds the possibility to filter based on message contents using regular
expressions. The new configuration scheme is intuitive and powerful.
Forwarding logs over TCP and remembering all forwarding hops makes it
ideal for firewalled environments.

9. sudo -- http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/
Sudo (superuser do) allows a system administrator to give certain users
(or groups of users) the ability to run some (or all) commands as root
or another user while logging the commands and arguments.

10. TCPdump -- http://www.tcpdump.org/
tcpdump is a common computer network debugging tool that runs under the
command line. It allows the user to intercept and display TCP/IP and
other packets being transmitted or received over a network to which the
computer is attached.  Combine this tool with other software such as
wireshark or home grown scripts makes this a big tool in the sysadmin
tool box.

11. mon -- http://www.kernel.org/software/mon/
mon is a general-purpose scheduler and alert management tool used for
monitoring service availability and triggering alerts upon failure
detection. mon was designed to be open and extensible in the sense that
it supports arbitrary monitoring facilities and alert methods via a
common interface, all of which are easily implemented with programs in
C, Perl, shell, etc., SNMP traps, and special mon traps.


12. ssh --
Secure Shell or SSH is a set of standards and an associated network
protocol that allows establishing a secure channel between a local and a
remote computer. It uses public-key cryptography to authenticate the
remote computer and (optionally) to allow the remote computer to
authenticate the user. SSH provides confidentiality and integrity of
data exchanged between the two computers using encryption and message
authentication codes (MACs). SSH is typically used to log into a remote
machine and execute commands, but it also supports tunneling, forwarding
arbitrary TCP ports and X11 connections; it can transfer files using the
associated SFTP or SCP protocols. An SSH server, by default, listens on
the standard TCP port 22.


13. ntp -- http://www.ntp.org/
NTP is a protocol designed to synchronize the clocks of computers over a
network. This got a resounding yea at the meeting as we all realized
that we all used it at home and work..NTP used to make sure all our home
servers time is perfectly set.  :)

14. Hobbit -- http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/
Hobbit is a tool for monitoring servers, applications and networks. It
collects information about the health of your computers, the
applications running on them, and the network connectivity between them.
All of this information is presented in a set of simple, intuitive
webpages that are updated frequently to reflect changes in the status of
your systems.


15. Wiki -- http://www.wikimatrix.org/ (compare them all)
Wiki's have become a big tool in the sysadmin world.  If you set up a
wiki and just start writing down the way things are set up and how they
are done..you will start getting a handle on your documentation.  A
particular Wiki package wasn't recommend over any others but a lot of
people at the table were using DokuWiki
(http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki%3ADokuWiki).


16. vmware -- http://www.vmware.com/

17. rdesktop -- http://www.rdesktop.org/
rdesktop is an open source client for Windows NT Terminal Server and
Windows 2000/2003 Terminal Services, capable of natively speaking Remote
Desktop Protocol (RDP) in order to present the user's NT desktop. Unlike
Citrix ICA, no server extensions are required.


18. vnc -- http://www.realvnc.com/ , http://www.tightvnc.com/,
http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/
VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is remote control software
which allows you to view and fully interact with one computer desktop
(the "VNC server") using a simple program (the "VNC viewer") on another
computer desktop anywhere on the Internet. The two computers don't even
have to be the same type, so for example you can use VNC to view a
Windows Vista desktop at the office on a Linux or Mac computer at home.
For ultimate simplicity, there is even a Java viewer, so that any
desktop can be controlled remotely from within a browser without having
to install software.


19. screen -- ftp://gnu.teleglobe.net/ftp.gnu.org/screen
It allows a user to access multiple separate terminal sessions inside a
single terminal window or remote terminal session. It is useful for
dealing with multiple programs from the command line, and for separating
programs from the shell that started the program. Great for setting up
IRC chat sessions that will stay connected to the IRC channels when you
shut down the terminal.

20. Cygwin -- www.cygwin.com
A collection of free software tools originally developed by Cygnus
Solutions to allow various versions of Microsoft Windows to act similar
to a Unix system. It aims mainly at porting software that runs on POSIX
systems (such as Linux, BSD, and Unix systems) to run on Windows with
little more than a recompilation. Programs ported with Cygwin work best
on Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003


21. Putty -- http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
A free Telnet/SSH terminal for Winindows.  If you admin any *nix boxes
and you are using a Win32 OS as your desktop/laptop system this is the
tool you need to connect to your *nix boxes.

22. Mondo Rescue -- http://www.mondorescue.org/
Mondo Rescue is a GPL disaster recovery solution. It supports Linux
(i386, x86_64, ia64) and FreeBSD (i386). It's packaged for multiple
distributions (RedHat, RHEL, SuSE, SLES, Mandriva, Debian, Gentoo).
It supports tapes, disks, network and CD/DVD as backup media, multiple
filesystems, LVM, software and hardware Raid.
You need it to be safe.

23. subversion -- http://subversion.tigris.org/
Subversion is an open source application for revision control. Also
commonly referred to as svn or SVN, Subversion is designed specifically
to be a modern replacement for CVS and shares a number of the same key
developers.

24. rcs -- http://www.gnu.org/software/rcs/rcs.html
The Revision Control System (RCS) manages multiple revisions of files.
RCS automates the storing, retrieval, logging, identification, and
merging of revisions. RCS is useful for text that is revised frequently,
including source code, programs, documentation, graphics, papers, and
form letters.

25. unison -- http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows
two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on
different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified
separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in
each replica to the other.


26. splunk -- http://www.splunk.com/