Topic: Killer open source admin tools

[devnullius]

http://www.networkworld.com/slideshow/89893/killer-open-source-admin-tools.html

Sysadmins are a unique breed. Like many of our IT brethren, we must be jacks of all trades. Mail relays, file sharing, websites.... It's a lot to shoulder, but don't fret. Open source is here to help.

From systems automation and monitoring, to backups and data center management, open source has the tools to make our jobs easier. Need to make configs simpler so that you can hand off some tasks to a junior admin? Want to automate more of your routine tasks to save more of your time? Maybe you just need a better way to view what’s happening on your servers or on the network?

Whatever your situation, these killer open source admin tools will help you get the job done faster and easier.

From this slideshow, the following tips can be found:
- http://processhacker.sourceforge.net/
Process Hacker provides all the functionality of Windows’ Process Explorer utility, plus a whole lot more. You can see all network connections, open/listening ports, and which processes they are connected with. Click the processes tab to get a tree view of parent-child relationships. And no more “hidden” processes: All processes, services, and threads are on display, to be terminated, suspended, or restarted one at a time, or in a batch when you highlight multiple entries.

Process Hacker is a tool for developers, so it even includes ways to manage real and virtual memory, scan memory for strings, and dump memory contents to a file for analysis.

- http://www.adminer.org/
Adminer is a great alternative to phpMyAdmin. It’s a single PHP file, so it’s easy to install. The UI is simpler and more intuitive than phpMyAdmin. And Adminer has full support for features like foreign keys, grouping SELECT results, sorting results by multiple columns, easy downloading of blob field contents, and editing fields in multiple rows. Adminer can work with MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle Database, whereas phpMyAdmin supports only MySQL. Adminer even works with older versions of MySQL and PHP.

- http://postfixadmin.sourceforge.net/
Sysadmins love Unix because the tools typically do one thing and do it well. That is the case with Postfix Admin, which provides a Web UI to help with the day in, day out management of a Postfix mail server. Postfix Admin provides a simple enough interface that the mail server administrator can confidently hand off the day-to-day user adds and changes to a junior IT staffer, who can add, update, or remove users and aliases with nary a furrow of the brow. Postfix Admin also lets you create an auto responder vacation message, view server logs, and even add a new domain.

- http://rk4an.github.com/phpsysinfo/
Sometimes you just want a simple tool to do a simple job. A set of PHP scripts that pulls data from the /proc file system and lays it out neatly on a Web page, phpSysInfo shows key information about your server, such as RAM and CPU utilization, attached drives and USB devices, available disk space, networking, hard drive SMART info, and more. For busy admins on the go, there’s even an Android client app for phpSysInfo.

- http://www.ntop.org/products/ntop/
Ntop is like the Unix top command, but for network traffic. You can view network flow stats, filter and sort the data, see who your big bandwidth consumers are, produce network utilization graphs like MRTG and Cacti, and so much more. Sysadmins who double as network admins will like that Ntop can take NetFlow and sFlow data as inputs for analysis. And if you need to track down a pesky user who's sucking up more resources than you'd like, Ntop's OS fingerprinting and sniffing of user identifying information like email address will come in very handy indeed.

- Expect
Automation means spending less time on rote tasks and more time on high-level work. But what if we want to automate an interactive session like telnetting to some old and obscure piece of network equipment to get a list of active users? Our shell scripts, Perl-fu, and Python skills are not enough to get the job done.

Expect automates interactive CLI commands. You tell it the sorts of prompts and outputs it should see and how it should respond. How useful is it? When my team needed to query several thousand routers for a piece of information that was not available via SNMP or any other straightforward method, we turned to Expect to grab that info from an interactive login on the routers.

- http://www.ispconfig.org/
Want a Web-based control panel system, but you don’t like Webmin? Give ISPConfig a try. It not only has a more intuitive interface, but it’s also better suited for sysadmins as it has more support for advanced options like firewalling and email spam filters and whitelists.

With support for IPv6, the Apache and Nginx Web servers, key-based SSH connections, and the Mailman mailing list server, ISPConfig can handle most of our favorite Linux distros and applications. ISPConfig also has support for my favorite containers-based virtualization solution, OpenVZ.

- http://stahlworks.com/dev/swiss-file-knife.html
Swiss File Knife packs a lot of power into a single binary. It performs basic file operations like listings, searches, and deletions, but can also report on disk space, remove spaces from file names, and mirror files and directories. You can use SFK to send command output to a logging server or copy it to your clipboard, and you can use it to share files over the network via Web or FTP.

For you poor schlubs stuck working on Windows, SFK provides all the great command line text processing tools from Unix. For us schlubs stuck working with files from Windows users, SFK has handy text filtering capabilities like converting Windows line feeds to Unix newlines or changing tabs to spaces (and vice versa).

- http://www.artica.fr/
More than just a great looking control panel, Artica does the heavy lifting of installing and configuring the various applications needed to create an appliance of your choice: Postfix mail server with all the firewall, anti-spam, and anti-virus trimmings, a Squid caching proxy server, or a NAS device running Samba that can double as a domain controller for your network.

Artica is a huge timesaver for sysadmins, and it puts reliable Linux servers within reach of millions of small businesses who can’t afford a dedicated admin. You can bolt Artica onto your favorite Linux distro or download an Artica ISO to install Linux with the Artica system pre-loaded.

- http://racktables.org/
Do you have rack upon rack full of servers, switches, and routers, and you can't keep up with them all? RackTables keeps a database of each device in each of your racks in each of your datacenters, and displays them in either a list format or a graphical representation of the racks.

Do you have a team of admins who need an accurate and up-to-date set of documentation to work together effectively? RackTables lets you set up multiple users with permissions to the specific racks or datacenters they support.

RackTables also employs a tagging system that helps you search and sort your equipment in the racks and data centers. You can even use RackTables to manage details such as IP addresses or firewall rules.

- http://www.rsnapshot.org/
We have many choices for backups on Linux and *BSD systems: Bacula, Amanda, Arkeia, and more. My pick is Rsnapshot, which is based on the excellent Rsync file mirroring utility. Rsnapshot uses Unix hard links to effectively keep a full backup for each snapshot while consuming only the network bandwidth and disk space of a differential backup. The backups are saved to regular file systems on the backup server’s hard drives, not tapes, so there’s no media to change out. Because rsnapshot uses common Unix tools, such as Perl, Rsync, and hard links, it runs on most any Unix-ish operating system -- even Mac OS X, Solaris, and Irix.

- http://www.ispcp.net/
Based on the old Virtual Hosting Control Panel project, ISP Control Panel is made for running a hosting service. It has separate control panels for ISP service admins, service resellers, and end customers. ISP Control Panel is designed to work with a specific set of server software apps, but it provides an almost turnkey system to run a Web hosting company.

ISP Control Panel provides all the services that you would expect from a hosting company, including Sender Policy Framework records, bandwidth usage tracking, and spam filtering with graylisting functionality. It expressly supports Debian and Red Hat Linux, as well as FreeBSD, and documentation suggests that it should run on any other Linux or *BSD flavor.

- http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
The first time that I wanted to install Linux onto a USB thumb drive, I read a dozen different websites with a dozen different sets of instructions, and I got a dozen times frustrated. The UNetbootin project makes it easy to set up a Live Linux installation on a thumb drive. You can use the UNetbootin thumb drive to boot into Linux, or to install Linux as a dual boot option on a Windows PC. It’s an easy way to carry Linux around with you.

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Read about more open source winners
====

InfoWorld’s sixth annual Best of Open Source Software Awards call out more than 100 open source products in seven categories from app dev tools to games.

Bossie Awards 2012: The best open source applications http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/65165/bossie-awards-2012-the-best-open-source-applications-202530

Bossie Awards 2012: The best open source application development tools http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/65162/bossie-awards-2012-the-best-open-source-application-development-tools-202390

Bossie Awards 2012: The best open source data center and cloud software http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/65314/bossie-awards-2012-the-best-open-source-data-center-and-cloud-software-202536

Bossie Awards 2012: The best open source databases http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/65089/bossie-awards-2012-the-best-open-source-databases-202354

Bossie Awards 2012: The best open source desktop applications http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/64914/bossie-awards-2012-the-best-open-source-desktop-applications-202288

Bossie Awards 2012: The best open source networking and security software http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/65285/bossie-awards-2012-the-best-open-source-networking-and-security-software-202548

Bossie Awards 2012: Now for something completely different http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/65168/bossie-awards-2012-now-something-completely-different-202541

Karma...

Devvie



~~~ notemail@facebook.com ~~~
 
Cuisvis hominis est errare, nullius nisi insipientis in errore persevare
——
All spelling mistakes are my own and may only be distributed under the GNU General Public License! – (© 95-1 by Coredump; 2-013 by DevNullius)

[jheysen]

This will really help our visitors
Thanks for the info D.

J.

[Fintech]

Thanx  You are collect a lot of information to admin and also another users

Many interesting links!

[devnullius]

  all credits go to networkworld.com - happy to copy paste

Karma,


devnullius

[devnullius]

And some personal highlights from: http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/65168/bossie-awards-2012-now-something-completely-different-202541

- http://www.openremote.org/display/HOME/OpenRemote
Far and away the geekiest open source project on this list, OpenRemote started as a solution to "the rich man's problem" -- how to control your lights, your TV, and your air conditioning from your smartphone (or tablet) -- but it has become much more. From home automation to "Smart (Office) Buildings" to accessibility solutions for the disabled, OpenRemote may drive the very closed and proprietary home automation and control system industry into the mainstream. OpenRemote costs tens of thousands of dollars less than an AMX or Crestron solution and puts the UI design into the hands of nonprogrammers. If you're a programmer, this may be the coolest thing you can do with your free time. -- Andrew Oliver

- http://xbmc.org/
Sure, you could buy a smart DVD player or something like Google TV, but what fun is a sealed box? XBMC turns your PC into a smart media center with plenty of flashy doohickeys to make it look cooler. Or if you don't want a whirring PC with a loud fan, look around for some of the newer low-powered Android PCs that are ready to hack. If you're not happy with what you get after unpacking the TAR file, there's a robust community of plug-in developers who are revising and extending the tool to make it even better. You'll have so much fun programming it that you won't have any time for watching TV. -- Peter Wayner
EDIT devnullius: IF ONLY it supported LDNA / streaming, also for hulu... No free software out there to accomplish this :s

- http://stella.sourceforge.net/
If you love the classic Atari 2600 games, then the Stella emulator is your open source tool for playing them again and again and again. Chopper Command, Space Invaders, Pitfall, and more are ready and waiting for you. Some people are even writing their own new games for the 2600 platform. It's not refusing to grow up. It's getting a self-taught Ph.D. in computer history. -- Peter Wayner

- http://calibre-ebook.com/
Launched as a personal project in 2006 by then Cal Tech student Kovid Goyal, Calibre (pronounced kal-eh-bur) is an open source e-book library management tool that supports converting across a wide range of formats, downloading and reading news and magazine feeds (over 300 sources in multiple languages). It even has a plug-in that allows users to shop for DRM-free books. At a time when platform lock-in seems to be growing, Goyal says his project "will always present an alternative for people that love to read e-books and want to be in control of their own digital libraries." At an average of over 500,000 new downloads per month, it looks like many people share Goyal's point of view. -- Mike Amundsen.

- http://assault.cubers.net/
A standard first-person shooter, AssaultCube is faster in gameplay than Counter-Strike and slower than Unreal Tournament. It's easy to learn, with intuitive controls, and it features a ton of game modes like one-shot one-kill, deathmatch, capture the flag, and knives and guns only. The single-player mode features bots that are totally stupid and get stuck in corners all the time, but there's also a multiplayer mode, and AssaultCube's surprisingly small 50MB package is easy to pass around. It's the perfect gift for someone who loves to kill stupid bots. -- Deep Mistry

- http://wz2100.net/
Like most real-time strategy games, Warzone 2100 follows the basic gameplay formula of gather, build, maintain, defend, and destroy. Unlike most, there is no tedious micromanagement of resources, so you can focus on more interesting things, like unit design and weapons manufacturing. And instead of being limited to generic units available based on level or experience, you can create units with specific abilities based on what you've researched. An awkward detail about this game: Units never seem to find the correct path from point A to B on the map. The best feature: Definitely the 3D engine, which produces fully detailed topography and visual effects. -- Deep Mistry

- http://www.lwks.com/
A professional-grade video editing and mastering platform with Hugo and many other films on its résumé, Lightworks would tempt even the most avid users of Apple Final Cut Pro. An advanced UI streamlines editing with powerful timeline and trimming tools, color correction, and a host of onboard creative effects. Lightworks is not actually open source software -- yet. A free Windows version is available, and the company says it will release source code for all three platforms with the forthcoming Mac and Linux versions. A Pro version ($60 yearly license) unlocks a rich set of codecs and team support. -- James R. Borck

Only my personal choices - more in original slide-show!

Karma,

devnullius

[devnullius]

And some more personal choices from: http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/64914/bossie-awards-2012-the-best-open-source-desktop-applications-202288

- http://www.scribus.net/
Scribus is to desktop publishing what OpenOffice and LibreOffice are to the personal productivity suite. Most every feature you'd expect from a publishing application is here: importing external documents and images, advanced typographic controls, support for a broad range of image formats, tables of contents, drop caps, advanced text-wrapping and reflowing functions, and more. PDFs produced by Scribus support a full gamut of professional publishing features, from overprinting to archival features. It's a powerful, polished package with just one big drawback: Lack of native support for Pantone colors and other commercial swatch sets means that spot colors must be added by the user. But hey, it's free. -- Serdar Yegulalp

- http://camstudio.org/
Anyone who has wanted to record whatever's happening on their screen for the sake of a demo or a tutorial will appreciate CamStudio. It allows you to record part or all of a screen, a specific window, or even a roaming region that follows your cursor. The resulting video file can be saved in .AVI format or converted to Flash's .FLV format for easy reuse. CamStudio is missing a few features, like the ability to zoom in and out during recording, and it supports only a limited range of codecs to record to, although you can address this via third-party codec packs. Version 3.0 of the program, a total rewrite, is in the works, so look for that soon. -- Serdar Yegulalp

- http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
This multiplatform audio recording, editing, and conversion application can import, export, and manipulate sound files in just about every format in common use. Audacity includes whole battery of common effects (noise reduction, limiting, "auto duck"), and common audio plug-in types (VST, Nyquist, Audio Unit, LADSPA) are also supported. The program's biggest drawback is the interface. It's rather clunky when working with multitrack audio, for instance, and some of the tool behaviors take getting used to. But the gamut of useful features far outstrips the limitations. -- Serdar Yegulalp

- http://windirstat.info/
"Where did all my disk space go?" WinDirStat shows you with easy-to-read graphics that depict where disk space is being allocated on one or more volumes, turning maintenance and disk cleanups into a game instead of a chore. (Small wonder the progress-bar icon for the program is Pac-Man!) File types can be color-coded for easy distinction, and the resulting map can be shown with or without free space as part of the picture. Right-click a region in the map to zoom in on folders or files, start a command-line prompt in a given subfolder, or perform mass cleanups via user-defined automated actions. -- Serdar Yegulalp

Again, more in the original slide-show! Only my pesonal choices here...

Karma,

devnullius

[devnullius]

Last snippets overview, this time from: https://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/65165/bossie-awards-2012-the-best-open-source-applications-202530

- http://www.alfresco.com/
Enterprise content management is essential for most medium-sized and large companies nowadays, not to mention government agencies. These companies have Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, as well as HIPAA and maybe FERPA to contend with. While the "freemium" open source business model is still in place, the number of features that are present only in the enterprise edition (such as JMX MBeans) is dwindling. Alfresco 4 adds Activiti workflow, support for Apache Solr as an indexing system, and support for Google Docs, Twitter, and other social integrations. But it's the records management, SharePoint replacement, and open source Java that have us hooked on Alfresco. -- Andrew Ball

- http://gallery.menalto.com/
Is marketing trying to stick you with website development and maintenance? I say give them a way to manage the website themselves and be done with it! To that end, let them use Gallery for posting their photos and images. Gallery features geotagging support, batch editing of images, drag-and-drop watermarking, LDAP and OpenID authentication, and simple blogging functionality. You can use Amazon's S3 storage system to hold all the images for use with Gallery -- just send marketing the bill. There's even a third-party iOS app called viGallery that lets users upload pics from the iPhone or iPad and edit Gallery albums. -- High Mobley

- http://www.sugarcrm.com/
Sugar is your only real choice for open source CRM -- so it wins. Although it is extensible and has many mods, the spaghetti-ball of bad PHP makes this a costlier proposition than it ought to be, and the professional support and hosting options could be better. The shared hosting at SugarCRM is so horribly slow that even a small amount of data kills it, yet it isn't profoundly cheaper than Salesforce.com despite not being half as good. That said, if you need basic account, contact, opportunity, and lead management, then SugarCRM can deliver them at a fraction of the cost of Salesforce.com -- if you host it anywhere but at SugarCRM. -- Andrew Oliver

- https://www.vtiger.com/crm/
A fork of SugarCRM, vTiger is a powerful CRM with a host of features. There's only one edition, which is free and open source. In addition to the standard CRM capabilities, it includes what would be considered premium features in other CRM apps: sales orders, purchase orders, invoices, asset tracking, SMS notification, PBX manager, customer portal, mobile access, and workflows, to name a few. The community is large and active, and there's a lot of good documentation, plenty of third-party add-ons, and a new project called Tigress for making modifications without requiring code change. An inexpensive hosted version and third-party integration with Front Accounting are also available. -- Fred Blauer

- http://frontaccounting.com/wb3/
There are plenty of open source packages for small-business accounting. We choose FrontAccounting due to the quality of the system, the people behind it, and the community around it. Aimed at smaller businesses, the system is built on a PHP framework, and it runs on the standard LAMP stack. There is no SaaS option available, so you have to host it yourself or use one of the partners if you want to deploy in the cloud. FrontAccounting has been around for several years, and it's reasonably mature. The documentation and forums are pretty good. You'll also find good prebuilt connections to other "best of breed" projects for the likes of e-commerce and CRM. -- Fred Blauer

- http://www.gnucash.org/
GnuCash is the standout favorite in the personal finance category. It's mature, with a large and active community. The documentation is good, and there are a lot of useful features. GnuCash even has rudimentary small-business accounting functions, and many people have tried to use it as an accounting program. But it falls short if you need to take care of inventory control, order entry, purchasing, or time tracking. Think of it as a free open source alternative to Intuit Quicken. It has good bank reconciliation features, as well as investment tracking. -- Fred Blauer

- http://www.openerp.com/
Unlike some "dual license" projects, OpenERP provides only one edition of the software. Commercial versions add maintenance and support. The advantage of this business model is that you can start off with the professional version, then move back to the community version merely by dropping the services. (This is not typically possible with the dual-license model because different versions of the database make it impossible to "downgrade.") OpenERP is built on a Python framework that's easy to customize and extend. There are tons of third-party add-ons, almost all of which are free. -- Fred Blauer
EDIT devnullius: this program needs a better description...

- http://www.openbravo.com/
Openbravo is a fork of the original open source ERP app Compiere, now owned and supported by Consona. However, unlike Compiere, Openbravo has better community support and has not crippled the community version. In fact, there's only one edition of the system for everyone. This system is built on Java and designed for enterprise scalability, but there is a trade-off in terms of complexity when it comes to installation, customizing, and learning. You'll need a good consulting firm with a lot of experience with the technology stack or plenty of in-house expertise. There is a good partner network, ecosystem, and a wealth of third-party add-ons. -- Fred Blauer

- http://www.xtuple.com/
Open source ERP is still in the early stages, and xTuple is one of the pioneers. The project is going though a major transition from the Qt4 UI framework to Enyo, an open source Web/mobile HTML5 toolkit that came out of the WebOS project and is sponsored by HP. xTuple is a different sort of company, with its own business and software development philosophies, but you can't argue with its success. The company continues to grow at a healthy rate year after year, and while almost all of the other open source ERP projects have been forked, xTuple has not. That's a testament to the strength of the system. -- Fred Blauer

- http://www.liferay.com/
Liferay Portal is a full-on open source Web portal system. It gives you the building blocks you need to easily create a dynamic website. You can use it to create a basic Web presence, a customer-facing data portal, a Web-based collaboration system, or even a social Web platform. Liferay has a built-in document manager that lets you use multiple content repositories, and it speaks Microsoft SharePoint protocols so that you can use Microsoft Office in conjunction with the document repositories. Liferay is like LEGOs for Web apps and websites: It provides the blocks, but it's up to you to find the best way to use them to create the Web app needed for your organization. -- High Mobley

- http://diasporaproject.org/
Web junkies love to dream about federated social networks that replace Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr with open standards that let you share status updates and photos with your friends. One of the first of these to gain attention, Diaspora, is morphing to become even more open as some of the original developers move on. The code is open and ready to return control to us. All we need to do is build out our own sites, and we can stop worrying about Mark Zuckerberg watching and dictating everything we do. -- Peter Wayner

A TOTAL OF 26 CRAZY SUITES IS DISCUSSED IN THE ORIGINAL SLIDESHOW. YOU must CHECK IT OUT if you have any corporate aspirations, including medial! Go fish, by order of...

devnullius ; )