It’s not every day that you come across such a fine collection of tools that someone has generously created and put forth for the world.  One of my agents in the field sent this my way and so I feel compelled to share with you, my loyal readers.  This is a set of system administration tools, written in PERL, and that been offered up for free by the author simply out of the goodness that swells within his and her heart.  With tools like ‘turbo’, ‘cdrewind’, and ‘mkzombie’ just to name a few, how can you NOT have this collection in your kit?  Check it out, and see the goodness for yourself!

I have added another goody for anyone working on Windows that might be interested.  It’s an new tool that does MD5 checksum generation and comparison for you.  It’s free and still in BETA, but I am pretty sure it’s solid and I have any kinks worked out.  If you have any troubles, let me know or post in the forums.  Now, get over there and check it out!

XanaNews Screenshot

I was looking for a good, solid and preferably open source news reader (usenet client) whilst booted into Windows XP on my laptop earlier, and I found a dandy. I found a lightweight client called XanaNews, which although lightweight, not over burdened or bulky, it is also solid and easy to use. Throw in that it is open source and free, and it’s a nice application.

I looked at the screen shots and it looked like it was along the lines of what I wanted, so I decided to download it and give it a try.  After running the installer I easilly configured my news server (Giganews, if you aren’t using them and you want AWESOME usenet access, check these guys out! Like NOW!) and off I went, effortlessly subscribing to groups and reading posts on procmail.  That’s what I was working on at the time.

Well, I liked XanaNews so much, that I decided to install it on my main machine running Ubuntu.  I fired up Wine and ran through the same install steps and it again worked like a charm.  So now I can use this dandy little news reader on Windows and Linux.  I felt like I just had to share with everyone, because it seems like good usenet clients are hard to find unless you want to try and use something bundled into a web browser or email client which I usually don’t.  Give me an app made especially for what I want to use it for, and it’s probably going to do a better job of it every time.  Not always, but most of the time I would say.  Hope you enjoy it!

Moving files from Windows to UNIX or Linux (and now MacOSX) can be a pain if during the process you end up with a text file full of EOL characters thanks to how Microsoft terminates lines of text in Windows.  Yep, that’s the little ^M at the end of every line.  Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you can’t help but get stuck with them.

Here’s a tip for getting rid of them once and for all.  Use the dos2unix command!  Just like it sounds, it converts text files riddled with ^M’s to nice pretty *nix happy files.

By default, the command will open and read your file, and write it back to it’s original name and location.  Minus the ^M beasties.  So you can simply do this to convert a file:

dos2unix filename

Yes, it’s that easy.  There are other options if you want to get fancy, read the man page it’s full of information.  Do a quick Google search and you’ll find lots of resources about it, but chances are it’s already part of your Linux distro.  Other operating systems may be different.  Have fun!

Greetings everyone, I am back with more information about backing up your files.  I know, I know, talking about backups might be boring, but one day a good backup will save your butt, I guarantee it.  Previously I posted an article extolling the virtues of rsync, a very powerful command line tool for syncing files both locally and across networks via SSH.  This is great for command line addicts like myself, and especially because you can use it in scripts such that along with shared keys and keychain it becomes a powerful tool in your arsenal of sysadmin goodies.

Now, for folks that aren’t command like geeks, or maybe just want a quick and easy way to backup some files, there is a nifty little tool called grsync.  This is (as you can probably guess from the name) a gui for the command line rsync, making it much more user friendly.  Also, it’s quite nice for pointing and clicking what you want, and then seeing what the command it will use is, a learning tool.

The home of grsync is here:

http://www.opbyte.it/grsync/

For Debian, Ubuntu users you can find it in the repositories.

I found a cool tool, and that doesn’t even do it justice, I found a freakin’ awesome tool for monitoring whats going on with your servers and server logs.  It’s called Splunk, and it’s been around a while (a couple years at least, maybe more), but I just recently got the chance to check it out.

Wow.  Now, remember, I don’t do ANY paid reviews on this site.  So this is not me promoting something because I got a check for it.  This is me promoting something because of the principles of what I started this site for.  I found something totally cool, useful, well worth the time and money to invest in it and I want to tell all my readers about it.  That being said, just in case someone from Splunk is reading this right now and would like to send me a check, or a free license for the good promotion, I am all for it just drop me a line!

Anyway, this software can run on Windows, Linux, UNIX, you name it.  It accepts syslog input, flat file log parsing, interfaces with WMI and more.  So far, it knows what to do with everything I throw at it.  All that log data is chopped up and stored in a database so you can easily get meaningful information back out.  Probably the best feature of this whole darn thing is the interface.  Splunk has a CLI which rocks, but the web interface is one of the best I have ever seen.  Very slick, very nice, very easy to navigate, very easy to sort and search, truly amazing.  I have used other systems similar in theory (I won’t name names), and they didn’t do a half bad job at collecting the data, but it was getting anything useful out of it later that was the tough part.  Plus their appliance was much, much more expensive.

Now, do you want to know the best part?  Wait for it …. yep, it’s free!  No, really, it’s true.  They have a freely available and usable version of the software that 100% works.  The catch is that some advanced features are not enabled, and you are limited to 500MB of log data per day.  That’s great for most small shops, and to buy the Enterprise license for more features and data logging capacity, the pricing is not near as bad as the others I have seen.  Top that off with this being a better product and it’s like win, win … win … win … or something.

Go check it out, you’ll thank me if you haven’t done so already.  It’s free and installs in seconds, it’s so easy to setup you’ll laugh when you are done.  Go … now … go!  Enjoy!