Let’s start with detailed reviews of 31 Essential System Tools. This is a series of cornerstone articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small, indispensable utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems.
| System Administration Software | |
|---|---|
| System administration plays an essential role in the maintenance and operation of computer systems and networks. | |
 | Configuration Management Databases - A configuration management database (CMDB) is a repository of information related to the various components of an information system detailing an organisation’s IT services and the relationships between those components. The purpose of a CMDB is to catalog and track all of the information that an IT department needs to keep. |
 | Mailing List Managers - An electronic mailing list offers the ability to efficiently distribute information to many internet users. It is similar in some ways to a traditional mailing list. |
 | Disk cloning - Create, destroy, resize, move, check and copy partitions. It has a wide range of other uses such as provisioning new computers in the workplace, restoring computers from a master image, and system recovery. |
 | Disk Image Tools - Work with disk images. Disk images have many different uses such as burning optical media, system backup, data recovery, disk cloning, computer forensics, and operating systems (as Live CD/DVDs). |
 | Disk Encryption - Easy-to-use data encryption and security. The importance of security should never be underestimated. The consequences of losing data can be disastrous for any organization. |
| Partitioning Tools - Disk partitioning is the means of dividing a hard disk drive into multiple logical storage units referred to as partitions. A partition is a contiguous set of blocks on a drive that are treated as an independent disk. |
 | Configuration Management - Configuration Management software enables administrators to automatically manage the entire configuration of one or multiple computers. |
 | Server Provisioning Tools - Server provisioning is a set of actions to prepare a server, taking it from bare metal to a functioning system complete with an operating system, data and software. |
| Application Servers - An application server is computer software which provides the business logic for an application program. It offers services such as management of large distributed systems, data services, load balancing, transaction support, and network security. |
| Data Recovery - Data recovery is the process of retrieving data from corrupted or damaged storage media when it cannot be accessed. The storage media in question will often be a hard disk. |
 | Web Application Firewalls - A web application firewall (WAF) is a type of application firewall that lets you see and analyze HTTP traffic to and from a web application. |
 | Log Analyzers - The best open source software for collecting, parsing, storing, and making sense of logs. |
 | Logfile Viewers - Applications capture an enormous amount of information to log files, especially as a server may generate multiple logs. This software lets you view the logs. |
 | Console Log File Analyzers - We can use the tail utility to monitor a plain text log file. These tools give a lot more information than tail. |
 | Customer Service Trouble Ticketing Software - A customer service trouble ticketing (or help desk) is an information and assistance resource that helps the resolution of computer related problems. |
| System Profilers - A system profiler is a utility that presents information about the hardware attached to a computer. Having access to hard information about your hardware can be indispensable when you need to establish exactly what hardware is installed in your machine. |
| Handy Hard Disk Utilities for System Tweakers - We examine the finest open source tools to diagnose the health of a hard disk. We also look at software that can help improve the performance of a hard disk. |
 | Choosing a Journaling File System - A journaling file system is a special type of file system that maintains a tracking file, called a journal. The journal enables the system to repair any inconsistencies that may arise as a result of a system halted abnormally. |
| Encrypted FUSE-Based File Systems - Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) lets non-privileged users create their own file systems without editing kernel code. |
| Backup Software | |
|---|---|
| Backup software is used to perform a complete back up of a file, data, database, system or server. It enables users to make a duplicate of everything contained on the original source. This type of software is also used to perform a recovery of the data or system in the event of a disaster. | |
 | Backup Tools - Explore backup software with intuitive graphical interfaces, applications that backup systems with snapshots, whilst not forgetting the powerful command-line tools that exist. |
| Simple Backup - Keep data safe with the minimum of fuss. Install software that hides the complexity of doing backups. |
| DeDuplicating Encryption Tools - Deduplicating encrypting backup software. data deduplication is a specialized data compression technique for eliminating duplicate copies of repeating data. This technique therefore improves storage utilization. |