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Tools for managing Linux boxes with Domino
April 4, 2002 |
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My Favorite tools for managing linux boxes with Domino (all are free) Items in green tools should be included in your distro and others may be downloaded Remote Admin cconsole - built into Domino -
allows console access wget filename pico - an easy to use text editor ( others may prefer vi) python/perl - for automating system administration tasks on many servers. I use python with expect to automate telnet sessions with routers, other servers and other devices. iptraf/ntop - tools which allow you to monitor network traffic on your machine or the subnet of your machine. ntop is particularly impressive in terms of ease of use and power. Mail forwarding fetchmail - a tool that allows
you to retrieve POP3 and IMAP mail from another server and forward it
to domino users.(Included in most distros) Misc Charting your logs webalizer - a nice easy
to setup log analyzer Server performance charting rrdtool
- a complex, but brilliant tool for charting server performance
Essential Linux command line tools that you
should know This is above and beyond the basic directory navigation tools. Note - I list the non - GUI ones because although the linux GUI is getting better ( and changes rapidly) you will eventually end up using the command prompt. Particularly if you are troubleshooting a problem or writing a shell script to automate administration. df -h - shows you the disk free (in meg or gig) - or you can use the notes admin client du -
shows the disk usage of a specific directory top - allows you to monitor cpu usage ps -ef - lists processes that are running - you can do a kill -9 PID on any process that doesn't seem to be responding lsof - shows open file handles and owners (good for locked files) netstat -vat grep - allows you to filter any
command with a pipe dig - is useful for checking dns
settings Alt+Fn - This will open up another terminal ( great if the one you are on is hung) also try to ssh into a box if it doesn't seem to be responding. locate filename dmesg - shows you any boot
errors that the machine may have had. vmstat/iostat/mpstat/sar - tools that allow you to easily monitor and chart system performance. Grab the lastest versions of these tools if you need them. tar xvzf filename.tar.gz -
un tar and unzip a file setup/setuptool/linuxconf - allows you do essential system setup from the command line (redhat/mandrake). Some people like linuxconf to manage a machine as well ifconfig -a - show your network card configuration information Seem to be having CPU performance problems? Get a quick baseline with smbclient //servername/g$ -W WINDOWS_DOMAIN -U user%passwd A quick tool to get to other windows servers. Where g$ is the drive where the domino data directory is located( or it could be a share that you create). For more security drop the passwd and you will be prompted. This will attempt to connect you to the remote disk or print share.
If successful, you will be sitting at a command prompt at which you
can use commands like cd, ls, get, and put, mkdir, rmdir, rm, ..., provided,
of course, the username and password you used allow you such access
to the history - shows command line history - use CTRL + R to search or !command to repeat Sources of information
Fun stuff
[root@ns1 root]# su - notes
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< It's all in the mind, ya know. >
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