Awesome Sysadmin: Open-source sysadmin resources | Hacker News Reader

Awesome Sysadmin: Open-source sysadmin resources

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250 pointsmountaineer46 comments

An impressive list. However - how do you choose the right tool for your needs? "What is the best tool for ..." is usually rejected in SO (and other Stack Exchange sites). A "Stack Overflow for tools" recommendations, pros and cons would be great.

It exists, although it's in beta and not focused on sysadmin stuff: http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/

THis will be funny if they continue the standard of closing everything based on "too subjective".

Seems to be missing some obvious things:

Under virtualization: XenServer -- it has Xen, but most SysAdmins wont use raw Xen, but instead a complete hypervisor such as XenServer or VMware, etc.

XenServer was recently re-rereleased and now is 100% open source (all features). Now you get all the "enterprise" features in the freebie Open Source version.

Under SMTP Servers: Zimbra - excellent top-of-class email server, and open source.

Kinda off-topic, and you might be the wrong person to ask, so, sounds like a plan! Which hypervisor would likely be the best on Ubuntu 14.04. It'd be for a single, fairly low-utilization system. Looks like 14.04 has support for Xen, KVM, and VMware. As I said, low utilization, virtualizing a couple of linux boxen and a single Windows box.

Everyone else feel free to join in on the discussion (i'm probably breaking all kinds of site rules, aren't I?:) It's a greenfiield setup so I'd like to start with what the folks around here might recommend.

If one of the choices is correct by a very margin, let me know that's the case and I'll go checkout that path. Thanks!

> Under SMTP Servers: Zimbra - excellent top-of-class email server, and open source.

Zimbra is a groupware suite with Postfix under the hood. It doesn't really belong in that category. (Agreed though... it's fantastic!)

I'll add XenServer, I didn't know it was 100% open source now. Thanks for your suggestion.

Zimbra is added under "Collaborative Software"

Very good resources link. Thank you for sharing and keeping this thread alive on top. But all of them are not integrated to sort of interoperate leveraging each other's resources. Is there any project that integrates these different projects? Is there sufficient interest in the group to use sort of selected items as distro? Are there any takers for such an initiative? May be just focusing on Management and monitoring part to start with?

Slant is a general "what is the best..." website:

http://www.slant.co

That's the problem we're trying to solve at Leanstack.io, but without the Q&A interaction: http://leanstack.io/platform-as-a-service. Would love to hear your feedback: yonas[at]leanstack.io.

As someone new to a lot of this stuff, I'd love to also add a best practices section.

Like for example in SSH it would talk about setting up keys, and turning off features that make it less secure (can't think of which off the top of my head)

Sounds like Super User to me?

No, no that's not like Super User - as parent mentions, "What is the best tool for ..." is offtopic for Super User too.

This was mostly spawned from this: http://sabok.org which several LOPSA members have contributed to. Everyone has their own flavor of "What's the best" & "How to do Sysadmin", there's no real definitive list for anything. There's also http://ops-school.readthedocs.org which seems to be more focused on DevOps instead of real Sysadmin.

Founder of http://sabok.org here. Thanks for the mention! I used to work with the founder of Ops School -- we're still in touch and we're both gung-ho about effective ways to make more sysadmins / ops engineers.

Hi there, I promise I spelled your name right this time - it's me :)

"real sysadmin" ? :)

I'll be submitting things for sure. The more resources we have like this the better. Also, if you are interested in this type of stuff, I recently wrote an essay on "Bits Sysadmins Should Know", talking about sysadmin career advice and the main systems you will likely use @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/25-bits-sysadmins-should-k...

quite realted, but dont know how this would fit in there: DONT PANIC First Aid Kit - resources and links: https://8ack.de/firstaidkit/

Awesome. Thank you

Very good list. I do wish some of the entries had a more to their description than "written in Blub." Knowing the language is interesting but not really helpful if I just want to know functionality.

Of all the things I think this list is missing, I think the #1 is the backup software lsyncd: watches a local directory tree for changes, then uses rsync to copy the changes. Great for when your data become so large that you can't complete your periodic backup job in a reasonable period of time.

I have a problem with "cloud storage." Most of those are simple file sync services and they have nothing to do with "the cloud".

OwnCloud for example, is just a php app used for syncing files with different clients. It is not distributed, the data is not replicated, there is no High Aveilabilty(HA) setup. Seafile could has HA if you pay.

The only true cloud storage system there is Swift. And CEPH is missing, which is a big player in cloud storage.

I may be wrong here, but cloud should be HA, scailable and distributed.

Owncloud can do much more than just sync files: http://owncloud.org/features/ It's by no means distributed etc, though.

Repo owner here :P

You are right, I have to reconsider some categories, maybe something like "File Sync" is a better place for the rest of tools.

Ceph is categorized as Distributed File System

Thanks for your suggestions

Very good resources link. Thank you for sharing and keeping this thread alive on top. But all of them are not integrated to sort of interoperate leveraging each other's resources.

Is there any project that integrates these different projects? Is there sufficient interest in the group to use sort of selected items as distro?

Are there any takers for such an initiative? May be just focusing on Management and monitoring part to start with?

Submitted a pull request to add DREBS - our AWS EBS backup script.

https://github.com/kahun/awesome-sysadmin/pull/74 http://dojo4.com/blog/aws-ebs-backups-we-rewrote-drebs

Would be interesting to see a comparable SaaS version as well, for services that correspond to OS solutions here.

http://leanstack.io/categories is a pretty big repository of such services. Edit: or maybe you mean services which offer the equivalent OS software as a Saas?

This is good, that's what I was thinking of, comparable SaaS solutions by use case.

"The art of network administration" by Limoncelli et al is still surprisingly (given the pace of our industry) relevant. Great for the theory side.

That and the Evi Nemeth / Garth Schneider book for the step by steps to implement.

zeromq is in the wrong place

not sure if it's supposed to go in "newsletters" but there needs to be a place for majordomo and mailman

no sysadmin is going to want a list with mongodb on it. ;)

ticketing systems should include roundup

loggers should include flume

squid and haproxy need a mention

I'm not sure if it's in it or not, but mitmproxy is great for troubleshooting page loading problems, especially when you may be behind a filter/proxy.

For anyone interested there is also https://github.com/opsschool/curriculum

Hopefully the lack of comments here means everyone is submitting pull requests to the repo instead of posting their favourite missing resource on here. ;-)

Based on all the repo email notifications I'm getting, I believe that may be the case :)

I'll be submitting a pull request with the ones I know of, but one thing I'd like to see added is spam filtering software.

Don't forget wireshark for troubleshooting.

Does anything like this exist for testing?

What are the other lists like this one?

almost every comment on this thread should be a pull request.

Do not forget Zarafa!

only the first book listed is open source/free/creative commons

The point is that the list itself is open source, e.g. anyone can add resources to it.

Quite misleading.

Good resource

Should probably have some Kerberos stuff on there.

CVS is missing in the version control stuff.

Horde is missing from the webmail stuff.

Zabbix is missing.

Nothing about PHP deployment.

Lots of neat stuff, but, erm, not really for sysadmins.

EDIT:

Nothing on shell scripting, sed, awk, curl, wget, or any other tools of the trade.

Nothing on system V init scripts, or even systemd.

Nothing on RAID!

This isn't sysadmin stuff, this is a list of nifty little tools used by people pretending to be devops!

Urk.

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