Filed under: Software
Apps for the Sys/Network admin in your life
Blog posts listing the 'top ten apps for OS X,' or '25 apps that will make your Mac happy,' are a dime a dozen. You are bound to see Quicksilver, Growl, Adium, and the like on those lists. It is a rare occurrence for me to find a blog post that recommends software that I have never heard of, and that is gear towards the geekiest of the geeky: the system and network admins.Niranjan Kunwar has compiled a list of OS X apps that are great tools for anyone who needs to admin servers or networks alike. It certainly isn't comprehensive, but it is a great start.
Sysadmins out there, what are some of your favorite Mac apps?
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Derick said 3:15PM on 9-08-2006
To add to the list, Apple Remote Desktop, Server Monitor, Workgroup Manager, OmniGraffle Pro, Navicat, MacTracker, CarbonCopyCloner, NetRestore
Reply
Dan Siercks said 3:38PM on 9-08-2006
To add to post #1: A NetBoot enviroment with Mike Bombich's NetRestore PHPServices, ssh, dscl, Server Assistant, and #!/bin/bash.
Reply
CyBeR said 3:38PM on 9-08-2006
Terminal.
And ARD is pretty nice. But I absolutely need my terminal.
Reply
alx said 4:01PM on 9-08-2006
mmm...how about replacing Apple's iChat server with Wildfire combined with Spark clients for internal messaging.
Cacti for SNMP and Nagios for monitoring and alerts.
kerberos.
oh yea...tar is pretty handy to keep ACLs and metadata around...
Reply
systemsboy said 5:59PM on 9-08-2006
I second the inexplicably left-out votes for Terminal and ARD.
Terminal is absolutely essential, and can gracefully handle special characters (like the "Apple Character", shift-option-k) which iTerm mangles. and ARD is just really great to have around. I'd also like to add TextEdit to the list.
What, no one writes scripts anymore?
-systemsboy
Reply
Ian Neubert said 6:23PM on 9-08-2006
I like JellyfiSSH ( http://www.grepsoft.net/jellyfissh.html ) for quickly getting SSH terminals open to all my servers.
Reply
mac-lender said 11:23PM on 9-08-2006
I also love CronniX, CrushFTP and Pseudo
Reply
Chris Martin said 8:08PM on 9-09-2006
It's not technically a mac app, but rdesktop will compile and run nicely under apples X11. It's invalvuable if you have to remotely admin a windows box.
Reply
John from Buffalo said 12:04PM on 9-10-2006
I don't find these apps to be the "geeky" sort of thing that runs for the Big Brother in me. I am a sys/network-admin AND programmer de jour ... and if you have done ANY opensource technology and have a Mac you start realize that every thing you ever wanted is really in the Apps/Utils directory.
One only need peruse THAT directory to really find what you need. As for the remote connection stuff... well that just makes sense. If you are a University student, most likely chicken of the VNC and the RDesktop have popped their heads.
All and all.. eh. Not really that geeky. Once you get into command line packet sniffing and Kismac security utils do you REALLY start to reach the "nerd/geek" factor.
Reply