System tools in linux

10 Linux Tools to Know as Sysadmin

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Sooner or later, all system administrators face the challenge of administering servers.

And, tools come to rescue the sysadmin’s life.

As a sysadmin, you just don’t work on core OS (Linux or Windows) but also deals with what is hosted on them. It could be a database, application server, web server, messaging applications, caching, etc. The following tools should help you in many ways.

Zenmap

When you need to discover network-related issues, Zenmap will come to the rescue. It is not a tool you’ll use daily to administer your system, but it will prove to be invaluable when the need to scan the network to troubleshoot issues arises.

It is a front end for the Nmap network scanner that not only runs on Linux but also in Windows, BSD, other versions of Unix, and macOS. Besides network scanning, Zenmap can be used for penetration testing and port scanning, either by experienced or beginner sysadmins.

Zenmap can store profiles, which certainly is one of its strengths. These profiles can be reused for later scans.

Webmin

This one-stop-shop tool offers a web-based interface for administering every aspect of a Linux server. From file sharing to DNS, to Apache web server and various databases. If you need something that is not included in the default package, you can pick one from a huge catalog of third-party modules that bring added functionality.

You just have to download the latest version and copy it to the server’s home folder. After that, you simply run the command: dpkg -i webmin_(version).deb . And that’s all.

Cockpit

Cockpit is another server administration tool. It stands out for being “beginner-friendly”: it is easy to use, lightweight and simple, yet very powerful. It offers a web-based GUI that facilitates storage admin tasks, service starting/stopping, journal inspection, and multi-server setup management.

The tool was created for Red Hat, but it runs on many Linux server distributions, besides Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL): Fedora, Arch Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, among others.

The installation procedure varies for each distribution. In some distributions, like Fedora, CentOS and RHEL, Cockpit can be found in the official repositories. In others, like Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint, you can install Cockpit from its official PPA.

gping

A fantastic graph-based PING utility. The great thing is, gping lets you visualize multiple endpoints ping in a real-time graph.

This can be a great choice when you have to compare the ping latency for two or more URLs. You can ping IPv4 or IPv6 address and the installer are available for Ubuntu, CentOS, macOS, and Windows.

Shorewall

This tool adds an abstraction layer for achieving a higher-level configuration of Netfilter. Shorewall reads configuration files and configures Netfilter in the Linux kernel, with the support of the ip, tc, iptables, and iptables-restore utilities. The advantage of using Shorewall is that it divides the interfaces into zones, assigning different levels of access to each one.

It allows the user to operate on groups of computers connected to the interface, instead of working on groups of addresses. Users can easily deploy different policies for each zone.

Nagios

This open-source network monitoring tool was launched in 2002 under the name NetSaint. Since then, Nagios has gone a long way, awarding itself a strong reputation for doing a great job monitoring servers and network devices. It works well out of the box when it is given the task to monitor an environment with many basic protocols. Nagios also provides a base for other monitoring utilities, such as Naemon, Icinga, and OP5.

Nagios got great documentation for you to get it started.

phpMyAdmin

For those who also have to deal with database maintenance, phpMyAdmin is a classic and very popular tool. The main reason for its popularity is perhaps its portability. phpMyAdmin runs in a web browser, which means you can use it from any device, even from a smartphone. Another reason is that it covers all the necessary functions required to manage the database, and you practically don’t have to know how to write queries in SQL to do that.

Puppet

To manage the growing number of servers that run on a corporate network, as a Linux admin, you will need the best-of-breed tools to do orchestration and configuration management. One of these tools is Puppet, a complete one when you take into account user interfaces, modules and available actions.

Puppet not only shows you the whole picture of the Linux server ecosystem but also includes almost any other operating system that may be operating in the network, giving you a deep insight into each one. Installation is easy.

MySQL Workbench

For those of you who need to manage MySQL databases but don’t like web-based GUIs, feeling more comfortable with traditional windowed apps, then MySQL Workbench is your tool. The bright side of this app is that it installs very simple and has an easy to use graphical interface, grouping every MySQL task you may need to perform.

It offers some interesting goodies, such as unlimited undo/redo, multiple MySQL connections and visual modeling of data and schema. It can also be automated through scripting and extended via plugins. The only drawback of MySQL Workbench is that, unlike phpMyAdmin, to master it you need deep knowledge of SQL.

Network administrators have many options when they need to choose a monitoring tool capable of doing network mapping and port scanning. Among them, the de facto standard is Nmap, due to its combination of usability and versatility. Network admins use it for network discovery and vulnerability detection. It can scan all available hosts in the network, making a list of all the services they provide.

In this way, the administrator can find open ports and take appropriate measures to reduce security risks.

Nmap users agree that it adapts well to any environment where identification of endpoints or vulnerability scanning is required. However, you need a certain level of experience to interpret its output correctly.

Just the tip of the iceberg

The beauty of Linux rests in that because it is open-source, there are thousands of developers out there eager to come up with a hot-new utility that will make them heroes for all system administrators. The utilities we mentioned here are only a few of the many there are available. Still, altogether, they comprise a bunch of items that most surely will be part of the toolbox of every sysadmin, regardless of his or her working style.

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10 Commands to Collect System and Hardware Info in Linux

It is always a good practice to know the hardware components of your Linux system is running on, this helps you to deal with compatibility issues when it comes to installing packages, drivers on your system using yum, dnf, or apt.

10 Commands to Check Hardware and System Information in Linux

Therefore in these tips and tricks series, we shall look at some useful commands that can help you to extract information about your Linux system and hardware components.

1. How to View Linux System Information

To know only the system name, you can use the uname command without any switch that will print system information or the uname -s command will print the kernel name of your system.

To view your network hostname, use the ‘-n’ switch with the uname command as shown.

To get information about kernel-version, use the ‘-v’ switch.

To get the information about your kernel release, use the ‘-r’ switch.

To print your machine hardware name, use the ‘-m’ switch:

All this information can be printed at once by running the ‘uname -a’ command as shown below.

2. How to View Linux System Hardware Information

Here you can use the lshw tool to gather vast information about your hardware components such as cpu, disks, memory, usb controllers, etc.

lshw is a relatively small tool and there are few options that you can use with it while extracting information. The information provided by lshw was gathered from different /proc files.

Note: Do remember that the lshw command is executed by the superuser (root) or sudo user.

To print information about your Linux system hardware, run this command.

You can print a summary of your hardware information by using the -short option.

If you wish to generate output as an html file, you can use the option -html.

Generate Linux Hardware Information in HTML

3. How to View Linux CPU Information

To view information about your CPU, use the lscpu command as it shows information about your CPU architecture such as a number of CPUs, cores, CPU family model, CPU caches, threads, etc from sysfs and /proc/cpuinfo.

4. How to Collect Linux Block Device Information

Block devices are storage devices such as hard disks, flash drives, etc. lsblk command is used to report information about block devices as follows.

If you want to view all block devices on your system then include the -a option.

5. How to Print USB Controllers Information

The lsusb command is used to report information about USB controllers and all the devices that are connected to them.

You can use the -v option to generate detailed information about each USB device.

6. How to Print PCI Devices Information

PCI devices may include usb ports, graphics cards, network adapters, etc. The lspci tool is used to generate information concerning all PCI controllers on your system plus the devices that are connected to them.

To print information about PCI devices run the following command.

Use the -t option to produce output in a tree format.

Use the -v option to produce detailed information about each connected device.

7. How to Print SCSI Devices Information

To view all your scsi/sata devices, use the lsscsi command as follows. If you do not have the lsscsi tool installed, run the following command to install it.

After installation, run the lsscsi command as shown:

Use the -s option to show device sizes.

8. How to Print Information about SATA Devices

You can find some information about sata devices on your system as follows using the hdparm utility. In the example below, I used the block device /dev/sda1 which is the hard disk on my system.

To print information about device geometry in terms of cylinders, heads, sectors, size, and the starting offset of the device, use the -g option.

9. How to Check Linux File System Information

To gather information about file system partitions, you can use the fdisk command. Although the main functionality of the fdisk command is to modify file system partitions, it can also be used to view information about the different partitions on your file system.

You can print partition information as follows. Remember to run the command as a superuser or else you may not see any output.

10. How to Check Linux Hardware Components Info

You can also use the dmidecode utility to extract hardware information by reading data from the DMI tables.

To print information about memory, run this command as a superuser.

To print information about the system, run this command.

To print information about BIOS, run this command.

To print information about the processor, run this command.

Summary

There are many other ways you can use to obtain information about your system hardware components. Most of these commands use files in the /proc directory to extract system information.

Hope you find these tips and tricks useful and remember to post a comment in case you want to add more information to this or if you face any difficulties in using any of the commands. Remember to always stay connected to Tecmint.

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Better Than Top: 7 System Monitoring Tools for Linux to Keep an Eye on Vital System Stats

Last updated October 23, 2020 By Ankush Das 35 Comments

No matter whether you’re a system administrator or just a casual desktop user, you may have heard about one of the most popular terminal-based system monitoring tool “top“. To many, it’s the task manager on Linux.

In case you didn’t know, the “Top” utility helps display all the running processes and gives you some important information on the performance of your personal computer or server. It also gives you the ability to kill processes that you don’t need.

But, what alternatives do you have? Do you need any? Let’s find out.

Why do you need “Top” Alternatives?

Considering that you’ll find it baked in on most of the Linux distribution by default, top isn’t going anywhere.

However, you won’t find any mouse support, scroll support, no colors to highlight things, and a few other cons. For these reasons, using top command to its fullest is not easy for everyone.

There are alternatives which provide you more information on the running processes and lets you manage them easily.

Useful system monitoring tools like top (but better than top)

Hence, in this article, I’ll mention a few good alternatives to the top command utility that are potentially better.

I have included installation commands for Debian/Ubuntu based distributions. Almost all the tools mentioned here should be available via the package manager of other distributions as well.

The list is in no particular order of ranking. Try what’s best for you!

1. htop

htop is an interactive system monitor that supports scrolling and mouse interaction as well.

Not just limited to the advanced features — but it also highlights the processes and information using some color codes which makes it look more organized and easy to work with.

In fact, I personally prefer using htop over top to keep an eye on the system resources and the processes. It lets you kill processes, filter them, offers tree view of processes (press F5), and a couple of other features.

How to install htop?

For Ubuntu-based distros, you just have to head to the terminal and type in:

You can also find RPM/DEB packages from the links on their official website for other Linux distributions. In either case, you can also download the source if you want.

2. atop

If you want more details on the running processes or the ones that were previously running, atop is a useful utility for that.

It also supports permanent logging of resource utilization if you want it for long-term analysis. Even though I’m not a professional system administrator, it’s easy to say how useful it is to see the critical resource being highlighted.

In my case, I’d prefer htop over this — but it depends on what information you’re looking to monitor and what are the extra features that you want. You can learn more about it on its official website.

How to install atop?

If you’re on a Debian-based distro, you just have to type in:

You can also find .rpm packages listed for every version on their official download page. In case you’re looking to install it on other Linux distros, you should refer to its official web page.

3. nmon

nmon is yet another useful utility that lets you monitor system resources and processes.

Unlike some other options, it gives you control to break down the information and display them one by one (toggle them) as needed

As you can observe in the screenshots above, you have to press specific keys to toggle stats and look through them. The stats are color-coded as well, which makes them easy to go through.

How to install nmon?

For Ubuntu-based distros, you can simply type in:

In either case, you can head to its official download page and look for packages for other Linux distros.

4. vtop

vtop is an interesting utility to monitory system resources while having the ability to manage them as well.

Unlike others, it is written using node.js. So, you’ll need to install node.js and npm packages.

It does offer mouse support and it looks like a GUI in a terminal. You can disable the mouse control if you don’t need it. So, it makes things easier to understand and monitor. Also, you can customize the vtop theme pretty easily.

How to install vtop?

For Ubuntu-based distros, you need to enter the following commands in the terminal

Here, you’re installing nodejs and its package manager npm first. Next, with the third command, you’re actually installing vtop.

If you want to install it on other Linux distributions, you can refer to its GitHub page.

5. bashtop

An impressive top alternative which potentially needs more resources to run — but easy-to-use and looks better in my opinion.

I’m starting to think that I should use bashtop instead of htop for monitoring.

In addition to the information it offers by default, you can also add more modules if you also want CPU temperatures and other stats using bashtop.

You can get all the details on it at its GitHub page.

How to install bashtop?

For some reason, it isn’t available in the default repository of Ubuntu 20.04 – but if you have Ubuntu 20.10 or later, you can simply type in:

For Ubuntu 20.04 or lower (any Ubunty-based distro), you can simply add the PPA and get it installed using the following commands:

To get installation isntructions for other Linux distributions, you can check out the GitHub page.

6. gtop

Yet another impressive top alternative. It looks somewhat similar to vtop and also needs nodejs to be installed.

You don’t get much to customize here — but it’s easy to use and provides all the necessary information.

How to install gtop?

Similar to vtop, you need to install nodejs and npm package manager to get started on Ubuntu-based distros.

Just type in the following commands in the terminal to get it installed:

If you need to install it on any other Linux distro, you can refer to its GitHub page.

7. Glances

Glances is an amazing system monitoring tool for folks who need to have more information at a single place.

The information you’ll have on your screen will depend on the size of the window. So, you should expect all the essential stats for disk I/O, network, kernel version, sensors, and other information.

You can also export the stats to an external database and use a web interface to monitor remotely. This is particularly useful for the system administrators making a custom web dashboard of sorts.

How to install Glances?

For Ubuntu-based distros, you can simply type in:

If you’re looking to install it on other Linux distributions, you can refer to its official website where you should find an auto install script or just explore its GitHub page.

Wrapping Up

Now that you know about some of the amazing top alternatives – what would you pick to monitor your system?

Do you use some other tools for system monitoring in Linux? Which one is it? Do share your it with us in the comments.

Like what you read? Please share it with others.

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