Must have open source projects for IT admins

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shadow_man

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Software that's useful for system admins / IT departments. Software that makes your day to day life easier and aids you in performing the tasks you need to in your job.

Please provide name / projector URL / description.

I'll add your suggestions as they come in. Thanks to all the contributors - see their individual posts to see who contributed what.

Tracmor - http://www.tracmor.org/
Asset / Inventory Management, track all your IT assets and provide reporting on them to your bean counters aka (finance department).

Reposado - https://github.com/wdas/reposado
Software update server for OSX OS updates. No need to have an Apple server, just to serve updates on your LAN! Saves on time / bandwidth / $$$.

ZFS on Linux - http://zfsonlinux.org/
A really cool file system with some really cool features. Has the ability to create snapshots of your file system and restore them at will. Can also replicate itself to a spare box for redundancy and so much more!

PFSense - http://www.pfsense.org/
A FreeBSD based firewall. One of the best I've used. Blocklists / squid / reporting / captive portal and so much more.

Observium - http://www.observium.org
Network monitoring system. Monitor your devices in real time and receive reports when systems are out of space or under load. Great at providing graphs.

Ansible - http://www.ansibleworks.com/
Infrastructure as code. The ability to role out servers via pre set builds / scripts. You build a template for your mail server and simply deploy whenever a new mail server is needed. Great for standardization.

RT - http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/
Ticket / project system.

Nagios - http://www.nagios.org/
Network monitoring system. Monitor your devices in real time and receive reports when systems are out of space or under load.

Wink - http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
Tutorial creation software. Great for providing tutorials to users / other IT personnel.

OpenFire - http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/
Jabber server. Host your own internal chat network and become a cohesive unit.

BigBlueButton - http://www.bigbluebutton.org/
Virtual whiteboard / tutorial creation software. Get everyone in to contribute in to an idea, whether you're in the same office or not!

Hiren's Boot CD - http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd
A boot CD with great tools for PC repair, previously it wasn't all Open Source but I believe they've removed all of the infringing items e.g. Ghost / Acronis.

RSYNC - http://rsync.samba.org/
rsync is a utility software and network protocol for Unix-like systems (with ports to Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh) that synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer by using delta encoding when appropriate.

Ketarin - http://ketarin.canneverbe.com/
Ketarin is a small application which automatically updates setup packages. As opposed to other tools, Ketarin is not meant to keep your system up-to-date, but rather to maintain a compilation of all important setup packages which can then be burned to disc or put on a USB stick.
More to come, will edit later. Please feel free to fill it out.

NirSoft - http://www.nirsoft.net/
Not quite open source but freeware. Some useful items like mailpv for retrieving Outlook password (when your users / clients have long forgetten them).

Ninite - http://ninite.com/
Not quite open source but freeware. A mass installer / deployment tool for new PC setups. Incorporate lots of installers in to one and run silent installs / avoid prompts.

UltraVNC - http://www.uvnc.com/
Open source VNC server / client. Allows you to remotely control a users PC and assist with IT issues.

UNetbootin - http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux distributions without burning a CD. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. You can either let UNetbootin download one of the many distributions supported out-of-the-box for you, or supply your own Linux .iso file if you've already downloaded one or your preferred distribution isn't on the list.

Process Hacker - http://processhacker.sourceforge.net/
Process Hacker provides all the functionality of Windows' Process Explorer utility, plus a whole lot more. You can see all network connections, open/listening ports, and the connected processes.

Clonezilla - http://clonezilla.org/
Open source alternative to GHOST / Acronos True Image etc. A program to clone hard disk drives.

WinSCP - http://winscp.net/eng/index.php
Graphical SCP / SFTP client. Great for transferring files if you want a GUI.

OCS Inventory NG - http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org/en/
Open source server based version of Belarc advisor. Very handy when your favourite proprietory software vendor calls and asks you for your 'licensing position' so they can 'add value by assisting you with your software asset management.'

Nas4Free - http://www.nas4free.org/
Network storage server OS. Has ZFS capabilities and a nice GUI to assign user rights etc.
 
Last edited:
I will most defenitly look at ZFS!
We make use of NETApp devices as NAS for VMware ESXi disks via iSCSI.

Looks like its very similar to LVM/2
 
Never heard of a software called "RESERVED" ?!!!

Better to keep editing your post adding on the new stuff than putting in reserved slots
 
SBSP said:
I will most defenitly look at ZFS!
We make use of NETApp devices as NAS for VMware ESXi disks via iSCSI.

Looks like its very similar to LVM/2
Click to expand...

I use ZFS to provide an ISCSI LUN to my VMWare ESXI boxes. Works well and I have the ability to snapshot the LUN whenever I feel like it. Greatly aids in disaster recovery. I then use ZFS send / recv commands to replicate that ZFS pool to another host. So if host 1 drops, host 2 can simply be renamed and off we go - no or very minimal data loss (e.g. last snapshot time).
 
imranpanji said:
Never heard of a software called "RESERVED" ?!!!

Better to keep editing your post adding on the new stuff than putting in reserved slots
Click to expand...

Its for when this grows beyond the first post e.g. too many entries - best to think ahead ;)
 
Never heard of a software called "RESERVED" ?!!!

Better to keep editing your post adding on the new stuff than putting in reserved slots

rsync : http://rsync.samba.org/
rsync is a utility software and network protocol for Unix-like systems (with ports to Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh) that synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer by using delta encoding when appropriate
 
jsheed_sa said:
I use ZFS to provide an ISCSI LUN to my VMWare ESXI boxes. Works well and I have the ability to snapshot the LUN whenever I feel like it. Greatly aids in disaster recovery. I then use ZFS send / recv commands to replicate that ZFS pool to another host. So if host 1 drops, host 2 can simply be renamed and off we go - no or very minimal data loss (e.g. last snapshot time).
Click to expand...

Exactly what the NetApp does, NetApp devices are awesome, Only problem is the Device and OS is based on unix, and made proprietary, Support in South Africa is very hard to find, If you need to learn , you can only buy an emulator, or obviously a Netapp device for 500K, We sync our data from one device to another to amsterdam, quite impressive it also integrates nicely into AD with CIFS and quite posibly with using some SAMBA , it supports "Windows Previous Versions"

Ive been messing with LVM2 for quite some time now, But LVM2 is not recommended to be used in a highly critical production environment, not safe enough
 
OCS Inventory NG has been pretty useful to me over the years. It's a bit like an open source server based version of Belarc advisor. Very handy when your favourite proprietory software vendor calls and asks you for your 'licensing position' so they can 'add value by assisting you with your software asset management.'

Ref ZFS, Nas4Free (which is forked from FreeNAS) has ZFS and does all the good stuff mentioned above. I haven't used in a production environment yet though.
 
jsheed_sa said:
To be honest I wasn't sure where to create this.

It can be moved if necessary but I figured the Linux section was a good place to start as most of the admin tools are Linux based.
Click to expand...

Will leave it then. Thanks for clarifying this :)

Great stuff! :)
 
ZFSonLinux aint bad, until you try ZFS on OpenIndiana or another Illumos based distro. ZFS on those are just amazing. Actually supports the full windows privileges (eg. instead of 777 crap you can do user/group based and more specific and just those 3 digits) and integrates very nicely into an AD environment. Also CIFS on these distros are much faster than Samba on Linux. If you serious about file storage using ZFS, give OpenIndiana for example a test. Running my fileserver at home now on OpenIndiana, and it is the best choice I have ever made for ZFS.
 
jsheed_sa said:
ZFS on Linux - http://zfsonlinux.org/
A really cool file system with some really cool features. Has the ability to create snapshots of your file system and restore them at will. Can also replicate itself to a spare box for redundancy and so much more!
Click to expand...

I would steer clear of this one - it's the worst ZFS implementation available (except for ZFS-fuse). If you want ZFS in an Open Sourche flavour, FreeBSD is what you want. At least until the Linux port of Open ZFS catches up, which looks like it will be a long long time.

SBSP said:
Ive been messing with LVM2 for quite some time now, But LVM2 is not recommended to be used in a highly critical production environment, not safe enough
Click to expand...

Why do you say that? It's absolutely safe for production environment. But like any tool, it can be used to do stupid things which may not be production safe.
 
koffiejunkie said:
Why do you say that? It's absolutely safe for production environment. But like any tool, it can be used to do stupid things which may not be production safe.
Click to expand...

The snapshot part of it is unstable, and a bit buggy.
Once you start having multiple snapshots, it becomes terribly slow.
And to recover data from it in case something went wrong is a night mare.

I wouldn't want to go to bed every night knowing our data sits on an LVM2 FS :)
 
SBSP said:
The snapshot part of it is unstable, and a bit buggy.
Click to expand...

Curious to know what bugs you're referring to. We rely on LVM snapshots to do snapshots on a couple of thousand servers. No problems so far, and it's been years.

SBSP said:
Once you start having multiple snapshots, it becomes terribly slow.
Click to expand...

It's Copy On Write. Any snapshotting mechanism puts an I/O tax on your discs. COW is arguably the friendliest of the lot, but it's not meant for permanent snapshots.

SBSP said:
And to recover data from it in case something went wrong is a night mare.
Click to expand...

If you need to recover data from discs, you're doing it wrong.

SBSP said:
I wouldn't want to go to bed every night knowing our data sits on an LVM2 FS :)
Click to expand...

There's no need to.
 
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