Let’s get this community popping with some useful information. Reddit’s sysadmin subreddit seemed like a place of complainers, I look forward to having actual productive conversation in this community.
Notepad++ is one of the best applications ever made
Kinda new to the whole sysadmin thing, but tmux has been an absolute game changer for me. No more remote desktop for long running processes, I can just do everything from ssh.
Put a dev box in the cloud/Colo whatever run tmux, learn about sync panes, work on multiple hosts at once, …, Profit
I’m a big fan of RoyalTS for managing my RDP / SSH access to servers. Keepass for password storage.
Pretty minor one, but for Windows, greenshot is a great replacement for Snipping Tool, and includes easy to use highlighting tools for SOP’s, etc.
Yep. They’re unstable builds have been great, lately.
Is love to see them ship a stable, though…
One of the first installs on any new computer. Can’t live without it once you have it! It makes it so quick and easy to grab a screenshot, draw some arrows/boxes/whatever, then just copy and paste.
Almost forgot obfuscation — the pixelization is so much better than blank white boxes.
Greenshot lacks the option to time screenshots. ShareX has it, but very janky
Bought greenshare andsharex. Greenshare on windows is great… Mac not so good
Powershell scripts have been my tool of choice for the past few years (stuck in Windows world unfortunately).
Lately I’ve been dipping my toes into automating switch config - Ansible has been fantastic for that.
Vscode. Yes it’s managed by Microsoft, and yes it’s a newage emacs (it can do anything with add-ons), but regardless of what your tasks are it’s probably going to be useful.
There’s always vscodium
Use it 6-10 hours a day. Probably the most versatile IDE I’ve ever used.
Big fan of the IODD. I love having a ton of bootable images ready to go on a single drive. I mostly use it to boot disk wiping software, disk imaging software, and malware removal tools but it also serves as my main flash drive with common software and scripts I use a lot.
My company has been moving onto Kubernetes recently and I’ve found Lens to be very helpful with it. It has a nice cluster dashboard and has inbuilt shortcuts to jump onto containers, see logs, etc.
For systems creation, provisioning and config management Hashicorp’s
terraformandpacker, and RedHat’sansibleare indispensable.govcfor managing guests in vCenter.jqfor parsing json.I like
tmuxbetter thanscreen, but use both.Not really a tool, per se, but Netbox is a great DCIM/IPAM application for managing your infrastructure.
Just learned about it and am currently learning, but Apache JMeter looks like a useful tool for running automated load testing against different kinds of services.
PDQ! Inventory and Deploy
Along with pre packed PowerShell scripts.
I have a bunch of pages and tasks that can be run from the right click menu in Inventory so not only myself, but also less technical team members can run them.
It also is nice to RDP or VNC into a machine with a keyboard shortcut.
I’ve been in the weird space of on-prem “cloud” infrastructure (mostly kubernetes) for the last seven years but I’ve been doing infra, middleware, and devops for more than twenty years and have my own way of working that’s nearly GUI-free.
Tools I use every single day:
- tmux
- The one true editor and org-mode.
- The other one true editor.
- Bash, sed, awk, and the indispensable Shellcheck.
- Munging data with
- curl and httpie.
- ag (the Silver Searcher) out of habit but ripgrep is awesome too.
Less often but very useful:
- socat a swiss army knife for sockets.
- ansible
- terraform
Languages, because I write my own tools:
Currently doing a lot with csv data, mlr is something I learned about 3 months ago… thanks for sharing!
remote desktop manager by devolutions powershell - duh ansible vscode sharex or greenshot (I’ve been favoring sharex lately) firefox with the container plugin (so I can keep the authentication contexts separate for all the o365 consoles I have to deal with)
KeepassXC. Covers all I need for my personal password management, I like putting my encrypted databases to e.g. OneDrive instead of relying to something solely cloud-based.
Vivaldi Browser. Because I like messing around with tabs and this is one is supporting side tabs (instead having them on top), you can have Chrome extensions as well.
Terraform and Terragrunt as a combination are really powerful.
Building reusable modules that you string together to infinity with automatically managed strategies is really powerful.
mRemoteNG
For having RDP, VNC, and SSH sessions all in a single page with tabs.
