Tools News and Articles

They say data is "the new oil," but all that data you collect is only valuable if it leads to new insights. An open source analysis tool called KNIME lets you analyze data through graphical workflows – without the need for programming or complex spreadsheet manipulation.

In this issue, sys admin columnist and tool veterinarian Charly Kühnast invites Sysdig, the jack-of-all-trades among system diagnostic tools, into his surgery for a quick checkup. The project promises to unite the functionality of lsof, iftop, netstat, tcpdump, and others.

The smenu tool reduces the effort of creating shell menus to one line, with numerous options for a wide range of design alternatives.

When human error stumps the Debian package manager, familiar tools like apt-get, aptitude, and dpkg can help restore functionality.

Httpstat is a special stopwatch you can use to discover how long web servers take to serve up a static or dynamic HTML page. Visible performance lags indicate optimization potential for the server.

Almost all manufacturers of GPS devices use proprietary formats to save routes, tracks, and waypoints. Vendors unfortunately rarely offer Linux software for uploading and downloading or processing the data. Four GPS editors keep Linux users on the right track.

Autojump is a mature and widely available command-line tool for navigating your directory structure. We show you how it works.

Sys admin columnist Charly never takes a vacation from the Internet. A beach bar with WiFi is quickly found, but it runs a forced proxy, which thinks that the SSH port (22) is in league with the devil and blocks the connection. Time to drill a tunnel.

The most fundamental tool needed to administer a cluster is a parallel shell, which allows you to run the same command on a series of nodes. In this article, we look at pdsh.

The inxi command-line tool provides useful information from the depths of the system.