Submitted by Will Powell on Apr 20, 2018
Description:
A modest collection of useful, mostly command-line tools for Linux
Purpose
This page is meant to showcase a few "cool tools" found for various administrative tasks. Of course, everyone is going to have their favorites - but it's also true that we discover new tools when we share the favorites we've found along this big adventure.
Assumed "Cool Tools"
There are a list of common "Cool Tools" that are assumed and often included in base installs. They are: htop, screen, lspci, lsblk, lshw, vim, tmux, lscpu, dmidecode, hdparm, ethtool
Table Format
The following table of "Cool Tools" will have application names that will be links to more information about that tool along with a description. We'll try to stick to tools that are distributed through mainline yum/apt repositories, including epel. If there are highly unusual build rules or a rarely used repo, please note that in the Desctiption column.
| Application Name | Description |
|---|---|
| iptraf-ng | An ncurses-based tool to show real-time network statistics and monitoring. Helpfup to enable its reverse DNS lookup capability, too, via its menu-driven config. |
| ncdu | An ncurses-based, graphical disk usage (du) tool. Adding "-x" to it restricts its report to the same filesystem (if, by chance, you don't want nfs/remote stuff reported, for example) |
| cdpr | Command line tool to listen for CDP broadcasts. Useful on a host to discover its upstream switch name and physical port. "sudo cdpr" |
| inxi | Command to report various hardware details, similar to lshw and dmidecode but with a lovely format. "sudo inxi -Fx" |
| terminator | A desktop terminal application that makes it easier to have multiple terminals in a single window, similar to iTerm2's "split pane" feature. Left-click on the window to split it. Can also toggle sending commands to all open sessions/panes if you have repeatable tasks to do on multiple systems. |
| nvme-cli | A useful CLI utility to query and manage NVMe drives. |
| Intel SSD Data Center Tool | "Configures and checks the state of Intel® SSDs with PCIe and SATA for a production environment." |
| ipmitool | Interact with a server's service processor. Can be used remotely but is also helpful in-band (from OS to IPMI) for things like verifying service processor LAN settings. Often requires OpenIPMI service/daemon to be running. |
| nvidia-smi | Typically installed with the CUDA tookit. Reports various details about NVIDIA GPU accellerators. A common setting we use is "sudo nvidia-smi -pm 1" to enable Persistence Mode to resolve occasional sluggish performance. |
| Intel Phi Tools | A set of utilities to manage/monitor Intel Phi accelerator cards. "sudo micinfo -listdevices", "sudo micctrl --status" would be common examples of use. |