System Administration Tools used in real world.

Hello everyone.

I am a student and was wondering what 3rd party softwares and other tools are used in System administration. Tools for NAS/SAN, Data Backup,Security and more.

Thanks.

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UnixGuy

halaakajan wrote: »

Hello everyone.

I am a student and was wondering what 3rd party softwares and other tools are used in System administration. Tools for NAS/SAN, Data Backup,Security and more.

Thanks.

Hi, welcome to the forums.

It depends on the environment and the technology used. There are a variety of 3rd party monitoring tools such as HP OpenView, BMC Patrol, Oracle OPS Center,..etc. Those monitoring are used to monitor the systems and generate alerts, sometimes they can also be used to do certain system administration tasks and configurations.

For SANs/NAS, it depends on the vendor. Every storage system comes with a tool for configuration and administration tasks, so there's no universal tool for that. However, recently there are certain vendors that introduced tools to control Storage systems from different vendors, this technology is sometimes referred to as "tiered storage Virtualization". Popular storage vendors: Hitachi, EMC, NetApp, IBM, HP, Oracle, ..etc.

For backups, in the past when systems were simple and data was small in size, scripts were written to store the backup on tapes using tape drives. Nowadays, this is not sufficient so Enterprise Backup software is used such as Symantec Netbackup, Symantec Backup Exec, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, Legato NetWorker, ..etc. Usually this backup is stored in Tape Libraries and sometimes on Disk arrays.

For Security, on the network side: firewalls, Intrusion detection systems, Antivirus/Anti-Spam. Combination of software and hardware devices are used for this purpose. Famous vendors: McAfee, Symantec, Cisco, Juniper, Check point,....

I hope this helps. Use Wikipedia to read more about each technology.

Tackle

Putty (Telnet and SSH client), Plink (Command-line interface to the Putty backends), WinSCP (Manage VM's at a file level), an Enterprise Anti-Virus with Server Management Console, OpenManage (For Dell Servers), PRTG by Paessler (For monitoring Bandwidth and performance).

Those are the tools I have on my desktop for quick access....

shaqazoolu

For security, your basics typically include:

BackTrack (5) virtual machine
Nmap (should probably have this no matter what IT position you hold, learn it well; included with BackTrack)
Wireshark (same comment as Nmap; included with BackTrack)
Netcat (included with Nmap I think; included with BackTrack)
A vulnerability scanner (Nessus, OpenVAS, etc.; included with BackTrack)
Putty (if you prefer Windows)
Cain (again if you prefer Windows)
Ophcrack (with a giant dictionary/rainbow table; alternatives are included with BackTrack)

There are a billion other tools and rabbit holes to go down for security but if you learn those, you'll have the basics. If you master (I mean seriously master) Nmap, Wireshark and netcat, there will be few things on the network that you will not be able to do/discover in any role that you decide to pursue.

Bl8ckr0uter

+1 to what Shaq said.

Also something like Scapy to craft packets would be a good thing to add. Also Metasploit.

shaqazoolu

Bl8ckr0uter wrote: »

+1 to what Shaq said.

Also something like Scapy to craft packets would be a good thing to add. Also Metasploit.

Yes, Scapy is amazing. I have not personally used it much but I've watched a good friend of mine use it. If you can max out it's potential, it is just as powerful as the ones I previously mentioned.

Forgot to mention Metasploit. I've gotten to the point now where I assume the only reason anyone downloads BackTrack is for MS. Not just for exploitation either. The scanning tools and host discovery tools in MS have also come a long way.

Good call.

halaakajan

Thanks for the reply guys. Really appreciated. I was wondering do we need to know how to use this tools before we work / before we apply for a job or we will learn this during the time spent on the job. I am currently a student of Computer Network Administration it's a one year certificate and only few tools are taught to us not that much. Thanks in advance. Please suggest me which tools must i prioritize to learn first.