A System Administrator could fall under the “IT Department” of any company. If they are doing their job well it may seem like they do not do much. This is because a good Sysadmin should be able to detect a problem before it occours and fix it before it breaks. So if you are reading this article and have recently complained about your work computer before link them to this article!

*Note all products linked here are 100% free and opensource*

Manufacturer’s Software

If your manufacturer takes time to develop software for you to use and bundles it with their computer, you should be using it. It can do helpfull things such as predict a hard drive failure which may not be common in a household but is fairly more common in a enterprise. Combined with the right monitoring software you can make sure your coworkers computers are always in the best physical health.

Monitoring Computers

Nagios even though it is made for Servers, it can also be used for workstations. Possible uses are:

• Monitor for predicted hardware failures
• Make sure the File Server is up and running
• Graph when PC’s are on/off (useful if your work wants to cut down on the electricity bill)

Another cool thing about Nagios is you can tell it to take action when something goes down, if used right you will never hear the question “is this down?”

*Note: Nagios is the actual server component. NRPE is the client for Linux and NSClient ++ is a great client for windows.

Managing Software

A computer is fairly secure until a user gets behind it, should use inventory software such as OCS-Inventory to keep track of what people are installing. With this you can not only scan for “rogue machines” aka peoples personal laptops, but you can check if they installed any software you don’t approve of such as PC Anywhere.

Syslog (servers)

You may have several servers or for whatever reason you want workstations logging to a central location. You can use Syslog-NG and PHP-Syslog-NG to record all this information into an easy to read web page that will let you filter + search. Why may this be useful? Well you would know if people have brute forced your server and more importantly gotten in. Also if someone gets in and attempts to hide it in the logs they would also have to break into your Syslog server, which is hopefully located on a different server to prevent you from finding out there was an intrusion.

Summary

As one can see open source software can be a great help but I would not recommend installing anything in an enterprise or especially on a machine that has a routable IP Address without doing some checks on just how secure it really is. With the 3 above packages you should be able to:

• Minimize downtime and ensure everything is running just fine(nagios)
• Track PC Uptime and possibly having users shut off their PC to save power(nagios)
• Monitor for unwanted software(OCSInventory)
• Have a central location of logs on your servers, mainly for security purposes(break-ins especially) as nagios should take care of services(Syslog-NG)

Getting Help

Google is your best friend however if Google is no help to you, turn to user groups, IRC and/or forums. Don’t know of a good place to ask your question? Register at our forums and ask us here!

Still Need Help?

You can try emailing me directly at ipp@tutorialninjas.net, or if you want to request our “Professional Services” for your business please send an email to support@tutorialninjas.net . We do have experience with installing the mentioned software in an enterprise and can tailor it to your companies needs.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 9:44 pm and is filed under Cool Tutorials, Technology.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.