Useful tools for Debian / Devuan

If you're going to be a good system administrator, you need to have the tools to help you do it well.

Here are some recommendations for things which don't get installed by default under Debian / Devuan (I have no idea whether any other distro provides them), but are a good idea to help find out what's going on when a system's not behaving itself.

The following are the Debian / Devuan package names, with some notes where appropriate on the tools they contain:

• dnsutils
  • Provides: dig, nslookup, nsupdate
• ethtool
  • "ethtool can be used to query and change settings such as speed, auto- negotiation and checksum offload on many network devices, especially Ethernet devices."
• gddrescue
  • Provides: ddrescue
  • ddrescue is like dd except you get a progress indicator, it's interruptible and resumable, and if the source device is faulty (ie: it can't simply be read in one go), ddrescue will try various techniques to get as much data off it as possible (and tell you how much couldn't be retrieved)
• iotop
  • "iotop does for I/O usage what top(1) does for CPU usage. It watches I/O usage information output by the Linux kernel and displays a table of current I/O usage by processes on the system. It is handy for answering the question 'Why is the disk churning so much?'."
• iptraf
  • "IPTraf-ng is an ncurses-based IP LAN monitor that generates various network statistics including TCP info, UDP counts, ICMP and OSPF information, Ethernet load info, node stats, IP checksum errors, and others."
• psmisc
  • Provides: fuser, killall, peekfd, pstree, prtstat
  • killall is particularly useful (and is even used by some startup / shutdown scripts (such as pacemaker) without having a dependency on this package)
• tofrodos
  • Provides: todos, fromdos
  • "DOS text files traditionally have CR/LF (carriage return/line feed) pairs as their new line delimiters while Unix text files traditionally have LFs (line feeds) to terminate each line. Tofrodos comprises one program, 'fromdos' alias 'todos', which converts text files to and from these formats. Use 'fromdos' to convert DOS text files to the Unix format, and 'todos' to convert Unix text files to the DOS format."
• unzip
  • "InfoZIP's unzip program. With the exception of multi-volume archives (ie, .ZIP files that are split across several disks using PKZIP's /& option), this can handle any file produced either by PKZIP, or the corresponding InfoZIP zip program."
• usbutils
  • Provides: lsusb
  • "This package contains the lsusb utility for inspecting the devices connected to the USB bus. It shows a graphical representation of the devices that are currently plugged in, showing the topology of the USB bus. It also displays information on each individual device on the bus."
• zip
  • "This is InfoZIP's zip program. It produces files that are fully compatible with the popular PKZIP program; however, the command line options are not identical. In other words, the end result is the same, but the methods differ."

Go up
Return to main index.