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All tooled up

Posted on 23 May 2006 at 12:07

Simon Brock and Ian Wrigley recommend open-source alternatives for Sysadmins who need to manage systems, servers and software

Go on - dump Internet Explorer and put Firefox on all your users' machines instead. They'll thank you for it, and you'll thank yourself too when you don't have to install updates on every machine in the company after yet another security hole is uncovered. Incidentally, if you have users who are comfortable only with Internet Explorer, you can always replace Firefox's icon with the standard IE one and your users will probably never notice what you've done.

Where to get it

Amanda: www.amanda.org

ClamAV: www.clamav.com

Ethereal: www.ethereal.com

Firefox: www.getfirefox.com

Knoppix: www.knoppix.org

Nagios: www.nagios.org

Windows Inventory: winventory.sourceforge.net

VNC: There are several versions of VNC; try www.tightvnc.com, or for Macs try www.geekspiff.com for Chicken of the VNC.

I Fink, therefore I am

The more observant among you may have noticed that the screenshot of Ethereal was created on a Mac. But how did we manage to compile and install this ex-Windows-dependent program without spending hours of time and effort? It was quite simple, actually, thanks to a package manager called Fink, which has been around since the early days of Mac OS X and which is now even better than ever. The goal of the Fink project (which can be found at fink.sourceforge.net) is to port as many open-source packages as possible to the Mac. Sure, you can just download the source code yourself and try to compile it, but the folk behind the Fink project almost certainly have a lot more experience at doing that sort of thing than you and, anyway, why spend hours battling with recalcitrant Make files and other Unix arcana when it's all been done for you?

To use Fink, you first need to have Apple's Developer Tools installed on your Mac (they come on the operating system DVD). Then you simply download the basic package, which comes as a standard Mac installer. Once that's been installed, fire up the Terminal and type 'fink install ' - for instance, 'fink install ethereal' - to have the system automatically download and install the software for you. Finked software is placed in the /sw/bin directory, so you can just navigate there and then double-click on its icon (or run it from the command line, of course).

Usually Fink works without a hitch, although in fact we did have a slight problem with the Ethereal package. When Fink installs a package, it also installs any "dependencies" - other packages required to make it work - but for some reason one of these was missing for Ethereal, which resulted in some ugly error messages and no sign of the program running. A quick ten seconds on Google turned up the answer: just type 'fink install gtk+2' (which is the missing dependency), relaunch the program and you're away. It runs, as do all of the Finked packages that use a graphical interface, under Apple's X11 environment, which should have been installed when you installed the Developer Tools.