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4 Free Must Have Android Apps for Sysadmins

by jdorfman on May 15, 2010

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System Administrators/Engineers have a lot of responsibilities. The top priority is uptime. There are a number of tools we rely on that help us stay on top of our networks health but we can’t always have a laptop/netbook strapped to our chest. Now these days we can do a lot of things on our smartphones. Here are 4 Android Apps I use daily to make sure I am covered.

Nagroid aka Nagios for Android

Nagroid aka Nagios for Android

Nagroid is an unofficial nagios client for android devices. Sure you can get emails but this wonderful app gives you notifications. At the moment there is only basic viewing support implemented and the developer has said future versions will improve. The Problems screen shows all problems reported by nagios (depending on the “Unhandled Only” option). All hosts with problems and hosts where at least one services has a problem are listed.

ConnectBot - An SSH Client for Android

ConnectBot - An SSH Client for Android

ConnectBot is a Secure Shell client for the Android platform. Its ultimate goal is to create a secure connection through which you can use a shell on a remote machine and transfer files back and forth to your phone. I use this to access my tmux session so I can check what’s going on in irssi (IRC).

Take and/or Read your Evernotes

Take and/or Read your Evernotes

Evernote for Android allows you to create text notes, snap photos, and record audio. In addition, you can easily attached files to your notes. Free subscribers can add PDFs, text, audio, or image files. Premium subscribers can attach any file they like, as long as the total note size is under 25MB. When creating your notes, Evernote for Android lets you specify titles, tags, and destination notebooks. Since I store all of my Network Documentation in Evernote, you can imagine how useful this app can be.

Maglight Replacement

Maglight Replacement

I hate carrying around a mini MagLight so I rely on this simple application that lets me control the LED Light on my Motorola DROID or Milestone.  It includes a 15 min auto time limit to prevent accidental battery drain. Please note, application will only function on the Motorola DROID/MILESTONE. If you don’t have a Droid, fear not there are many other flash light type apps in the Android Market.


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Don’t you love it when you get a new laptop and less than a year later when you are running on juice instead of the 2.5 hours you are suppose to have magically turns into 30 minutes?  Well as I was studying for my A+ certification (which I need to take soon) I came up on calibrating your notebook’s battery. This process can take up to 5+ hours to accomplish and I was like what? EF that…but then I did another Google Search and found a sweet tutorial on how to calibrate your battery on the quick yo. Now this particular video applies to MacBooks but I am sure if you do your own research (I can’t do everything for you) you can find a way to do it fast on any other OS platform.

Enjoy.

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Microsoft To Kill Windows XP SP2 Support

December 8, 2009
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Microsoft is reminding customers that the end date for support for Windows XP Service Pack 2, as well as some other versions of the Windows operating system, is already on the horizon.
“The company will officially end support Windows XP SP2, Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Client on July 13, 2010, [...]

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Network Lights lets you monitor network activity from your keyboard

December 7, 2009
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Network Lights is a Windows program, which blinks keyboard LEDs Light Emitting Diode indicating outgoing and incoming network packets on network interface. Network Lights lets you monitor network activity upload/download from your keyboard ScrollLock and NumLock indicators. Each LED will flicker when network traffic is detected.
“I’d recommend against running Network Lights on a laptop which [...]

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Even Microsoft says IE6 must Die!

December 1, 2009
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Stephen Shankland over at CNET informs us that Microsoft is actively urging IE 6 users to upgrade. (If they allowed Windows 2000 users to upgrade to IE7 they wouldn’t be in this mess. They created their own monster in my opinion.)
Microsoft has begun a campaign to actively urge users [...]

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Device Doctor – Free Driver Update Software for Windows

November 28, 2009
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Device Doctor is a freeware/donationware Windows application that scans your computer hardware and checks to see if there are new driver updates available for your devices. It also locates drivers for “unidentified devices” in the Windows Device Manager. Device Doctor queries their own manufacturer driver database and immediately fetches the correct driver files for your [...]

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Buffalo announces world’s first USB 3.0 12x Blu-ray burner

November 28, 2009
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Japanese computer hardware company Buffalo has announced the world’s first 12x Blu-ray burner, which supports USB 3.0 on top of that. The BR-X1216U3 is backward compatible with USB 2.0 but will burn your Blu-rays with “just” 7x speed in that case.
You can only use it with a Windows machine XP/Vista/7. But actually there are no [...]

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Firefox hopes to one-up IE with fast graphics

November 24, 2009
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Stephen Shankland over at cnet writes:

Last week, Microsoft showed off some browser technology that could help Internet Explorer leapfrog the competition. But if Mozilla succeeds in its hope, Microsoft could be playing catch-up instead.
The technology in question is hardware-accelerated graphics and text using interfaces called Direct2D and DirectWrite that provide an easy way to [...]

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Customize MediaWiki into Your Ultimate SMB Collaborative Website

November 22, 2009
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Can’t convince the boss to shell out some bucks for Sharepoint server? Oh what’s that…He doesn’t trust Google with company resources? Ok well, you still need to figure how to set up a collaborative website/cms/wiki whatever you want to call it. In this case we will use the term “wiki” because that is the solution [...]

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Pulse 2.1.2.4 Open Source Computer System Management Now Available

November 21, 2009
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Pulse 2 helps organizations ranging from dozens to 100 000+ heterogeneous computers to inventory, maintain, update and take full control on their IT assets. It has been designed to handle 100 000+ computers spread on many sites.  It supports heterogeneous platforms such as MS Windows, GNU/Linux (Mandriva, Redhat, Debian, Ubuntu., etc.), Mac OSX, HP-UX, IBM [...]

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