Previously on Geek Speak

About 4 months ago I wrote an entry saying I would write up some decent Gentoo packages for a desktop system. While this won't be for a desktop system, I will bring up some good packages for a Gentoo server system. Some of them are obvious, but there are a few that took me a while to find.

• logrotate - Rotates log files on the server. Comes with some pre-scripted files to rotate, but can also be customized for any log file.
• metalog - System logger. Can be extended to dump different system events into separate log files.
• screen - Emulates a terminal. Essentially, it can be used to start programs that need to maintain a session open. I use it all the time for compiling things in the background when I don't want to maintain an SSH connection to a server
• genlop - Used to find information about currently emerging and already emerged packages. It can give an estimated time to finish an emerge and tell how long an emerge has been going.
• gentoolkit - This is a must have for Gentoo. It provides various scripts for maintaining a Gentoo install. For instance, there is a program called "revdep-rebuild" which will verify that all emerged binaries link against the correct libraries on the system.
• iptraf - This is a handy app that can be used for network monitoring.
• tcpdump - This program can be used to monitor packets coming into a specified network interface.
• logwatch - Can be used to email a summary of the logs on the system.
• slocate - Indexes files on the filesystem to allow for quick searching

This is by no means an exhaustive list of helpful packages.