Curated Downloads

I used to like SUSE until Novell got to it. Fedora has always been a favorite as well. For a server install I would recommend CentOS/RHEL. For desktop – Fedora. If eye candy is your thing, go with Mint or Elementary OS.

I am not a big fan of monitoring tools that put alerting ahead of logic. To send a 90-percent capacity alert for a 1-TB filesystem that grows at 600KB per day and, thus, still has another 478 years to reach capacily, is a waste of everybody’s time. You’re just gonna wake up a hung-over sysadmin at 3am on Monday morning for no good reason.

A few hours later he’s gonna stumble into the office with a whopping headache and take his misfortune out on some random users. And you will spend the rest of the week cleaning up the fallout. Use Ganglia, Observium, and Netdata to see what’s up. The rest of the alerting nonsense is for the help desk folks and the management.

To summarize: Wireshark and Nessus. JTR and Hyra if you need to do some cracking. Metasploit and w3af to mend holes in your stupid Web apps.

Not much good stuff there. The Linux Foundation has placed a few of its courses on edx.org, which is nice, but somwhat lacking in substance and quality.