What tools do you use to manage your Linux Server?

I'm a starter, just started using a VPS (headless Ubuntu server 20.04), I was wondering what tools are the most relevant for configuring, managing, monitoring Linux Servers.

And maybe also some Tools for making Docker easier :)

I'm new so I wanted to see if I'm missing on anything

Cheers

Solution 1:

Well, obviously OpenSSH. You can install X11 and turn X11 forwarding on in your sshd.conf file, then you can run GUI stuff on your local PC using VCXsrv, Xmingw on Windows, or whatevee X11 server you are already running on a Linux client, if you need to. Some things that might be helpful to have a GUI for, for instance, I like Synaptic better than using apt commands from the command line, and also virt-manager for VMs.

I would also install Cockpit to manage the server via the web. You can add/remove/control VMs with this tool, which is great (BTW, KVM+QEMU is a great VM platform, which would be required to manage VMs using Cockpit). Webmin is also very powerful, although starting to feel a little outdated in its approach, if I'm being honest, and you have to watch what it does to config files, not always what you want (SMBd, I'm looking at you).

htop is a great alternative to "top" for resource monitoring/investigation. bashtop is even better, and bpytop is even better than that!

I 'm not huge into containers yet, but my understanding is that "Microk8s" with Kubernetes with Docker is a great solution (or at least that is what Ubuntu will have you believe). A step backward from containers would be Ubuntu "snaps" which have some of the isolation and packaging of containers, but are not containers. You'll have to research, as this is extremely oversimplified and may not even make any sense.

As you are certainly already aware, there are no shortage of ways to do anything on Linux, so find what works for you. These are just some of my go-to tools forgetting things done.