Comments on: 27 Useful Gadgets for SysAdmins

By: Dave O'Donnell

Dave O'Donnell — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 20:57:30 +0000

An Enterpad programmable keyboard and Autohotkey makes a fantastic combination to automate most repetitive sysadmin tasks. There is practically nothing you can’t do with these two.

By: David Ramirez

David Ramirez — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 01:54:32 +0000

A good gadget would be a monitor capable of taking a screen snapshot and storing it directly to a SD or USB memory… in this way even BIOS configs, RAID etc. or panic screens could be well documented… normally at those moments the OS-based screenshooter is no there, and a camera tends to results in a shaky picture with lots of reflections.

By: David Tower

David Tower — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 18:36:25 +0000

I could not agree more on the camera! Most recently I used my phone camera to take snaps of a hardware problem in a Dell server with their tech support on the line. The tech got the picture, said “yeah, that’s broken all right, now I don’t have to send someone onsite to verify”, and shipped the replacement parts. The phone is also great for capturing error information during BIOS post.

By: Jules Wilkinson

Jules Wilkinson — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 18:14:29 +0000

Oh and a label printer for labelling your assets!

By: Jules Wilkinson

Jules Wilkinson — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 18:14:08 +0000

Fundamental fail on this list that should be the #1 or ultimate on the list…
A smart phone…
Be it iPhone or Android phone…
But a smart phone none the less.

By: Vinicius Brenny

Vinicius Brenny — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 17:53:20 +0000

I know it might sound lame, but a good camera is also important specially when you have big Datacenter environments and is having a hard time reaching for small text or dealing with support technicians that are not exactly the best english speakers you have ever dealt with.

I, personally, use my phone. Saved my life a couple times; more recently, dealing with reaching a S/N behind a deeply buried server.

And about the pen: I just found out that a drawing pen was the best fit for me. It has the inconvenience of needing the tip put all the time you’re not writing, but it is worth the care.