Overview of downloadable utilities

As the list of binary packages available gets longer, it becomes more and more difficult to start using freeware tools. This page tries to show the freeware and shareware tools that are available for different types of use. Please remember that this division is to help give a clear description of the environment where a particular package may be useful, but does not imply any restriction and the different categories are not visible during the installation of the packages.

On this page we give links to the home pages of each tool mentioned (if available), which can be consulted for further information if required. Don't forget to come back to our download page to pick up the binary for AIX.

1. Back-Office Applications
   A back-office application is one that provides some internal business service, but that is not normally or directly visible to the outside world.
2. Web Infrastructure utilities
   Tools that would typically be used primarily by a Webmaster or a network administrator to provide appropriate access to information.
3. Security Utilities
   Many tools exist to test (or help attack) the security of a system or a network. Some of these tools should be used with caution.
4. Development Tools
   Packages that would typically only be used for software development tasks.
5. Administrative Tools
   Tools that would usually be of direct use to system administrators. Obviously system administrators are allowed to use all the tools appropriate to end-users too.
6. Desktop and Graphic utilities
   While many freeware packages have been aimed at the server environment, the range of desktop applications is constantly expanding. This is not the main use of AIX systems, but some tools are very exciting.

Back-Office Applications

• MySQL v3.22, MySQL SQL database server
  MySQL is a multi-thread SQL Database. It can be directly accessed from perl or PHP to integrate with the Apache web server or other "Front-End" applications.
• SAMBA v2.0, SMB client and server for Unix
  Samba is a freeware utility that allows PC users to access Unix Disk and printer resources without having to install NFS on the PC.
  Commercial equivalent: AS/U, Advanced Server for Unix, implements the complete Networking interface of WindowsNT v4.0
• Squid v2.3, Squid Web Proxy Server
  Squid is a high-performance proxy caching server for web clients, supporting FTP, gopher, and HTTP data objects. Unlike traditional caching software, Squid handles all requests in a single, non-blocking, I/O-driven process.
  Squid keeps meta data and especially hot objects cached in RAM, caches DNS lookups, supports non-blocking DNS lookups, and implements negative caching of failed requests.

Web Infrastructure utilities

• Apache v1.3, Apache HTTP server
  Apache is a freeware Web server, well supported and respected in the Freeware world. Apache can be extended with dynamically loaded modules, allowing it to access databases and handle dynamic page creation without the overhead of creating new subprocesses. Apache is, as of January 1997, the most popular WWW server on the Internet, according to the Netcraft Survey.
• PHP v3 and v4
  PHP is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language. PHP is similar to Microsoft's ASP (Active Server Pages), and can in some cases be configured to use the ASP syntax.
  If you are completely new to PHP and want to get some idea of how it works, have a look at the Tutorial section in the online manual. Once you get beyond that have a look at the example archive sites and some of the other resources available in the Links section.

Security Tools

• sudo, v1.6, Super-User Do
  Sudo allows a system administrator to give certain users (or groups of users) the ability to run some (or all) commands as root while logging all commands and arguments. Sudo operates on a per-command basis, it is not a replacement for the shell.
• Nmap, v2, The Network Mapper
  Nmap is a command-line tool that can perform the different types of network scanning available to "crackers". This tool lets you investigate the information your firewall leaves available to an external attacker, for example.
• Satan v2.0, Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks

Satan allows Unix machines on a network or subnetwork to be "probed" for externally visible security problems. It is a powerful and easy-to-use tool, recently updated to conform with ITCS201 recommendations. All externally-visible Unix machines should be tested with Satan several times a year.
Commercial equivalent: Internet Security Scanner, see http://www.iss.com/
• COPS v1.0.4, Security Checker

COPS looks for security problems on the machine where it is installed and executed. It allows an administrator to verify that no configuration errors have been made that could allow a local user to become super-user. All externally-visible Unix machines should be tested with COPS once a month.
• TIGER v2.2, Unix security checker

tiger performs essentially the same job as COPS. Both can be installed and used to double-check results.
• Crack v5.0, or Jonn v1.5, Password Cracking tools
  Crack verifies that the passwords for user logins (including root) are "difficult" to guess. Crack is mostly used on machines that host many user accounts, to verify that the users always choose passwords that do not contain their name, etc..
  John the Ripper is similar to Crack, but uses more recent and powerful algorithms.

Development Tools

• perl v5.6, PERL scripting language
  The Perl scripting language is rapidly becoming the preferred multi-purpose scripting language. Perl v5.5.3 is included as standard by IBM with AIX 4.3.3. However the IBM Perl package is not updated regularly.
  The freeware perl distribution is updated rapidly after perl releases, and is configured to interoperate with the the IBM packaging. Thus the freeware perl package can use modules installed under /usr/opt/perl5/lib/site_perl (the directory proposed by IBM) and under /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl.
• GCC v2.95
  GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection is probably the most widely-used compiler in the world, and is a real reference for "portability". The GNU C compiler is a fully ANSI-C compliant compiler. Every Unix machine traditionally has a C compiler, but not everybody needs a "commercial" product. The GNU C compiler gives the basic functionality for users who are not producing important software applications.
  Commercial Equivalent: IBM's XLC compiler produces smaller and faster binaries than GNU C, and also follows the evolutions of the operating system and the hardware more closely.
• GDB v5.0
  The GNU Debugger is a replacement for the standard dbx that comes with AIX. GDB is particularly useful when debugging C++ programs compiled with g++, the CNU C++ Compiler (part of the GCC), since it understands the "Name Mangling" system used by GCC.
• Python v1.5
  Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language. It incorporates modules, exceptions, dynamic typing, very high level dynamic data types, and classes. Python combines remarkable power with very clear syntax. It has interfaces to many system calls and libraries, as well as to various window systems, and is extensible in C or C++. It is also usable as an extension language for applications that need a programmable interface. Finally, Python is portable: it runs on many brands of UNIX, on the Mac, and on PCs under MS-DOS, Windows, Windows NT, and OS/2.
  
• Tk v8.3
  Tk provides portable GUIs on UNIX, Windows, and Macintosh. A powerful widget set and the concise scripting interface to Tk makes it a breeze to develop sophisticated user interfaces.
  
  Tcl v8.3
  Tcl provides a portable scripting environment for Unix, Windows, and Macintosh that supports string processing and pattern matching, native file system access, shell-like control over other programs, TCP/IP networking, timers, and event-driven I/O. Of course, Tcl has traditional programming constructs like variables, loops, procedures, namespaces, error handling, script packages, and dynamic loading of DLLs.

• Gtk+ v1.2
  GTK+ is Graphical User Interface toolkit with a C-based object-oriented architecture. GTK uses the X Window system, but does not require the Motif libraries.

Administrative Tools

• Webmin, Web-based administration
  Webmin is a simple administration infrastucture. Originally developed for Linux systems, it can be used to perform basic AIX administration tasks, and administer freeware applications under AIX.
• Ntop, v1, Network Top
  Ntop is a simple network monitoring tool that shows which systems on your local area network are generating the most traffic.
• Ethereal, v0.8, A Network Protocol Analyser
  Ethereal is a graphical, interactive, network protocol capture and analysis tool. Ethereal is extendible via external modules.
• VNC, v3.3, Virtual Network Computing
  VNC is a remote display system which allows you to view a computing 'desktop' environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet (depending on connectivity) and from a wide variety of machine architectures.
• lsof v4, List Open Files
  LSOF is an absolute essential utility on any modern Unix. Lsof has two "life-saving" uses since it can answer two difficult questions:
  • who is using a filesystem? To unmount a filesystem under Unix, all the users must stop using it. However it is often difficult to identify the user who has left a process running in that filesystem. Lsof allows the process still using any disk resource to be immediately identified.
  • What processes are using the TCP-IP stack? When debugging a network problem it is often vital to be able to analyze what processes are actively using the TCP-IP stack. Lsof can identify them quickly and easily.
• monitor v2.1, Performance Monitor Program
  Monitor is another "life-saving" utility. It allows all the major performance indicators to be displayed simultaneously on a simple ASCII screen (or xterm). Monitor combines the information available from many standard tools (vmstat, iostat, netstat, and more) to provide an immediate view of system performance. Monitor can also be executed by non-root users.
• tidysys v2.2.1, system maintenance tool

On a normal Unix system, there are files that accumulate under /tmp, log files must occasionly be reduced in size, etc.. Tidysys allows all the standard AIX files that need to be maintained in this way to be kept to a reasonable size. In addition log files from add-on products can also be maintained using tidysys.
• AIX Tools v1.5.1, Collection of simple command-line tools
  the LPP freeware.aix.tools.rte contains a range of small utilities from different sources
  • whichlpp Shows which LPP delivered a file
  • pstree displays processes in a tree format
  • ll equivalent to ls -l
  • ldd lists the shared library dependencies of a program, better than dump -H
  • xd hexadecimal dump utility, better than od -x
  • chpass "Batch" password modification program
  • ... and more, look in /usr/local/lib/tools

Desktop and Graphic Utilities

• The Gimp, v1.1, the GNU Image Manipulation Program
  The Gimp is a a freely distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. The Gimp is comparable to commercial image manipulation products such as PaintShopPro. The Gimp comes with a wide selection of plugins, implemented as shared modules or as perl scripts.
• AbiWord, v0.7, Wysiwyg Word Processor
  AbiWord is an impressive word processor, working under X11. AbiWord implements most of the features you would expect of a word processor, and the coverage is constantly improving.
  AbiWord can read and write to Microsoft Word-compatible "RTF" files, and can even read Word97 "doc" files directly.
• xpaint v2.5.5, Image editing tool
  Xpaint is a good tool for generating and editing imaged (although "PaintShopPro" on a PC is better). Xpaint also allows images to be converted from one format to another (so does "xv", see later).
• xv v3.10.1, XV image viewer
  XView is a shareware utility, that provides powerful image viewing tools. Xview can be used to capture images on the screen, which can then be edited and saved to disk in several formats.

General Purpose Tools

• gzip v1.2, GZIP compression and decompression tools
  Gzip has become the default compression tool on the internet.
• screen v3.9.4, ASCII Multi-Screen Utility

Screen is a miracle-tool if you use "dumb" ASCII terminals. Screen allows you to have several applications running on the same terminal, each thinking it controls a real terminal completely. The user can switch from one application to the other. Thus it is possible to use "vi" in one screen, perform a backup in another, be "telnet"ed to another machine in a third, etc..
• mtools v3.9.1, Utilities to access DOS disks in Unix

Mtools is an absolute necessity if you exchange diskettes with PC users. Mtools provide commands with the same names and syntax as standard DOS commands, however the names of the mtools commands are preceded with an "m" (mcopy instead of copy, mdir instead of dir, etc..).
• xpdf v0.8, PDF Display utility for X11
  Xpdf is a PDF Viewer for X11. It is smaller and faster than acrobat_reader.
• pine v4.20, Pine user-friendly email utility

pine is a powerful email utility, that is nevertheless easy-to use. Pine is an ASCII application, it is quick, and it used a special (easy) text editor to prepare mail messages. Pine is fully MIME-compliant, and text attachements can be displayed directly.
• unzip v5, Unarchiving and Decompression tool
• zip v2.3, Compression and file packing utility
  zip and unzip allow "zipfiles" (widely used on PCs) to be created and unziped under Unix. The zipfiles created by zip are compatible with the PKZIP utility on a PC.