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Five special distros for system and network admins

Do It All

Article from ADMIN 88/2025

By Erik Bärwaldt

In heterogeneous environments, admins regularly face system maintenance challenges, but the right choice of distribution on a USB storage device keeps your toolbox in your pocket.

With hardware and operating systems becoming increasingly complex, you need to improve your system and network administration skills constantly. The admin's daily grind involves deploying new tools to counter the growing complexity of faults and system failures. Special Live systems focused on problem localization and troubleshooting in heterogeneous IT environments can help you achieve this goal. I look at five distributions for your admin toolbox.

The Concept

As an operating system on the bleeding edge of technology, Linux has always been a pioneer in the field of Live systems. In fact, distributions designed for Live use on optical data carriers were first seen more than 20 years ago. In the meantime, USB flash memory has largely replaced the CDs and DVDs used in the past. They are not only smaller than optical discs, they can also be used on virtually any computer without additional hardware, thanks to the universal availability of USB ports.

Numerous Linux derivatives for system maintenance and data recovery are generally derived directly from conventional distributions. They come with a pool of specialist tools, which are free software for the most part, like the system itself. Because Linux was designed from the outset as a network-capable operating system that is based on common standards, it can be difficult to keep track of the huge selection of tools for network configuration. One thing is certain, though: The large number of innovative technologies first introduced on Linux, such as support for a wide variety of filesystems, means the free operating system was predestined for maintenance and rescue tasks.

The maintenance and rescue distributions discussed here are primarily aimed at admins who manage individual servers and, above all, workstations in small to medium-sized organizations. They take heterogeneous environments into account and, in some cases, assume that

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