Hello all, running Debian 12 right now and really liking this thing. I never ran straight Debian before, always mint or Ubuntu. But anyway…
I’m wondering if you guys could recommend some troubleshooting or scanning tools that help you find errors, misconfiguration, basically any thing that could be wrong with your system. I’d much prefer GUI tools as CLI tools can be a bit confusing.
So my only thoughts are auditing type apps. Don’t those comb through your system for issues? I’ve tried Lynis and it seemed pretty cool, need to explore further. Of course you got your vulnerability scanners which I plan to use. You’ve got your rootkit scanners and clamv for malware. I just got netdata up and running last night. Now that is one confusing ass app lol so many options and i dont really kniw what im looking at lol. But I’m more interested in the system itself. I know I have some issues within my system. Htop only tells you so much and it never answers my problems when my computer random freezes or It starts overworking and heating, yet no high CPU or memory usage showing on htop.
I know I have networking issues with my VPN and DNS and other stuff. I just lack the knowledge to know where to look and what to fix, so trying to finder more user friendly, maybe more proactive tools I can use to help me discover things within the system that need attention. Overall I just want a healthy, dependable, safe, secure Linux system and I always endupFrankensteining my shit just trying different crap and everything eventually falls apart lol so help with some reomendations please, folks!
Opensuse has GUI frontend that controls almost all the system settings called YaST, why dont you give it a try
Do you mean give yast a try or OpenSUSE?
You can use inspec to apply declarative rules against your machine and look for deviations (but I don’t think you want to be writing rules to check for system sanity). I’d say go even crazier, run Qubes, then run VMs of many different linuxs, and you can break them at will, resurrect them, etc.
Oh lord that is over my head. I tried messing around with that more advanced stuff but just got lost
You might want to start with something very friendly like checkmk, I’m sure there is a open source alternative to it, but I don’t know it off the top of my head.
https://checkmk.com/ https://github.com/Checkmk/checkmk
Full Disclosure, I’ve never used this, but it seems friendly enough
Hrm, I’ve been using Linux as my dayjob server os of choice for about 15 years, and for my personal computer for the past 10 - and I haven’t found something like what you described. Something I would recommend is looking at a configuration management tool (Ansible is a really solid choice).
Stability issues often come from misconfiguration or just flat out configuration drift (changes over time) - something like Ansible or Chef would help with that.
Other things that touch on some of your concerns may be SELinux (https://wiki.debian.org/SELinux). It’s a bit of a pain to get set up, but once you do your system is much more secure. It effectively functions under the principal of least access to lock down your Debian OS, rendering the need for AV/Malware scanning somewhat moot.
I’ve done a cursory glance or two at Checkmk for monitoring, but it sounds a bit overkill for a single Debian workstation.
I mostly troubleshoot things like VPN instability or crashes by diving into
/var/log
orjournalctl -ex
to see if any googleable errors are visible.Maybe someone else on here has more help to give?
Perhaps webmin could be what you’re looking for. I haven’t used it in 10 years though.