Carl Hage

Let’s face it being a good system administrator is no simple task, you firstly need the correct mindset, skills and knowledge to provide the best support you can to your customers within rapid time frames. The calls will not stop coming, that is guaranteed. However the way which you deal with them and the speed with which you can figure out the problem and give some insight and resolution matters. I have compiled a short list of what I deem to be essential Firefox Add-ons for the System Administrator.

Firebug

This tools is mostly used for one thing by a System Administrator who is not concerned with any design elements of a website, to see how fast the website loads on the client. Some times clients will call and say that somethign is wrong with the server because their website is taking 25 seconds to load, well this little tool will show you each element being called from the webpage and how long it is taking to load. To use it, click on the icon that looks like a bug in the lower-right hand of your browser and click on All then click on Net.

So if some images are loading in 8ms and others are missing and holding up for a few seconds, or if there is some horrible JS doing something nasty, you’ll pretty much nail it down and point out to them that the server is not slow but it is infact their poorly designed website which just has way too much client-side elements loading. I’ve used this in the past and my clients simply loved me, they saw the screenshots I sent them and passed them on to their designers!

ShowIP

Now this little tool is what I was referring to before when I was speaking about being able to resolve issues quickly while over the phone and not wanting to take ages to do the smallest tasks. This little tool will show you the IP address of any webpage you are currently viewing. It will display in red on the bottom right corner. Not only that but if you left or right click it will give you a list of handy little tools at your finger tips. You can do a WHOIS lookup, traceroute, ip2country etc. This will save you a lot of time!

HeaderSpy

This one is similar to ShowIP, except it actually shows you the Server headers instead of the IP address and domain information. In fact having both is the best as you get all the info you need right there and then. A right-click will also open up some more options for further investigating. Now how is this useful you might ask? Well first of all it gives  you a quick glimpse as to what OS this system is using, and any sort of modules that may be installed. The example below is of my server, which simply shows the Apache version and the OS distro name. If you use this while viewing a site on a windows machine it will say something like Microsoft/IIS6.0.

IE Tab

Ever wanted to see what a webpage looked like in Internet Explorer without having to actually open Internet Explorer? That is what IE Tab does, it switches a specific tab to render a page with IE’s rendering engine, all within your firefox browser. Now in terms of support and system administration, the only time this is handy is to see if an SSL certificate is functioning correctly under Internet Explorer. When you install this plugin it will show you a little Firefox icon on the bottom right hand side, you click and it refreshes the page, rendering it in IE.

Screengrab!

This add-on will let you qickly take screenshots of webpages, it has a few options which let you simply copy or save the entire page or frame, the visible portion, or only what you have currently selected. You don’t need to sit and crop anything out of your screenshots any more, and you don’t need to sit and take a few screenshots and try to line them up together to get the complete page.

Tab Kit

Now this is the latest firefox extension I’ve installed and am pretty impressed with the results so far. I am a clutter bug, I open everything in tabs and end up with 20 or 30 tabs on my browser, arranging them so they make logical sense is not something easily done. This little tool colorizes your tabs so that tabs that link to each other have the same color, it even does tab grouping. There are a lot of options in this and I haven’t explored them all just yet. But I think it allows you to pretty much customise a lot of the aspects of tabs to help keep your stuff organised.

Anyway I think that about does it for now. First blog post in a while and just needed SOMETHING to write about. If you think you have some other Firefox extensions you use please leave a comment!