I “do” system administration. From servers to workstations, Windows, OS X, and Linux, I take care of technical issues at my school.  To be honest, this is one of things I really enjoy about educational technology. I’ve always been curious, and system administration presents ample opportunities to look for problems and try to solve them. Along the way, I have learned quite a bit.  In the interest of sharing, here are the tools I often use to understand / grok computers, servers, and networks:

1. Sysinternals
2. Wireshark
3. Ubuntu on a USB disk
4. ubcd4win
5. PUTTY
6. All the normal Linux tools
7. Cocktail
8. Carbon copy cloner

Of course there are many more utilities I use, but these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.  I’ll add to this page as time goes on. I’ve been meaning to write a cookbook for a while, so this post will probably serve as a start.