Linux.com has an interesting review of a Linux distribution called Finnix. Finnix is a lightweight distro, based on Debian testing, built especially for system administrators. What’s more, Finnix is comparitively tiny, “currently the entire distribution is over 300MiB, but is dynamically compressed into a bootable image of about 100MiB.”
Finnix 92.0 is a useful distribution for system administrators. With many tools covering jobs such as data recovery, hardware diagnostics and benchmarking, network services, and monitoring, this distribution can greatly help an administrator. However, Finnix is not for the average user accustomed to booting up a system and doing things graphically. While Finnix’s CLI-based tools are not that complex, one must have the necessary knowledge to fully understand how to use them.
I was satisfied with the packages included in this distribution, especially the filesystem management and recovery utilities, as well as the CLI backup tools. For serious network troubleshooting, I would recommend instead distributions such as Network Security Toolkit or BackTrack, which are specifically intended for such purposes.
Tags: administrator, distribution, finnix, system