Today I want to call out a couple of Mac apps that I personally have found to be a great help to me as a systems admin and builder. These are all simple things that help me get work done.
Termius
Part of the reason I switched from Windows to Mac when I took my job was to have easier access to a bash terminal. But after a few weeks, I found that using the built in Mac Terminal app wasn’t very efficient for me. I had something like a dozen production and development servers to access on a regular basis, plus a growing amount of resources in AWS, and manually typing in hostnames, users, passwords, and tracking keys seemed unnecessarily burdensome. Before long I found Termius, which is a great SSH manager. Now I add my host information into Termius and can login into whatever server I need in seconds.
It can be used on a laptop for free but my boss was kind enough to purchase a license for me so I have extra features and can sync my credentials to multiple devices. That’s cool because Termius works just about anywhere, including my iPad and iPhone. The Mac app looks great, performs well, and also includes an SFTP client and the ability to save “snippets” so you can save and re-use tricky or frequent commands.
Cost: Freemium (60 USD per year)
Pro tip: Organize hosts into Groups and set a default color scheme. I use the classic black and green for my dev servers and a light color scheme on production so I can tell at a glance what environment I’m in.
LastPass
Let’s face it, passwords suck. But until biometrics or physical tokens or something else totally take over we’re stuck with them. I had been using this app for awhile personally and my team invested in LastPass about 6 months ago. It has made sharing credentials to access some of our tools much easier (and safer).
Most people probably use LastPass exclusively as a browser plugin that can auto-fill passwords. But it also comes with a pretty nice Mac app if you want to get a bit more in-depth. Beyond username/passwords, there are templates to store lots of useful things: server login info, private SSH keys, account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.
Cost: Freemium (2 USD per user per month)
Pro tip: When the Mac app is running, you can invoke a quick search of your vault with CMD-Shift-L . From the search results there are buttons to quickly copy usernames or passwords to your clipboard.
Amphetamine
The life of systems administration sometimes involves a lot of waiting around waiting for a process to finish. Sometimes, you need your laptop to stay awake even if you’d rather step away. Amphetamine is an app that does just that. Just turn it on and your Mac will stay awake without needing to futz with power saving settings.
Cost: Free!
Pro tip: You can choose criteria to keep your Mac awake: while a certain app is running, for a certain amount of time, or indefinitely. Keep this app on, then lock your screen (CTRL-SHIFT-Power button) to let a process run while you go take a coffee break//walk/nap.
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