15.4 Third-Party Applications

Although you can perform system administration through the utilities supplied with Mac OS X, several third-party applications provide convenient frontends to these utilities:

Cocktail

Kristofer Szymanski's Cocktail (http://www.macosxcocktail.com/) is a shareware application that provides a GUI frontend to a wide range of system administrative tasks and interface configurations.

GeekTool

Tynsoe.org offers the free GeekTool (http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/), which can redirect the output of system logs, Unix commands, and dynamically generated images to the desktop.

MacJanitor

Brian Hill's MacJanitor (http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/macjanitor.html) is a freeware application that does one thing and does it well: it runs the cron jobs that are scheduled to run in the wee hours of the night by default (see Section 2.3.1 in Chapter 2).

TinkerTool System

Marcel Bresink's TinkerTool System (http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerToolSys.html) is a shareware application that can do many things, including run the periodic cron jobs mentioned earlier, manage log files, and tune the network configuration.