Working at Intel has been a great experience. I wish I could have stayed longer, but in the end we decided to part ways.

During my stay I learned lots of stuff. I would like to boil my experience down to my top Linux commands.

The List

• git: Lots of git.
• syscfg: Managing bios settings from within Linux. Nice. (Intel platforms)
• setupbios: More bios settings from within Linux. (Dell platforms)
• puppet: I actually enjoy manually running puppet. –noop make me feel warm and fuzzy.
• micctrl: Borking a lot of kernel installs on mic cards, you end up using this command. Lots.
• flashupdt/flashrom: Soooo many bios’ flashed. Intel is bios-crazy.
• amplxe-gui: VTune Amplifier is a super awesome profiling tool. I could spend hours playing around in that gui exploring all programs trying to track down bottlenecks.
• ipmitool: Everyone needs more ipmitool in their life, totally underrated. Sadly, I would bet most sysadmins don’t even know IPMI exists. :(
• numactl: I’m waiting for numad, personally. My server should be smart enough to understand its own architecture.

Honorable Mentions

• icc: I didn’t run icc many times at Intel, but I was impressed with it.
• objdump: The few times I needed to run this, I felt like a wizard.
• bsub: On occasion I was required to submit jobs to LSF.
• lscpu: I felt like I ran this more than at other companies. Could be just selection bias.