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This issue Jonni’s getting paranoid with securing and monitoring his Mint install, so we asked our writers what’s their favourite security or monitoring tool?

Jonni Bidwell

Grafana is fancy and all, but I’m pleased that my Pi generates graphs from CSV files with Gnuplot, then displays them on a TFT screen. It’s amazing how even though you’re only dealing with 240 pixels, hours can be spent tweaking the axes and layout to make them look just right.

Nick Peers

I’ve just built an Ubuntu-powered server for media-streaming duties. I want to run it headless, so have installed the brilliant Cockpit ( sudo apt install cockpit -y ) to monitor it via my browser. I can keep it up to date, access a Terminal and run Docker containers easily, too.

Les Pounder

Because I own a rather elderly desktop machine, I need to keep an eye on my resources and so I used bashtop to keep an eye on my RAM, CPU and network usage. But then I found bpytop, which is written in Python. Now I can keep an eye on things in style.

Mayank Sharma

If I had to pick one, I’ll go with Firejail. It doesn’t take much to install and set up the sandboxing security tool and in my opinion it’s the best option to insulate against malware getting to the real juicy bits of your installation, when browsing the web.

Alexander Tolstoy

Currently my main security tool is the home Mikrotik router running Routeros. It’s a haven for security-related customisations! In order to keep my LAN safe I had to carry out lots of tweaks and set up a whole range of firewall rules there, because the router has a public IP and comes under constant attack from hackers and bots.