Like a stripped-down version of Server Admin, you configure the servers you’d like to monitor and switch between them. For each machine, you can observer the processor, network, and disk activity, as well as monitoring the individual services you’re running. Server Admin Remote also allows you to read your server’s log files, and connect via the command line for quick administrative tasks (if you’ve already got an SSH client on your iPhone). All you need is access to each machine via either VPN or forwarding of port 311, and a quick check of an important system is just a single touch away from anywhere.

Server Admin Remote isn’t perfect. The interface can be disorganized, unintuitive, and even buggy in places. Once you’ve learned its idiosyncrasies, though, there’s no better way to keep an eye on your servers during your commute, in meetings, or even just on an extra-long lunch break. It’s a solid application that can reduce your response times and increase your piece of mind.

Server Admin Remote sells for $7.99 retail via iTunes.

Now FSEventer is not a polished tool. The interface is crude and unfinished in some places. The documentation is sketchy. Developer Robert Pointon’s focus isn’t “look and feel”, and it shows.

Instead, the focus is on power, and it doesn’t take long to recognize FSEventer’s enormous potential. Open the application, authorize root access, and hit the triangular “play” button. As you preform tasks on your machine, you’ll see each file that’s utilized drawn into an enormous tree. Temporary files, file locks, preferences, and more all appear in real time.

Once you’ve finished your work, hit the “pause” button, and you’ve charted all the activity that’s taken place. You can inspect file information, location, and even double-click to see them in the Finder. Want to filter your results? Click the funnel. Want to start over? Just click the broom. It’s a simple interface, but one that covers all the bases.

There are several command line utilities that do similar work to FSEventer, but having a graphical representation in this case makes your data much easier to work with. If you’re responsible for pushing out configurations across your network, or just need to quickly understand how something works on your machine, there aren’t many tools that are as useful or as convenient.

FSEventer is donationware.

Composer isn’t the only utility that builds install packages from an existing filesystem or from filesystem changes. Apple’s own PackageMaker, LANrev’s InstallEase, and open source project Iceberg all handle that task well enough. What makes Composer stand out is that it includes the best features from all those tools, and manages roll them into one well-designed, dead-simple, powerful and reliable piece of software.

The first time you launch Composer, you’re greeted with three options: To track newly installed files, new and modified files, or monitor active file system changes. Select one, then install the software you’d like to package up, and Composer will present you with the relevant files to roll into a nice, new .pkg. If the software you’d like to deploy is already on your machine, chances are it’s been included in Composer’s extensive library of pre-built package manifests, which allow you to collect the relevant files from an existing installation.

Composer includes advanced options for building OS images, such as removing caches, page files, Kerberos certificates, and Trash contents. It also features an editable exclusion list, letting you control which files to ignore when building package snapshots, a permissions inspector, and drag-and-drop setup for simple applications. And while JAMF would no-doubt like you to push out these packages with their Casper Suite, they’re compatible with any Macintosh deployment tool.

If there’s anything not to like about Composer 7, it’s the price tag, the highest of any application in its category. But while there may be lower-cost alternatives, Composer’s greatest value is the time it saves you getting your job done. Despite my generally suspicious nature and unreasonably high standards, Composer really is the best-of-breed tool available for Macintosh software deployment.

Composer 7 retails for $100.

So we’ve collected some of our favorite free tools for Macintosh administration. We feel enormously lucky to have received these gifts from their developers, and we’re sharing them here in the spirit of giving.

Some of these utilities we’ve already reviewed, some we’re reviewing in the upcoming months, some of them we use every day, while some we only tinker with. But every single one of these applications is highly recommended, and completely free.

AirRadar:

There are many wireless scanners for Macintosh, but none as customizable or pleasant to use as AirRadar, Koingo Software’s beautifully-designed and profoundly Mac-like little application.

Flame:

More a proof-of-concept that a full-fledged application, Flame is nonetheless invaluable for tracking down unsanctioned Bonjour sharing on your network. Simple, functional, and free.

FSEventer:

Fern Lightning’s FSEventer doesn’t just log file system changes, it charts them graphically in real time. Wonderful for understanding the systems you’re supposed to keep running, and the horrible things that software does to them.

Keychain Minder:

In environments where Active Directory and Keychain passwords get out of sync, Keychain Minder helps users keep everything straight, and minimizes confused support calls. From the great folks at AFP548.

Lingon:

Peter Borg’s handy front-end for Leopard’s complex launchd doesn’t make building system daemons easier, but it does make it faster. We’ve reviewed Lingon before, and we’ve only used (and liked) it more since then.

Password Expiration Checker:

If you’ve got Macs bound to Active Directory, this little AppleScript can be set as a login item, warning users that their AD password is set to expire. It may only do one thing, but Peter Bukowinski’s Password Expiration Checker does one thing that’s badly needed.

QuotaMonitorMenu:

Great for users new to Portable Home Directory environments, Adam Gerson’s QuotaMonitorMenu displays how much space their account has left on the server. Another single-feature utility that should have come with the operating system.

Suspicious Package:

By bringing the convenience of Leopard’s QuickLook to the arduous task of vetting software installers, Suspicious Package from Mothers’ Ruin Software manages to be both deeply geeky and extremely elegant.

Time Machine Perspective:

Pierce T. Wetter III hacked the open source disk space monitor GrandPerspective, tuning it to only find files Time Machine had backed up once. Time Machine Perspective helps prune backups of unwanted cruft, reclaiming valuable disk space.

Wireshark:

Despite it’s colorful GUI, Wireshark is anything but easy or friendly. Instead, this enormously popular Unix tool is the most powerful weapon in your network troubleshooting arsenal. Learning it could be the best gift you get yourself this year.

Special Thanks: Our friends Damien Barrett, Eddie Kelley, Jasson Lewellen, Aaron Robinson, Shayne Sandison, and Craig Swanson all helped compile this excellent holiday offering. Thanks to everyone, and we’ll see you all in the new year…

While stand-alone expansion utilities for Stuffit archives aren’t new, The Unarchiver actually ties this ability into the operating system interface, allowing you to uncompress supported formats by simply opening them in the Finder. Just double-click on the application when you first install it to determine which file formats you’d like The Unarchiver to handle.

The author of The Unarchiver isn’t selling anything, so users never get nagged to “upgrade” to a deluxe version, a common complaint with the Stuffit-branded utilities. Plus, once you get your users into the habit of compressing files through the Finder, you’ll be able to share archives with Windows users without shelling out for Stuffit licenses year after year.

There are, unfortunately, tasks The Unarchiver can’t handle. Most notably, it lacks support for the proprietary .sitx format, which offers better compression ratios for graphics files than the original. It’s also essentially a front-end for the open source libxad project, so new file formats aren’t added to The Unarchiver unless they’re added to libxad first. Despite these weaknesses, The Unarchiver is an invaluable tool for breaking the expensive Stuffit habit.

The Unarchiver is available for free download from its creator, Dag Ågren.

That’s where Suspicious Package comes in, a Quick Look plugin that lets you view exactly what and how will get installed by any package-format installer.

Just select a .pkg file in the Finder, hit the space key, and you’re greeted with an interactive Quick Look window. The folder structure of the installer can be browsed using the unfolding arrows to the left of the file names, and the installation scripts can be read with the expansion button to the left of the script icon. Suspicious Package even lets you know if an installer requires an administrative password to run, or that your machine be restarted after installation.

Designed to do just one thing, and do it very well, Suspicious Package is an incredibly clever (and incredibly useful) little utility. It’s also an enormous time saver, and a fantastic extension of Apple’s Quick Look framework.

Suspicious Package is available for free from Mothers Ruin Software.

Inexplicably named for a swedish berry, with an icon like the giant red ball from Alias, Lingon’s odd presentation quickly gives way to its powerful and convenient functionality. Its main panel allows you to create and edit launchd jobs with just their names, the Terminal command or script they run, and their scheduling options.

An advanced mode offers syntax-colored construction of the full range of launchd options (such as inetd compatibility, hard resource limits, and listening sockets). For power-users, Lingon is a tremendous time-saver, eliminating a great deal of referencing and proofreading for what amounts to an occasional task. For the novice, it’s like Dreamweaver for dangerous system modifications.

Lingon has one major annoyance: The inability to save files anywhere other than live system directories. This isn’t so bad if you’re composing your plist files on a system that’s meant to run them. If you’re composing a launchd job for another machine (or many others), you must save it first without enabling it, then fish it out of the directory Lingon squirreled it away in. A “Save As” feature would go a long way here, and the absense of one could cause serious trouble for a careless user.

Despite its eccentricities, Lingon is an impressive tool, simple when it needs to be and complex where it has to. It’s also a generous open-sourced contribution to the Macintosh administration community.

Lingon is available free of charge.

The heart of ExpanDrive is the Drive Manager window, opened from its magnet-shaped icon in the OS X menu bar. From this window, you can add, subtract, and manage any remote volume on a server offering SSH. Fill in the server address, your login name and password, and (optionally) the remote server path you’re logging in to and name you’d like for the local version of the volume.

The beauty of ExpanDrive is that once it’s up and running, you can forget it’s there entirely. It handles network difficulties gracefully, faster and more stably than the Macintosh Finder itself, and reconnects seamlessly when disconnected.

ExpanDrive keeps improving as well, with four significant updates this month alone. The coming version, promised by Magnetk in the next few weeks, includes Applescript integration and command line utilities for mounting SFTP shares from the Terminal.

ExpanDrive isn’t without its issues. It handles Unix symlinks (file pointers like Windows shortcuts) poorly, can’t transfer the resource fork on legacy Macintosh files (and fonts), and lacks a standardized interface or dock icon. If these issues apply in your environment, they may very well be deal breakers. For web development, image libraries, or management tasks, on the other hand, ExpanDrive outshines any other available tools for secure file system access.

ExpanDrive retails for $29.

As files grow larger and storage more decentralized, managing Macintosh volumes on a shared network can be a significant challenge. Coriolis Systems’ iPartition meets that challenge by resizing populated file systems, growing and shrinking partitions without damaging their contents.

Simply select the “disk” you need to modify from the list on the left side of iPartition’s main window. This can be a literal disk, a local RAID array, or a designated slice from a logical volume device. Then grab the textured handle on your existing colored partition and drag it around until it eclipses the gray empty area entirely (or use the “Inspector” panel to specify the partition size down to the byte). Since this is a major disk operation, you’ll want to have a current backup of the partition just in case. You’ll also want to turn off network sharing to the volume before you proceed, since resizing it in this manner will unmount it momentarily.

Once you’re happy with your changes, hit the bright green “Go” button, and your changes will commit to disk (often instantaneously). If you assign too much space, you can shrink volumes in the same manner, though the process is much slower in reverse (you’d probably want to leave a 500GB volume overnight). There are a number of other disk management features (including a limited version of Coriolis’ iDefrag utility) in iPartition, but it’s ability to change filesystems of all types nondestructively that makes the program invaluable part of any administrator’s toolkit.

Update: Although Leopard added the ability resize HFS+ partitions dynamically, iPartition has only improved since our initial review, handling all categories of Volume beautifully on multi-OS storage systems. We wouldn’t maintain a network of any complexity without it.

iPartition retails for $49.95.