Somebody had to write them

RottenTools is a small collection of free desktop applications for people who administer systems. There are three of them so far. There will be more when something annoys their author often enough, which, given the job, is a matter of weeks.

What it is

Native software, compiled, for Windows, Linux and macOS. Open source, GPL, on GitHub. Each application does one job and does it without asking for an account, a license key, a subscription, an email address or your continued attention.

They are not products in the usual sense. Nobody is measuring adoption. There is no funnel, no onboarding, no lifecycle email waiting to ask how your first week went.

Who they are for

People who keep infrastructure running. Systems administrators, network people, the person on the SRE rota who drew the short straw, the one internal IT person at a company that thinks it does not need one.

The assumption is that you have already had the bad afternoon. Nobody needs to explain to you why a certificate expiring on a Saturday is a personal matter. Newcomers are welcome: the applications will not talk down to you, and the manuals are unusually honest about where each tool stops working, which is rarer than it should be.

Why native software still matters here

Because the work is local. The certificate is on your disk. The log is on your disk. The list of your machines should also be on your disk, and the only reason to move any of it somewhere else is that somebody built a business model out of holding it for you.

Because a native binary starts immediately, runs on a jump box with 2 GB of RAM, and keeps working when the vendor is acquired, the funding round does not close, or the API is deprecated with six months notice.

And because a tool that cannot phone home does not have to be trusted not to. That is a much better property than a privacy policy.

Why there is nothing to log into

Every account is a credential somebody has to store, rotate, reset, and eventually lose. Every sync service is a copy of your data in a place you do not control, governed by a document you did not read, in a jurisdiction you did not pick.

Skipping all of that was not a principled stand. It was the shortest path to software that works on a disconnected network.

Free, and still serious

Free does not mean unfinished, and rotten is a joke about the days, not a description of the code. Saving a file cannot leave you with half of one. A download that dies at ninety-seven percent does not overwrite the good copy. A server that stops looking like itself stops you before you type the password. That is not the behaviour of something thrown together on a weekend.

The unglamorous parts got the most attention, because those are the ones that ruin an evening. Anybody can write the feature. Far fewer people write the bit that handles the power cut.

What free does mean is that there is nobody to shout at. The license disclaims warranty at length and in capital letters. In exchange you get the source, the build scripts, the third-party inventory, and the right to fix it yourself.

Why rotten

Because the honest version of this job is not the one in the vendor keynote. Certificates expire on Saturdays. Undocumented infrastructure is the norm rather than the exception. The dashboard is green for another five minutes. The temporary VM from 2019 is now load-bearing, and the person who built it has left, twice.

So the name describes the job, not the work. Rotten name, real tools. It is also the only part of the project nobody reviewed, which you may treat as a confession. Something in these applications will still annoy you, and it will annoy you locally, offline, for free, and for as long as you keep them. But nothing in here is held together with tape. The tape is on the outside, where you can see it, which is the reverse of most things you install.

Who wrote them

Cyril LAMY, who administers systems, writes native code in the evenings, and has strong views about text that leaves a machine unnecessarily. Everything is on GitHub: issues, source and releases.

This website

Static HTML. No cookies, no analytics, no tracking pixel, no third-party request, no consent banner for consent that was never needed. Two font files, a few screenshots, and a small script that makes those screenshots larger when you click them.

• RottenText: A fast native text editor with a sysadmin toolbox bolted to the side, so the Base64, the certificate and the CIDR never leave your machine.
• RottenSSHrimp: A connection manager where SSH, RDP and VNC share one window, your hosts share one tree, and your private keys stay on your machine.
• Rottentree: An LDAP and Active Directory client that shows every change before sending it, and says outcome unknown when it does not know.