A fresh CentOS 7 install gives you the basics, but a handful of extra tools make day-to-day server administration much less painful. Here are five worth installing on any new CentOS 7 VPS.
1. Vim
CentOS 7 ships with a minimal version of vi. Vim builds on that with syntax highlighting, plugins, and a much friendlier editing experience for configuration files and scripts.
yum install vim
2. net-tools (ifconfig)
CentOS 7 leans toward the newer ip command, but plenty of admins still reach for ifconfig out of habit, and net-tools brings it back along with useful companions like arp, route, and netstat.
yum install net-tools yum-utils repoquery -l net-tools
3. Wget
Wget downloads files over HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP without needing an active user session, which makes it ideal for large transfers. It can resume interrupted downloads and throttle bandwidth so it doesn’t hog the whole connection.
yum install wget
4. Telnet
Telnet is handy for a quick, low-level check of whether a remote port is actually open and responding, useful when troubleshooting mail servers or firewalls. It sends everything unencrypted, so it’s a diagnostic tool only, never something to leave exposed to the public internet.
yum install telnet telnet gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com 25
To close a connection, press Ctrl + ], then type quit.
5. Htop
Htop is an interactive process monitor that improves on the default top in almost every way: mouse support, scrolling, faster startup since it doesn’t wait to fetch data before displaying, and the ability to kill multiple processes at once. It needs the EPEL repository first.
yum install epel-release yum install htop
None of these five tools take more than a minute to install, and together they cover editing, networking, downloading, port testing, and process monitoring, the core toolkit you’ll reach for on almost any CentOS server.