Software for providing DNS and DHCP services have typically come from ISC in the form of BIND and dhcpd. While these software packages are quite robust and, for the most part, quite secure, there are other alternatives that may work better depending on your situation. For smaller home or office networks, managing BIND and dhcpd may be overkill.

Periodic schedulers come in many shapes and sizes but one constant is cron, the scheduling daemon that will run programs and scripts at arbitrary times or intervals. A number of different cron implementations exist: although vixie-cron may be the most popular, there are other similar programs such as dcron, fcron, anacron, and others.