Some Top Tools for Sysadmins

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 jEdit
The world's most powerful editor and a pretty good IDE for too many languages to mention. Once you try the regular expression hypersearch function you won't ever look back.

Notepad2
For a super-lightweight, blindingly quick and simple replacement for Window's default editor, you can't go wrong with this baby. It's a genuine, simple replacement for notepad, unlike Notepad++, which (IMO) does too much to be really quick and simple, and too little to compete with jEdit or UltraEdit32. 

Beyond Compare
While jEdit has a comparison plugin - jDiff, it doesn't begin to compare (sorry) with Scootersoftware's minor masterpiece. This will compare directories, files of all types and all kinds of archives (even war, bin, cat and jar files, to name but a few). Old versions are available for free.

Fiddler2
While some might argue this isn't really in the domain of a typical sysadmin, I think understanding exactly why a page is throwing an HTTP error 500 code, or why a certain component renders slowly or never loads at all is pretty useful, especially since the post-financial crisis sysadmin typically has to take on many jobs that would normally fall to developers, webmasters and software engineers.

Radmin
While there's are a lot of remote control software out there, I've never tried one that is quite as good for remote administration of multiple Windows clients. Free is great, but sometimes, you only get what you pay for.

ZipGenius
While the version for 64-bit Windows 7 leaves a lot to be desired (they are still working on shell integration), ZipGenius rules on 32-bit Windows systems. Incorporating 7-zip binaries, as well as many others, such as C.A.K.E, UnRar and UnAce,there is little or nothing that ZipGenius can't open. It's missing the ability to simply GZIP files (it TARs and GZIPs them instead).

PuTTY
A free Telnet and SSH client that still can't be beat for its simplicity and power. Put it on a stick and shake it at every problem you've got.

Filezilla
The ubiquitous FTP client that's so obvious that we forget it's even there. There's a lot of competition in this area, but its still a winner for me. It's my FTP server of choice too.

phpMyAdmin
OK, so not all sysadmins use MySQL - but they should. There's every reason to have at least one instance of MySQL running, most sysadmins these days are at least part time solution developers. If there's a reason to have MySQL, there's a reason to have phpMyAdmin.

SQuirrel SQL Client
For every other DB, there's SQuirrel SQL. Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, Derby, posegreSQL - you name it, they have a driver for it.

Eclipse
There are so many plugins for Eclipse, and so many tools that can run on its framework, that there is no way a serious sysadmin should be without this. Want to put together a website with some PHP? Try the PHP perspective. Need to glue some disparate applications together, use the perl perspective. Got JVMs heapdumping? Use the memory profiler, load up some verbose gc logs and away you go. I could go on, but you probably get the picture. You can say it does a bit of everything, and none of it very well. But it is flexible, and its free.

Clonezilla
Backup and clone a system to many computers thanks to Clonezilla's use of multicasting. No need for the slavish one-at-a-time approach that can make a sysadmin suicidal, and that can only be a good thing.

LogMeIn
This has to be the biggy. You're offsite. You're online. You need to assist your client right now. They could be 40km away, or they could be 4,000km away. This one is priceless. Maybe you have to get to your work desktop while working from home without access to a VPN. If you're company allows it, use it. If it doesn't, invest in one of the many expensive alternatives - WebEx, Sametime Unyte, AOS.

Yes, I know, I'm missing something. Please tell me what it is and where to get it.

Further reading

• "Radmin Wanted" Campaign Completed with Striking Results (prweb.com)
• Everything - A Super Fast Portable File Search (techie-buzz.com)
• File Server OneHTTPD (ghacks.net)
• The 40 Most Popular Tools For Your System Admin Bag (sunbeltsoftware.com)
• tlbox - System Administration Tools (tlbox.com)

Windows Presentation Foundation has some serious issues

All is not well in Microsoft's attempt to improve the Windows user experience for Vista, Windows 7 and subsequent releases.
I still don't have Silverlight installed on my home PC (No! It can't be so!) - I need to use it for collaborative work with Microsoft on my computers at the office, but I can't say it enriches my experience as a user.

If I was a .NET developer, dependent on MS for new SDKs and APIs, I'm not sure I'd be too happy to read this, but InfoQ are going around and saying it has some serious problems, the biggest hitter probably being the fact that it memory leaks like a big bucket full of memory with a massive hole in the bottom.

Other members of the blog-o-sphere spotted this issue before, so I'm not sure why it took so long for the InfoQ guys to sniff it out. The point is that they eventually did, and they even identified some major areas where it was leaking.

Read more about the basics of WPF, Microsoft's own WPF library, a site for its fanboys, and the Windows Presentation Foundation SDK.

Brooker enters the forum of Mac OSX vs. Windows Vista...

... With hilarious results:

Recently I sat in a room trying to write something on a Sony Vaio PC laptop which seemed to be running a special slow-motion edition of Windows Vista specifically designed to infuriate human beings as much as possible.

LOL

I don't like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers.

Amen

Read the full article by Charlie Brooker

Boot up faster

If like me, you are still using Windows on your primary PC or Notebook, and - heaven forbid - are still using XP, and you're not a fan of re-formatting and reloading the OS every time things get bit infected, or slow and heavy... Pause for breath... You're probably either just not interested, or , quite the opposite, you're fond of poking around the registry, tweaking and optimizing.

When I get a virus, trojan or other nasty, I like to remove it, clean up all traces of it, and kill off the previous System Restore point(s). I have Nod32, Xoftspy, Malwarebytes, Spybot S&D, Spysweeper and other tools to help me out in this regard. I don't do "re-format and rebuild" - not ever. You learn nothing, and you lose too much. It takes time to lovingly customise your user experience. Reloading XP might be quick, but all the little flourishes you add over months, even years, is definitely not.

The downside of all this, is that eventually, things start to slow down over time. It gets tougher and tougher to clean up the remnants of this and that. One by one, the applications, files, pictures, movies and mp3s accumulate until you're short of resources; CPU, memory and disk space.

So, you do your best spring clean and you look at what you can optimise.

This is a minefield... Many so called optimisations can do more harm than good, so it's best to stick to the few that are known to work well. Keep it safe, at least at the start.

Boot up - we all want that to be quick.
System readiness from logon - that's really important.
Application loading times - Firefox, anyone?

I'm not going to go through all the things you can do to improve performance, because this article makes a pretty good fist of that, but the most important thing to me to start with is boot time.

BootVis can really help here. There's a really good article on it from OReilly, but the best resource is straight from the horses mouth, and was written recently. The document, imaginatively called "Windows Platform Design Notes - Fast System Startup for PCs Running Windows XP" really explains the ins and outs of BootVis, if you really want to know. Otherwise, the OReilly guide is more than good enough.

If you don't feel like using a tool like BootVis, you can always turn on boot logging and read through the boot traces. You'll be digging around for ages, but you'll learn a lot this way (I picked up a thing or two, anyway). You can really see where the bottlenecks are occurring, and can address them one by one. You can read all about this painstaking approach and try it out if you want. Another alternative is tracelog.exe, part of the Win XP SP2 Toolkit, which is described in detail in an article on citrix.com.

One way to get a startup trace whenever you want, is to add the /BOOTLOG and /SOS boot switches to a new OS entry in your boot.ini. This is pretty organic. Just don't mess it up - I promise you'll regret it if you do ;-)

Happy boot optimising.

Further Reading

• The Mystery of the Horrible Boot Speed (anomalousanomaly.com)

Estimation

See more strips like this at: xkcd

A BSOD with a difference :)

If your PC dies with a BSOD specifying the error:

*** Hardware Malfunction
Call your hardware vendor for support
*** The system has halted ***

NMI: Channel Check / IOCHK

Visit http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315223 and download Windows Memory Diagnostic tool from here:
http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

When I got this error the first time, I simply restarted  the PC and it was fine for a week. This morning it came back with a vengeance - rebooting wasn't an option as I was getting a string of BIOS beeps (indicating a memory problem).
I had to reseat each and every memory module, one-by-one until the BIOS beeps stopped and the PC could be started. Next step will be to burn this memory diagnostic tool onto a disk and do a check. Another day's work :)

Is Autocheck.exe playing up on your PC?

Problem: Spybot-SD Resident scanner pop-up requires confirmation every time Windows starts. Clicking "Remember this decision" won't help...

The pop-up is to alert you that the Session manager registry key in the CurrentControlSet is being changed.

Cause: Autocheck.exe is corrupt.

Solution: Run checkdisk on the next boot by clicking Start > run and typing chkdsk /r. You'll see a message saying the volume is currently in use and would you like checkdisk to run on the next reboot - type Y. Reboot at your leisure and make yourself a cup of tea, because this is going to take a while.

It should fix the problem, however, so that's alright then.

pchelptech

Upgrade to XP

Excellent article on the smooth upgrade path available from Vista to XP

Posted by:

--
Jim
Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure

Microchuck

Users surprised by change to AU settings (Vista)
http://windowssecrets.com/2007/10/25/03-PC-rebooting-The-cause-may-be-MS-OneCare

U3 flash drives rendered useless on some PCs
http://windowssecrets.com/2007/10/25/04-U3-flash-drives-rendered-useless-on-some-PCs

Convert applications to run on your new U3 USB Flash Drive
http://www.eure.ca/
--
Posted by Jim (via email)
Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure

The Trouble with Vista

It isn't the features you can see in Vista, or the lack thereof -- it's the priority shift at Microsoft's core


This is an old article by Scott Finnie on Compterworld (since Feb '07)

Windows expert to Redmond: Buh-bye

Scot Finnie says "sayonara" to Windows, but his search for Mac software continues

Stealth Windows update prevents XP repair

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Why Microsoft must abandon Vista to save itself

http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13506_1-9785337-17.html


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Get to know Windows Vista's new bootloader architecture

Another fine article from TechRepublic.

Read it here.