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)

Ever wonder how you spend all that time on the PC?

Well, no need to guess. ManicTime is a handy little freeware utility that allows you to track your time spent on your computer, by program, and your idle time too.

All this information is stored in a local database, isn't transmitted anywhere (for those with security concerns, rest assured), and can be displayed in all manner of views, graphs and charts. It's not a mindreader, so you might have to tag your time, but that's pretty easy.

It might not be something you'll use often, but it's interesting to give it a try at work, you might be surprised just how much you spend time switching applications when you see the results, not to mention the surprising amount of downtime. An eight to ten hour day doesn't amount to as much real work as you might think, especially when you take away the time lost to meetings, lunch, coffee breaks and other meanderings.

The problem with USB pen drives

USB pen drives are great - all that storage in your pocket and for a low cost too. I used to have a 128MB drive a couple of years back - I thought it was the dogs - I carried around a whole heap of stuff I never could dream of way back when all I had was floppy disks. Then I got a 256MB drive, then 1GB, then 2GB and recently I picked up an 8GB drive that is less than 5cm long (MyMemory.com) for peanuts. Cheap peanuts at that.

Back when I got the 1GB pen drive, I started running lots of Portable Apps on it: portable versions of Thunderbird; Firefox; Sunbird; Toucan; Abiword; Gaim (now Pidgin); Foxit and many more. Then I started to worry about what would happen if it fell into the wrong hands - all my email, my calendar, IM contacts and personal documents would be there for anyone to see. So I decided that I needed to encrypt as much of this personal / application data as possible

After a fairly thorough search, I found two freeware / open source applications that appeared to fit the bill (there were a load of slower, more cumbersome ones):

- Dekart Private Disk (only Lite is free)
- TrueCrypt

Both applications allow create a virtual drive of a predetermined size from a single file. To activate the private disk, you simply start the program, point it at the encrypted file and open it - the file appears as a virtual drive with a pre-assigned (fixed) drive letter, e.g. O:\.
You can then drag all the files and folders you want to encrypt into this drive and when you click on disconnect in the program the drive disappears and the file is encrypted. The encryption type is 256-bit AES - more than strong enough for most purposes - and the speed with which fairly large amounts of data are encrypted and decrypted is quite amazing. I tested with 512MB and 1GB of data. Once you create the initial file for encryption, you set the size - so this file takes up that space from the start, and you can never fill it up data totaling more than that value - so think very carefully about how much space you need before you start - it can take a while to initially create or finally delete one of these virtual drives.

Back when I was testing this out originally (sometime back last August/September), I found Dekart to be better. It could be stored and run from the USB pen drive itself, and ran very smoothly. I found TrueCrypt performed not quite so well.

However, recently, I moved all my portable apps into the virtual drive and found performance to be terrible - Thunderbird was so slow opening up and working with email proved to be unbearable. With a new version of TrueCrypt now available, I find myself curious as to whether or not it has improved and perhaps overtaken Dekart Private Disk.

For now, my email and other data from portable apps remains unencrypted, and I have to remember to disconnect my pen drive every time I leave my desk :(

I hope that TrueCrypt, or a future offering from Dekart will change things.

Outstanding tools for Mobile Phones (and other devices)

I'm particularly impressed with X-plore, a great little file manager for Symbian mobile phones, and Slick, a chat client you can use on the go. Haven't tried the music player or email client yet.

Free popup killer

Someone asked me today if I knew any programs that did a good job of killing popups.
I made three recommendations:

1. Switch to Firefox, or better still, Opera
2. Make sure popup blocking is enabled at the browser level
   
3. Install Ad Block Plus (a Firefox add-on)*

As for a program that will kill popups for you - this simply isn't necessary. If you have money burning a hole in your pocket, then get Spysweeper - it is a great anti-malware program that monitors your system for changes and blocks popups, amongst other things. Whether you have the moula or not, however, there is a no-cost solution for Windows users:

Edit the hosts file
Win XP: Click Start, Run and type "notepad c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts"
Win 2k: Click Start, Run and type "notepad c:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts"
Now edit the file to map the domains of the nasty popups you want to block, like this:


Note the lines are composed of two columns. The left column is the IP address you want to map the hostname to, while the right column is where you enter the hostname/domain name.

The hosts file is basically a text file that maps hostnames to an IP address - it will be the first place your computer will look when a hostname needs to be resolved, so it overrides anything obtained from the DNS server.

So, when a popup from www.partypoker.com is triggered, it maps to 127.0.0.1, which is your computer's loopback or localhost address, but since the page does not in fact reside there, it cannot load, and you will at most see a page not found instead of a nasty, annoying and potentially malicious popup.

The downside with this approach is that it is manual, and you have to get the popup at least once to add it to the list of "blocked" domains. The upside, of course, is that it is free.

* if you insist on persevering with Internet Explorer, then get "IE-Spyad", a registry file that will add a massive blacklist to your restricted sites list in IE.

Older Software Versions

Following on from the Older Freeware Versions post, here is another site for older versions of software - so old they call it "abandonware".

This is one of the sites you can go to when you want software like:

• Turbo Vision
  
• Norton Ghost
  
• Lemmings
  
• dBXL
  

Older Freeware versions

Some more sites to get some older versions of shareware programs, mostly free.

http://pricelessware.org/thelist/index.htm
http://www.oldversion.com/
http://www.old-versions.net/

Free Video Editing Software

... that works.

FastStone Capture now on version 5.9

In a post I made earlier this year, I lavished praise on one of my favourite little apps these days

FastStone Capture (the best bang per buck screen capture app there is, I think)

It's remarkable how many features they packed into 1.3MB:

• multiple image format conversion (jpg, png, gif, bmp, tiff, pcx, tga)
• export to PDF
• screen capture direct to Word, PowerPoint
• edit, edge effects, negative, sepia, blur etc.
• captioning
• image format quality setting, with lossless compression and instant preview
• zoom
• magnifying glass with negative feature to help those with very poor vision
• and of course, multiple screen capture modes, such as active window capture, selected window capture, freehand, region, full screen and scrolling window capture
• oh, and a colour picker
• and a screen ruler

I think that's everything, as of version 5.9, but I could be wrong.

Sample screencap (with added caption):

Spiceworks - how can they offer this for free?

Spiceworks is an IT inventory management system that will let you keep track of every system on your network. You can generate reports and troubleshoot problems on multiple systems from one control center. The only downside is that while you can monitor Unix and Linux systems, you can't install and run Spiceworks from them. Still, the trump card is the price - there isn't one.

Get it here

40+ Free Windows Apps For You

The good people of Technology Bites have been kind enough to compose a list of... you guessed it... 40+ Free Windows Apps... for, erm... you?



Submitted by muglatte via email