Bizarro. I’m Helping.

Posted by mkeadle

A collection of freely available tools that are nifty helpful and whose collection may provide nifty helpful to someone else. Zing.

• Group Policy Management Console (GPMC): Sure beats doing it through Active Directory. If you’re running Windows 2K3 you should be using this. GPMC consolidates policy management, lets you backup and restore policies (about time!), and has policy modeling to show exactly what will be applied and which policy it’s coming from.
• Server Performance Advisor: This tool’s a treat. From the Microsoft website:
  

  Service Performance Advisor is a server performance diagnostic tool developed to diagnose root causes of performance problems in a Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, particularly performance problems for Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 and the Active Directory® directory service. Server Performance Advisor measures the performance and use of resources by your computer to report on the parts that are stressed under workload.

  Other server roles include system overview (hot files, hot TCP clients, top CPU consumed), print spooler, context switch data and preliminary File Server trace data.

  It’s a piece of cake to use and can provide a lot of useful info. Install it, run the canned 5 minute Active Direcory data collector, view the report and have fun.

• Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA): Along the same lines as the Server Performance Advisor, but from a security standpoint. From the Microsoft site:
  

  MBSA is the free, best practices vulnerability assessment tool for the Microsoft platform. It is a tool designed for the IT Professional that helps with the assessment phase of an overall security management strategy. MBSA Version 1.2.1 includes a graphical and command line interface that can perform local or remote scans of Windows systems.

  Just as handy as SPA. Produces nice reports and helpful information that you might otherwise be unaware of.

• ADModify.NET: There are some things you can do in Active Directory that can be easily applied to multiple accounts. For instance, adding all users in an OU to a specified group isn’t much of a chore. But there are some group or universal actions that Active Directory just doesn’t have the ability to apply. ADModify.NET lets you adjust just about any property on just about any amount of accounts in AD, regardless of OU or other factors. Need an easy way to change the description for a multitude of accounts? Edit the displayName property (ex: reverse “last,first” format) of a large user set?
• Updated ADM Templates: Windows XP SP2 has administrative templates that are more current then those shipped with Windows 2003 Server. This can be important for several reasons, one being the ability to controll the SP2 firewall in Group Policy with the new templates. This site gives you access to those templates, as well as all templates shipped since Windows 2000.
• Bulk Rename Utility: Tool that gives you the ability to rename files and directories in bulk. You may not see a need for it, but it’s helped me out in a few random occasions.
• The Berkeley Utilities: 40 unix commands ported to DOS. If you’re a command line junkie and miss your Unix tools, these should help bridge the gap when working with Windows boxen. The trifecta of sed, grep, and awk are worth it alone for their mad text parsing skills.
• PuTTY: Simple SSH client for Windows. Has the ability to perform local and remote port forwards.
• OpenSSH for Windows: PuTTY is nice and simple, but you might need something a little more like the original. The original WindowsSSH project has been discontinued, but someone else has continued the work as SSHWindows. Crafty. There are several methods for running SSH on windows and this is just another one of them. Cygwin is another popular method, but it’s a bit more complicated to install and has a lot of features/additions you may not need if you’re just looking for an SSH solution.
• Gencontrol: Control the desktop of remote machines. Silently uses an RPC call to drop a VNC server on the remote compter, start it, and connect to it. All in a single executable. I’d call that handy. Oh, and it’ll only work for you Domain Admins, so don’t worry to much about it slipping into the wrong hands.
• Iperf: Tool to measure TCP and UDP bandwidth performance. Easy to use and understand and packaged in a single executable. I keep iperf services running on two NOC Linux boxes at all times and the Windows executable in my home space. Gives you the ability to test connectivity and bandwidth availability at the same time.
• Snare Agent for Windows: So you’ve setup a central syslog server for all your Unix devices, but wouldn’t it be a treat if you could get your Windows servers to dump their logs there too? The Snare Windows agent will, in real-time, provide a conduit from your Event Log to your syslog. Free-as-in-beer and easy to install. One tip: When it asks if you want it to take over management of you logs, say NO. The rest is fairly straight forward.
• OCS Inventory: By far one of the best, free inventory programs available for Windows. Comes with an agent that, when run on any Windows box, will index installed hardware and all installed software. We’ve stuck it in as part of the login script for a house cleaning account we use. When we login and that script is run, local profiles are killed from the machine and an inventory is performed and stored in a central server. The next time we run the OCS frontend, it imports the new information.
• Firefox: Firefox has been trumpeted enough. You don’t need me to tell you it’s a better browser then Internet Explorer.

Posted in: HOWTOs, Server work Comments(1) March 2005