Good Freeware Sources -- Here are mine, share yours!

[B4RSK]

Where do you go for great freeware applications? What do you use? (The titles below are links.)

Pricelessware
Some of the stuff listed here is only truly free for individual use, but it is a fantastic source of information, with no banners, pop-ups, flash animations...

Sysinternals
If you've not been here before, and you do Sysadmin work, go now! Amazing tools that you can do amazing things with. All free for all uses!! The PsTools kit saves me hours and hours of work every month. I can not recommend Sysinternals highly enough.

Black Viper
This is not a freeware site, but it has very good information about Windows 2000 and XP services. In particular it has suggestions about which ones you can safely turn off, and which ones you can't. His writing style is a bit weird, and some of his opinion articles don't match my thoughts, but the information about the services is good.

Once you decide for yourself which services you can turn off, you can script this using PsService from the PsTools kit at Sysinternals. If you build machines for people or have several machines (or more) you wish to set up this way, this makes it very quick.

Spybot Search & Destroy
Very good Spyware removal program. I prefer it to Lavasoft's Ad-aware, but it doesn't hurt to use both, either. I also use SpywareBlaster which sets "kill bits" for hundreds of different spyware programs to stop them getting installed in the first place.

NU2
If you make boot floppies for diagnostics or other work, or if you make bootable CDs, this is a fantastic site to check out! Very, very useful tools.


Those are the ones that come to mind right now... I hope everyone else will kick in with some cool stuff too!

Ian

 

[blakerwry]

I usually go to webattack.com if i'm looking for a tool and I have a good idea what I want it to do, but i don't know what's out there and available.The site is filled with tons of useful tools and programs across the entire spectrum.


http://www.webattack.com/shareware
http://www.webattack.com/freeware


I think the links are pretty explanitory. I usually navigate by catigory rather than the search. Each item on the site has a user rating(popularity), an editor rating and a breif description, and maybe more importantly a screenshot of program. All programs are ordered catagoricaly so it's easy to find what you are looking for and the descriptions and ratings make it easy to compare products.

 

[Mercutio]

Freshmeat.net. Mostly *nix stuff, but some Windows, too. I've found more little tiny gems on that site than just about anyplace else.

 

[CougTek]

NU2
If you make boot floppies for diagnostics or other work, or if you make bootable CDs, this is a fantastic site to check out! Very, very useful tools.

I visit http://www.bootdisk.com/ for the same purpose.

 

[blakerwry]

NU2
If you make boot floppies for diagnostics or other work, or if you make bootable CDs, this is a fantastic site to check out! Very, very useful tools.

I visit http://www.bootdisk.com/ for the same purpose.

hell yeah! they brought it back up after being closed down by M/S twice. the winPE builder is available.

 

[B4RSK]

CougTek -- Cool site, will check it out in more detail!

Mercutio -- Also interesting stuff there. Reminded me of something else too, more below.

Here are a couple of things that I do with some of the tools at Sysinternals:

Well, one I already mentioned. I script the ability to disable services. PsService has an extra benefit in that I can disable/enable/stop/start/restart services remotely on any machine I have admin rights on. Quite if you have some services that hang occasionally, or if you want to do the scripting mentioned above.

PsExec lets you run programs on a remote computer, typically with System account permissions. I use this in a few different ways, but here are two:

1. I use it to run a script that sends a file via FTP from a certain machine. The file must be sent from that specific machine due to firewall IP restrictions. PsExec lets this happen automatically from within a macro on a separate machine -- this becomes more useful as the distance between where you want to run the macro and the machine that needs to send the file increases!

2. Remote patch installation. Service Pack 4 rollout to 50 PCs? Do it remotely! I have a script that does the following:

1. Pull a list of machines to be updated out of a MySQL database.
2. Start those machines remotely using WOL.
3. Wait a few minutes to make sure they are up.
4. Check each machine to make sure the "Patch" directory exists on the C drive. If not, create the directory and set the permissions to Admin and System only.
5. Copy to the "Patch" directory the patch(es) to be installed. Also copies a patch installation script file to the remote machine.
6. Run the patch installation script to install the patches remotely. Not all patches can be installed this way, but most new MS ones have switches for unattended installations. The script finishes with the MS qchain.exe program that allows multiple patches to be installed without rebooting after each one.
7. Shut down the machines using PsShutdown. This also turns off the power again.

It seems complex, but it isn't. If you are administering a network of 50 or so PCs and don't already have some sort of patch management system/software in place, it is way more comfortable to do it this way than to visit each machine one-at-a-time... It typically takes me about 20 minutes to set up and test a script that is run at night. I guess it would be possible to do larger networks with this system as well, but at some point (100 PCs??) it will be a lot better to use a proper patch management setup...

If a user is having problems with a stuck application, instead of walking out to their desk, you can use TightVNC to see/control their desktop. If that doesn't work, then use PsList to look at all the processes they are running. If you see one that is eating up all the CPU time, you can use PsKill to shut down that process, perhaps letting the user save other work before continuing... If nothing works, you can us PsShutdown to reboot the machine...

Really I am supposed to be the "IT Manager" for the Japan office. And I do get my share of "fun" management stuff to do... But it is not a large IT department, so I still get to work on the technical side too!

Ian

 

[B4RSK]

Damn, forgot to add the bit that Merc's site reminded me of!!

I use a Linux-based boot floppy for erasing HDDs of machines that are no longer to be used.

I have used BC Wipe until now, (download the bcwipe.flp file and write to a floppy using WinImage or another file-->floppy program), but DBAN looks even better. Have a couple of disks to erase, so will give it a try.

Ian

 

[Adcadet]

I'd like to second B4RSK's approval of Tight VNC. At school the machine that captures our lectures has Tight VNC installed that lets me and my fellow tech geek control it remotely. Very nice for when we have review sessions that aren't officially scheduled with facilities management and we end up locked out of the AV booth and in desperate need to capture a lecture (ever have 165 angry med students pissed and chasing you? - not fun). Or when I have to update the Lectures Online webpage and I forget the file names - I just VNC in, then take a peek at the file server to see what the lecture(s) in question were named. Also nice for when I'm sleeping in at home, and want to chat with the other techie - I just VNC in, open notepad, and start typing my message. Definitely a weird chat client, but it works.

 

[B4RSK]

If anyone is wondering "Why TightVNC instead of RealVNC (or one of the others)?", these are my reasons:

1. Faster than VNC, with selectable compression levels.
2. Mouse cursor is no longer a bitmap that is sent from the remote PC. It is the local hardware cursor, and therefore much much smoother.
3. Option to disable the machine's keyboard/mouse during the VNC session. I do this so the local user of the machine can't try to do things while their PC is being worked on.

Overall I find TightVNC to be as fast or faster than PC Anywhere. The only complaints I have are:

1. The client is not as 100% rock-solid stable as the original VNC. Server seems fine though.

2. VNC still has absolutely no secure connection options. Everything you type (including your passwords) is sent over the network/internet connection in plain clear text! If you need security, then an SSH tunnel should be used. Or a VPN of course...

Ian

 

[blakerwry]

i was thinking in the changelog of one of those (real or tight) that they mentioned they had encrypted the password trasnfer

 

[B4RSK]

I haven't heard that the logons are being encrypted, but it is certainly not impossible.

The trouble is that the entire session needs to be encrypted. If not, your Windows passwords are being sent in plaintext! As well as everything else you type...

The most popular way to add security to VNC sessions seems to be by tunneling VNC through SSH. This page has some information about tunneling VNC though SSH when the VNC server is behind a firewall that has SSH running. (They mention too that the VNC logon passwords are encrypted.)

I had a look on Google, but didn't find anything easily that talked about running an SSH server on a Windows machine that you want to VNC to. Smoothwall is a good free firewall that runs SSH and can be used to tunnel VNC connections through.

One of these days I'll get my machine set up so I can VNC to it from work... Another one of those "one of these days" projects!

Ian

 

[Mercutio]

If you've got 200x Servers and Active Directory, it's probably a lot easier to just assign machines the service packs. I also make use of Software Update Services to keep my clients in line.

 

[B4RSK]

Yup, for a large network that would be the ideal solution. It would be even better to have such a solution that could run on top of WinNT Server and not need 512MB of memory and 6gigs of HD space...

At least MS doesn't seem to be charging for it though! That would be the killer -- build buggy OSes and then charge people for patch management. I wouldn't put it past them though.

Their whole new licensing program is a huge huge scam. Everyone that has bought the Upgrade Advantage for their Office installs, but is running OSes other than Win2K SP3+ or WinXP is screwed... You can't run Office 2003 (which you have already paid for!!) unless you throw more money at MS to upgrade to Win2K/XP!! And if the machines won't run 2K/XP, then you get to spend even more money to upgrade or replace them... Yup, seems like a REALLY good deal to me. Besides, what is the need to upgrade beyond Office 2000 anyway?

And MS assured everyone that the new licensing plans would save them money.... I honestly can not believe that ANYONE fell for that coming from Microsoft!

/rant off

....

Ian

 

[Mercutio]

Outlook XP sucks a little less than Outlook 2000 (I don't use either, but I do manage an Exchange server).

Personally, I don't think we've gained anything since Office 95 (spellcheck on the fly, LFN support, no crappy Outlook). I know some people use the Internet integration stuff, but to be honest, I'll bet that's just another "1% of users" feature. The only think I notice about Office 2003 is that it looks a little different. I can't see any functional changes at all in Word or Excel.

MS licensing schemes just get worse and worse. It's something you pretty much have to live with.

 

[Mercutio]

Ian, since I know you're at least somewhat familiar with *nix, you might also want to look at Samba version 3 to replace NT4 servers.

 

[Howell]

I haven't heard that the logons are being encrypted, but it is certainly not impossible.

The password for both Real and Tight is an encrypted hash. The data is not encrypted though. You'ld think they'ld at least use rot-13.

I switched back to Real from Tight because Tight was being blamed for not releasing the user.dat at logoff and causing application errors messages in the event logs.

SystemTools Remote Control Manager is really handy to use in conjunction with VNC. We have SMS but we use VNC as a backup. (Well, I only use VNC)

One of these days I'll get my machine set up so I can VNC to it from work... Another one of those "one of these days" projects!

Ian

It's pretty sweet. The hard part was figuring out which ports on the corporate firewall were open. I use :8080 here. One day I'll setup a SSH tunnel.

 

[Santilli]

Anyone have a good spam killing, free, program?
gs

 

[Mercutio]

Try Spamihilator. It works by setting itself up as a POP3 gateway for your mail.

You could also try a non-sucking e-mail client like Thunderbird, which has builtin spam filtering.

If you've got a real mail server Procmail is your best friend in the whole world.

 

[Bozo]

Another site for utilities is http://www.nu2.nu/

Great for finding DOS drivers for network cards.

Bozo