Techie's tools

[CoffeeFiend]

What tools do you other admin types use day to day? I'm NOT talking about making unattended installs here (i.e. not nLite, BDD, WAIK or such) nor de-spyware'ìng but rather admin tasks (in an enterprise setup)

A quick list of some of my fav tools, in no particular order:

• SysInternals Suite (process explorer, process monitor, several command line utils...)
  
• WinDbg and related tools (like DebugDiag and the User Mode Process Dumper), and KernRate viewer
  
• Visual Studio with some addons, and SVN/Hg
  
• MMC & snapins, SSMS for 2005 & old client tools for 2000, SMS, MOM
  
• various editors (ultraedit, primalscript, etc) for scripting and such
  
• PowerShell v2 (currently CTP2) + WinRM, and some extras (even got a portable version...)
  
• mstsc and vnc
  
• CopSSH, Putty, WinSCP, Tunnellier, FileZilla (SSH, SCP, SFTP, FTP)
  
• Windows/IIS/MOM resource kit and Windows admin tools
  
• WireShark, nmap, WinPCap, MS network monitor
  
• IIS/SQL Server (2005 express & 2000 developer's ed) as a back-end to various in-house admin web apps and web services (also used by some scripts)
  
• many of windows' built-in cmd line utils (net, netsh, wmic, reg, sc, tasklist, taskkill, icacls, takeown, diskpart, netstat, fsutil, mklink, powercfg, etc)
  
• many command line utils (not windows') like wget, sed/gawk/grep, wsname, devcon, 7z, makecert, etc
  
• Windows Performance Tools Kit (replacing BootVis)
  
• tons of scripts I've written (vbscript/jscript/powershell mainly) and a few homemade apps
  
• some reg tweaks -- many "uncommon" ones (set symbol path, pre-accept EULA on SysInternals Suite, etc)
  
• some MSI installer tweaking, packaging, and repackaging tools
  
• the usual disk image deployment tools... ghost/trueimage/imagex, sysprep, etc
  
• various references like BOL and some handy cheat sheets
  

Lots of things I'm forgetting... vmware comes in seriously handy for a LOT of things. Now and then I'll use Hyena too (I'm not a big fan of it though). MS Office for a lot of things too (e.g. excel pulling live data from MSSQL, then doing fancy graphs from it or such). Wiki on a stick to keep some notes too. There is a bit of overlap between my admin and programming tools admittedly (e.g. when you already have VS 2008 installed, why not also use it to debug scripts?)

Additions to the list:

• msicuu -- thanks to GrofLuigi
  
• nirsoft apps -- thanks to GrofLuigi
  
• ShellExec -- thanks to os2fan2
  

What am I forgetting? Any gems to add to that list?

Edited June 23, 2008 by crahak

[GrofLuigi]

What am I forgetting? Any gems to add to that list?

ExCtrlst, msicuu, TweakUI, everything from Nirsoft, very few from grc...

GL

[CoffeeFiend]

ExCtrlst is part of the resource kit tools which I listed.

msicuu sure looks like a handy tool. Thanks!

I'm not a big fan of TweakUI myself (I already got tweaks & scripts to do all them things anyways), but whatever gets the job done I guess.

nirsoft seems to have some tools that might come in handy now and then (pwd recovery ones mainly, don't have much of a use for the others)

grc.com... doesn't really have anything I'd use I guess (best thing seems to be ID Serve, but I already got plenty of utils that can do this and more)

[Idontwantspam]

For those who didn't already know, the sysinternals suite can now be accessed as a windows file share, over the internet. Just type \\live.sysinternals.com into the run box and after being slow for a minute, it will open up and you can run the tools directly from the MS server. Nifty! Of course, it also works to just keep them on a flash drive, but if you're ever without yours and need one of the tools, there you go.

[GrofLuigi]

I'm not a big fan of TweakUI myself (I already got tweaks & scripts to do all them things anyways), but whatever gets the job done I guess.

There are things in TweakUI that cannot be accomplished by scripts (now I forgot which ones, but... It's handy to make quick checks).

nirsoft seems to have some tools that might come in handy now and then (pwd recovery ones mainly, don't have much of a use for the others)

Try some of the 'others' , you'd be surprised.

grc.com... doesn't really have anything I'd use I guess (best thing seems to be ID Serve, but I already got plenty of utils that can do this and more)

Yeah, that's why I said 'very few' (I used them more in the past).

GL

[Idontwantspam]

I'm not a big fan of TweakUI myself (I already got tweaks & scripts to do all them things anyways), but whatever gets the job done I guess.

There are things in TweakUI that cannot be accomplished by scripts (now I forgot which ones, but... It's handy to make quick checks).

Are you sure about that? 99.99% of what TweakUI does is making registry changes. And all registry changes can be made from a script - either using a .reg, reg.exe or through vbs. I'd be interested to know what can't be automated...

That said, it's a lot easier to check some boxes than research what changes you have to make, unless you're trying to do it unattendedly.

[os2fan2]

It's simple and it's plain:

• 4NT 8.02
  
• REXX (regina rexx)
  
• Patrick McPhee's DLLs
  
• Semware Editor
  
• FC/2 and FC/W
  
• ShellExec
  
• Windows Commander
  
• Snagit
  
• BurnAtOnce
  
• DskImage, BFI and Extract2
  

[GrofLuigi]

I'm not a big fan of TweakUI myself (I already got tweaks & scripts to do all them things anyways), but whatever gets the job done I guess.

There are things in TweakUI that cannot be accomplished by scripts (now I forgot which ones, but... It's handy to make quick checks).

Are you sure about that? 99.99% of what TweakUI does is making registry changes. And all registry changes can be made from a script - either using a .reg, reg.exe or through vbs. I'd be interested to know what can't be automated...

That said, it's a lot easier to check some boxes than research what changes you have to make, unless you're trying to do it unattendedly.

The bottom three nodes. And some settings are not translated directly to reg values (e.g. UserPreferencesMask). I'm not saying you're not right, just that it's like 90%.

GL

[CoffeeFiend]

I used to use 4NT... Been a while though. Most of my "console" time nowadays is spent in PowerShell, and most the other stuff gets scripted too (vbscript/jscript), and half the time it's running inside VSCmdShell too.

Never tried REXX (on any platform)

Semware... I'm more of an ultraedit person I guess but there's lots of other good ones for sure (notepad++, EditPlus, etc) -- that selection very comes down to preferences. I use more than one too.

Never heard of FC/2 and FC/W. Google isn't too helpful finding anything there even. Unless you're just referring to fc.exe from windows (/b is VERY handy with that) which I just willingly omitted (no place to write down ALL of them!)

ShellExec -- nice tool for sure! Added to the list.

I've used apps like Windows Commander before... Some were nice, but I just don't really bother I guess.

Snagit? I'm already a big fan of it, I just left it off the list because it doesn't really accomplish an admin task per se (i.e. doesn't make changes on a computer). If I included such apps, my list would be 10x as long.

BurnAtOnce, well, I've used disc burning command line utils now and then, but if I'm gonna use a GUI then I'll just use good ol' Nero I guess (or ImgBurn). Also, same comments as Snagit to some extent (I didn't put Nero on my list either)

DskImage, BFI and Extract2? It's been YEARS since I've used a floppy... As in, more than 5 (WinImage was a handy util for those though)

[DigeratiPrime]

very nice list crahak, happy to say I use most of the same tools

biggest thing I see no one has mentioned: regex

otherwise here are some apps I also consider handy:

AntRenamer, ReNamer

Event Log Explorer

Everest

WinMerge, Araxis Merge

XYplorer

There are a ton of network related tools I can think of, but I like to seperate Sysadmin from Netadmin.

[CoffeeFiend]

very nice list crahak, happy to say I use most of the same tools

Thank you

biggest thing I see no one has mentioned: regex

Registry editor? Or some kind of regular expression tool?

AntRenamer, ReNamer -- I've been using several file renaming scripts for a while. Nothing perfect, but just haven't found the time or motivation to find the perfect tool for me (or to make it). There's so many renaming apps out there!

Event Log Explorer -- very nice tool for sure!

Everest -- yeah, very good util too

WinMerge, Araxis Merge -- I'm a WinMerge user too (and UltraCompare), I left that aside as it's more of a dev tool for me than an admin one

XYplorer -- yet another explorer replacement... comes down to preferences I guess. I'm trying QT TabBar right now (extension/toolbar for explorer, for tabs and such) and it's ok I guess.