free software

Essential tools: Fiddler Web Debugger, Display HTTP packets LIVE without a packet sniffer

You may have been thinking I had forgotten about this series of articles since I haven’t posted to it in a while. Nope! Just haven’t run across anything that was truely aazing enough to be an “Essential Tool”. Well, I recently found just that web I had to troubleshoot a application that was making calls to a web service.

The tool i was lead to is Fiddler, the Web Debugger!!! If you’re like me and you have to trouble shoot web applications that make web service calls– you’re going to LOVE fiddler. No more digging through logs to determine problems real time, especially since IIS caches the log data and writes it in chunks.

Fiddler displays the HTTP (and HTTPS) traffic originated from a machine it is ran on and then shows the cooresponding response from the server you connected with in the request. It’s a real life saver, especially if your not certain the packet is well formed for a SOAP web service on the other end. As an added bonus, Fiddler also allows you to see the raw HTTP (or HTTPS) headers and response headers.

Best of all it’s FREE!!! (We’ll it cost me a $250 call to Microsoft to find out about it… but the application is free and for you the information is free!) Try it out— TODAY!

Essential Tools: A free undelete utility that actually recovers files effectively

Please note: This is a re-posting of a previously deleted post, details to come. 

The next tool I’d like to share with you in my Essential Tools series is another useful tool from a company called Piriform, who created a free drive defragmenter tool in the series, Defraggler.

This tool, Recuva, is an excellent file recovery tool— hence the name Recuva, which is pronounced like recover. Recuva is easy to use and quite impressive in it’s ability to recover files.

It first presents you with a wizard that, if you chose to use it, will guide you through the selection, scanning, and recovery process. Once it has scanned your drive it presents you with a list of files that were deleted– along with their recover ability in plain English! Simply select the files you need to recover and then choose to recover them and your on your way to getting back to that game of Halo with your co workers!

So why not take a second an run over and download the application and give it a shot– It’s FREE!!!

Know of a tool that you think is essential? Post a comment here and if I don’t already have it in my tool belt, I’ll add it and give it a shot. If it makes the grade– I’ll add it to the list of tools to review. The only criteria are:

1. The tool must be free, or inexpensive with a “Per User” type license. (No pay per installation licenses, please)
2. The tool (or it’s installation file) must be small enough to fit on a 256Mb flash drive for portability.
3. Command line run time options are beneficial, but not required.
4. If it has ads… it needs be truly INVALUABLE.
5. It should make the user’s job easier by gathering information or preforming a task that a typical Network or Systems Administrator would preform.

Enjoy!

Essential Tools: A FREE File Level Drive Defragmenter

Please note: This is a re-posting of a previous post that was deleted, further details to come. 

The first tool I want to call out in my Essential Tools series, and the inspiration for the series, is one from a company called Piriform the tool is one that I’ve been looking a long time for… a real drive defragmenter.

As a systems administrator, I’m sure you know defragmentation can kill the performance of a system and that it doesn’t take long before a drive is defragmented! Plus, you probably know the frustration of spending hours defragging a drive to only find out that after defragging one, maybe two or three, times that there is still a file with hundreds of fragments!

I absolutely hate that! Three hours out of my life and the best you can do is leave a file with 878 fragments?!? I’m from back “in the day”, when DOS 6.22’s defrag utility actually defragged the hard drive and also did a file level defrag.

Sure there are some apps that do that, but they charge out the nose for the software and, lets face it, not everyone works at a fortune 500 company with a million dollar software budget to spend on disk defragmentation software.

There is a tool that does this, does it quite well, and better yet is FREE! This tool is called Defraggler.

It will defrag your drive, like most other defrag software applications, but it goes one step further… It will allow you to choose an individual file to defragment!

Plus, for those of you that are batch scripters or command line people (nothing wrong with that), there’s a command line tool installed that they don’t mention, df.exe, in addition to the standard Windows version!

Straight from the command line help we see how powerful this can be if you have a file or folder that has heavy disk activity:

df C:
Defrag drive C:

df “C:\Program Files”
Defrag “C:\Program Files” folder.

df “C:\Program Files” /S
  Defrag “C:\Program Files” folder and recurses into sub folders.

df “C:\Windows\*.exe”
Defrag all executables inside “C:\Windows” folder.

So check it out, I’m sure you’ll find it to be one of those tools that you simply add to your tool belt or boot disk.

Until next time….

Essential Tools: A free tool to mount an ISO cdrom or DVD image as a Virtual CDROM drive

We’ve all had times when we needed a file from an installation CD or DVD, but only had an ISO image available on the network. So, we have to copy the image to our machine then burn the image to media– just to get the file.

There are utilities out there that do this, like Alcohol 120%, but none seem to be free and free from ads or “Value add toolbars”. (Alcoholsoft makes Alcohol 52%, but it has toolbars). I’ve recently found a free utility that does fit the bill for my free essential tools series!

The tool is Virtual CloneDrive from Slysoft. Virtual CloneDrive delivers all the functionality you need to mount an ISO as a virtual CD/DVD Drive in a small (1.86Mb for a full install) FREE package! (As a added benefit, it appears to have multi-language support as well)

Once installed it adds a Virtual CDROM drive to your system that has a menu context “Virtual CloneDrive” that gives you the Mount and unmount options, just like Alcohol 120% does. And it keeps track of your recent ISO’s like Alcohol 120% as well.

It also registers .ISO files with itself and simply double clicking on the file automatically mounts the image in your virtual drive, a nice touch.

All in all, the performance is good and the integration with windows is top notch. Give it a shot, I’m sure you’ll find it to be one of your essential tools.

Know of a tool that you think is essential? Post a comment here and if I don’t already have it in my tool belt, I’ll add it and give it a shot. If it makes the grade– I’ll add it to the list of tools to review. The only criteria are:

1. The tool must be free, or inexpensive with a “Per User” or “site” type license. (No pay per installation licenses, please)
2. The tool (or it’s installation file) must be small enough to fit on a 256Mb flash drive for portability.
3. Command line run time options are beneficial, but not required.
4. If it has ads… it needs be truly INVALUABLE.
5. It should make the user’s job easier by gathering information or preforming a task that a typical Network or Systems Administrator would preform.

Enjoy!

Essential Tools: Determining disk usage graphically with free tools

The next essential tool is one that I have used for quite some time now, and one I searched to find for some time. As a systems administrator, its an ever ending battle for you to keep space clear on the servers. It’s a battle that puts you smack in the middle of the users who are using all the space and the management who refuses to buy more space. Additionally, management all to often refuses to place a mandate on how old data is before it is free to delete.

 This tool won’t help you delete files, but it will tell you really quickly where exactly the space is being used for any particular volume… even if it is a UNC path on your network mapped to a network drive!

This tool, spacemonger, is a tool that will show you this in a visual representation by size where space is being used. It allows you to drill down into directories to see more detail and gives you shortcuts via a context menu to common tasks you would preform on a directory.

SpaceMonger truly is an essential tool. The 1.x version I’ve linked to is older, but free and it gets the job done. Additionally, a newer version is available that has more features and is relatively cheap. Go ahead, check it out… I’m sure you’ll add it to your essential tools!

Know of a tool that you think is essential? Post a comment here and if I don’t already have it in my tool belt, I’ll add it and give it a shot. If it makes the grade– I’ll add it to the list of tools to review. The only criteria are:

1. The tool must be free, or inexpensive with a “Per User” or “site” type license. (No pay per installation licenses, please)
2. The tool (or it’s installation file) must be small enough to fit on a 256Mb flash drive for portability.
3. Command line run time options are beneficial, but not required.
4. If it has ads… it needs be truly INVALUABLE.
5. It should make the user’s job easier by gathering information or preforming a task that a typical Network or Systems Administrator would preform.

Enjoy!

Essential tools: Tools every systems administrator needs to know about and use

If you read this blog regularly, you know that much of what I write about is VBScript. But that’s not completely the goal of this blog. The main goal is to make your life as a systems admin easier! (Scripting just happens to be a big way to accomplish this.) So, on occasion I do write about other topics.

One topic I plan on starting is one for useful tools I find to help make your job easier. (Please don’t applaud, just keep coming back and reading the blog.) To help identify these postings, I will place “Essential Tools:” at the front of the title and tag them “essential tools“.

This will be a virtual corner of the blog that you will be able to find free tools and applications that will either make your life easier or provide those sysadmins with less resources (read budget) than a fortune 500 company gives to the systems administration team to accomplish things.

Stay tuned, the first tool is on the way!