About a year ago, Windows IT Pro published my "8 Absolutely
Cool, Totally Free Utilities" article (InstantDoc ID 50122)—a
compilation of handy tools I'd gathered in my IT travels. I use
these kinds of tools on a daily basis, carrying them around on
a portable USB drive so that I can grab them at a moment's
notice. They make me a happier administrator, and they help
make my clients even happier, too. Best of all, every one of the tools is
completely free.
That article received a generous amount of positive feedback, so for
the past year, I've been keeping an eye out for other free utilities that are
new or that I might have missed the first time around. Without further
ado, here's my second collection of eight terrific, completely free utilities
that will make your job easier.
Inventory and Monitoring Tools
The modern enterprise network contains a ton of data to manage—not
just user or company data, mind you, but data about how everything is
put together, how it's performing, and so on. Let's start by looking at a few
utilities for keeping tabs on your environment and getting the information you need when you need it.
WinDirStat
The goal of WinDirStat—probably my favorite utility in the bunch—is
simple: Determine how space is being utilized across your disks and
represent it visually in multiple ways so that you can easily find wasted
space. This utility does a great job of ferreting out directories or files that
are taking up too much space in your network. Figure 1, shows
how you can display disk utilization in three ways: a traditional directory list (i.e., upper left), a graphical and interactive tree map (i.e., bottom),
and an extension list (i.e., upper right).
But the figure doesn't portray this utility's interactivity. As you move your
mouse over large blocks in the lower portion of the display, the names of
the files represented by those blocks appear in the status bar at the bottom
of the window. When you click an item, the upper-left tree list expands to
the individual file in question. Through this interface, I quickly discovered
about 10GB worth of PST files hidden in a Norton Protected Recycle Bin on
my desktop. The large files stood out on the map, so I instantly knew what
was going on. (I'd uninstalled Norton several months earlier.)
Another interactive aspect of this utility lets
you click a directory name in the upper-left
side of the display, producing a white frame
around the objects in the graphical display at
the bottom. This display gives you a visual representation of how much space each directory
on your system consumes. You can start at the
top-level directories or navigate down to lower-level directories in the tree, and the behavior is
the same.
WinDirStat is available for every flavor of
Windows released in the past decade, from
Windows 95 to Windows Server 2003.
System Information for
Windows
Quite frankly, System Information for Windows
(SIW) knocks my socks off. This simple, standalone utility can tell you nearly anything about
an individual system—and I mean anything.
Figure 2 shows SIW's main interface. Once
you use this tool, you'll rarely ever go to My
Computer and select Manage again.
The sheer amount of system information that
this utility can extract is amazing. Need to know
your original Windows installation serial number
and product keys? Want to see CPU or other
ambient temperatures currently reported by your
motherboard (assuming it's capable)? Need to
find application license keys for a wide range of
common off-the-shelf applications, above and
beyond Microsoft products? Need to recover a
password? SIW can accomplish all these tasks
and report on a huge amount of data:
- Software—OS, hotfixes, installed applications (and applicable license keys, in many
cases), current processes, open files, audio
and video codecs
- Hardware—motherboards, sensor data,
BIOS, CPU, PCI/AGP, USB and ISA/PnP,
memory, video card, monitor, disk drives,
CD/DVD drives, SCSI devices, Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology
(SMART) data, ports, printers
- Network—network cards, shares, network
connections, open ports
SIW also offers password-recovery tools for
revealing passwords hidden behind asterisks,
product keys, and serial numbers, as well as
real-time CPU, memory, page-file-usage, and
network-traffic monitors. SIW is available for
every version of Windows since Win98, including 64-bit versions and Windows Vista. Many
thanks to Gabriel Topala for providing such a
great free utility to the world.
OCS Inventory NG
Another project available at SourceForge,
Open Computers and Software Inventory (OCS
Inventory NG) has a larger architecture than
our first two utilities do, but its goal is loftier: to provide detailed inventory data and package management across an entire network of
systems. Compatible client systems for OCS
Inventory NG include Windows 2003/Vista/
XP/2000/Me/NT 4.0/98/95, HP-UX, IBM AIX,
Linux and BSD, Macintosh OS X, and Sun
Solaris. The utility's modular and scalable
architecture makes it suitable for both small
networks (of a few dozen devices) and large
enterprise networks (of tens of thousands of
devices). Figure 3 shows the main interface.
The OCS Inventory NG architecture is comprised of five major components: agents that
reside on target devices, a database server to
store collected information, a server to handle
all communications between agents and the database, a deployment server to store any
packages that require network deployment,
and a Web-based administrative console. You
can install each component on its own server
for high scalability, or you can place them all
on the same system in smaller environments.
The level of inventory data that OCS Inventory NG can collect is comprehensive (although
not as comprehensive as that of SIW) and would
make any systems administrator happy. All that
data is easily available and up to date in a centralized database. But in addition to providing
capable network-inventory functionality, OCS
Inventory NG includes package-deployment
capabilities on client computers that are in the
inventory system. From a Web-based administration server, you define packages that clients
will download via HTTP/HTTPS. An optional
OCS Inventory NG agent on client computers
performs package execution.
A deployment package has four primary
components: priority, action, payload, and
an optional launch command. The priority component defines which packages take
deployment precedent over others, and the action component describes what happens
with the payload itself: simply copy it to the
target system, copy and execute it, or use the
launch command (external to the payload) to
launch it on the system as a part of the deployment. With enough time and creativity, you'll
find OCS Inventory NG's package-deployment
capabilities extremely useful.