Executive Summary:
Our latest collection of great free/open-source tools includes Active Directory Change Reporter, BotHunter, Eraser, KeyFinder, NMap, NTFS Undelete, PhotoRec, and WinAudit.
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As I started researching this fourth article in my "Free Utilities" series, I knew this installment would be the most challenging yet. Finding good, reliable,
useful free utilities is always a daunting task, but unearthing the tools that are relevant to IT pros' day-to-day responsibilities is even more difficult. However, the challenge can be quite rewarding. When you find a powerful, useful utility, the payoff comes in time saved, headaches reduced, and end users satisfied—always worth the effort. So, without further delay, here's a brand-new collection of 8 utilities that will help make your life easier.
WinAudit
Parmavex Services' WinAudit isn't the only tool on the market that provides auditing capabilities for Windows systems, but it does its job in a compact, standalone 830KB executable file and runs on every version of Windows (desktop and server) back to Windows 95. (Windows Server 2008 support isn't officially listed, but I've tested it and found that it works fine). You can easily keep WinAudit on a USB drive and use it on any system from which you need to quickly collect configuration data. The data that WinAudit pulls together is comprehensive, as you see in Figure 1, and you can save all this data to a file (text, .xml, .csv, .pdf), email it to someone, or even export it to a centralized database.
As a bonus, WinAudit also supports command-line execution, with all the output options available except email. (WinAudit doesn't include its own email client, so it relies on Microsoft Outlook.) In less than an hour, you can easily edit the logon scripts within your entire Windows network, add in WinAudit with configuration parameters to output the collected audit data to files or a database, and display an informational message to users while the audit is running. WinAudit is generally pretty quick: Execution on my Windows XP test system took a little less than 60 seconds.
Keyfinder
With WinAudit, over the course of a single lunch hour you can have a comprehensive auditing solution deployed to your network for no cost, storing data in a file or writing it all to a central database. But something that WinAudit doesn't capture is the various license keys for OSs, and the applications that are installed on those systems.
Enter Magical Jellybean Software's KeyFinder, whose sole purpose is to capture all this data where possible and display it or store it for you. Again, acting as a standalone package (no installation required) and weighing in at just over 600KB, it's storable on a USB drive for quick auditing use whenever you need it. Keyfinder works on every version of Windows (desktop and server) back to Win95 (including Server 2008).
As you can see in Figure 2, Keyfinder found the license keys for all the Microsoft products on my test system, as well as license keys for installed third-party software. Keyfinder does this by searching a configuration file (keyfinder.cfg) for clues about where it should look in the registry for license keys for various applications. The default keyfinder.cfg file that Magical Jellybean Software provides contains the known locations of license keys for more than 160 commercial applications, and the text file is a simple delimited format, which you can easily modify for your purposes. Unfortunately, of the 160-plus applications that are preconfigured in Keyfinder's configuration file, many of them appear to be consumer applications (e.g., games, CD burners, media players), so you might need to do a little homework before Keyfinder reaches its maximum usefulness in your environment.
Like WinAudit, Keyfinder execute in command-line mode and write its data out to a custom CSV file for each system you run it on. So once again, over the course of a lunch hour, you can configure Keyfinder to execute via logon scripts for your users and write the license key data for various applications to a central repository for compliance-auditing or backup purposes. As you add new applications to your enterprise over time, you can simply edit the main keyfinder.cfg file on your network to define where the license keys are stored in the Windows registry, and each system on your network will begin to log this data the next time their logon script executes Keyfinder.