grand stream dreams: Bargain Basement SysAdmin Link Sale!

Saturday, August 02, 2014

Bargain Basement SysAdmin Link Sale!

It’s that time of the year again for Claus to unload all of the pending Sysadmin-related links that he’s been collecting.

Bear with me here…some of these are older than others and this is more of a link-dump then those posts that come with more commentary.

Think of it more like a “pop-up” edition without the actual pop-ups.

Actual SysAdmin Stuff

TinyApps bloggist recently thought I might be interested in a sysadmin-related site called System Administration Screencasts.

Indeed I was! Though it mostly follows a *nix bent, there is lots of great material here. Most all of it is screen casting, however in most episodes a transcript can be found. I’m working my way through these right now:

I really encourage you to also check out the About page as there are some great “recommended reading” links as well.

I’m particularly curious about The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps book to see if it can enhance the ITIL trainings I’ve already been to.

That also reminded me of this giant list of RSS feeds that the Standalone Sysadmin posts (with a OPML file for fast snagging) that TinyApps also shared with me in the past.

Subscribed Feeds - Standalone Sysadmin

Oh, and one of my favorite miscellaneous sysadmin sites is the MoonPoint Support Weblog. I frequently find troubleshooting tidbits that are valuable. I also finally found the RSS feed for that weblog so now I can follow the postings much more easily.

Daniel Miessler’s blog is another of those sites that is a balance of tech, troubleshooting, and ponderings on deeper life stuff. I really appreciate all he posts and look forward to his frequent and new postings.

How To Safely Get Interviewed by a Journalist - Daniel Miessler
Building a Professional Firewall with Linux and Iptables - Daniel Miessler
Generate Test Data For IT Testing - Daniel Miessler

Mostly Microsoft & Active Directory Stuff

AD Info - Active Directory Reporting Tool - Ckwdev - free/$ versions - recently bumped to v 1.7.9. There are lots of other tools there as well but some of the most helpful might be AD Permissions Reporter, AD Info, and AD Tidy. Check out the software link for more info on those and many more.

Those reminded me of the Sysinternals tool AD Explorer which I love and use almost daily. It hasn’t been updated since November 2012 but I guess it still does the job perfectly.

Weekend Scripter: Non-PowerShell Books for PowerShell People - Hey, Scripting Guy! Blog

New PowerShell Scripting Tools Released - The Deployment Guys

Windows PowerShell 4.0 Book and Guides from Microsoft - The Windows Club

Download Windows PowerShell 4.0 and Other Quick Reference Guides - Microsoft Download Center

Download Windows Management Framework 4.0 - Microsoft Download Center

Microsoft's USGCB Tech Blog - Aaron Margosis blogs here occasionally.

Utility and Software - New and Updated

Updates: Autoruns v12.0, Procdump v7.0 - Sysinternals Site Discussion

Updates: AccessChk v5.2; PsExec v2.11; Sigcheck v2.1; VMMap v3.12 - Sysinternals Site Discussion

PassMark MemTest86 - $/free versions updated to 5.1.0 back in May (hat-tip to RMPrepUSB, Easy2Boot and USB booting)

Svchost Process Analyzer - Neuber software - free tool to check out the svchost.exe loaded processes. No install needed.

Moo0 File Monitor 1.11 - Moo0 software - interesting tool to monitor file access activities on your system. Spotted via this AddictiveTips blog post. Note it reminds me a bit of this great NirSoft tool FolderChangesView.

CCEnhancer 4.0 - SingularLabs - This one got some pretty big feature updates recently.

ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver - Version 1.8.4 released July 2014. See also this project: ImDisk Toolkit - reboot.pro

dErase - Foolish IT LLC - free tool (now at v2.0) that does file/folder deletions with secure optional secure delete routines. Ignores file system ownership/permissions when executing so use carefully!

dBug - Foolish IT LLC - interesting tool to use when dealing with malware impacted systems. Basically it removes auto-start items and exe runs from know problem locations. This should allow killing of malware auto-loads which may prevent effective system cleaning. Once remediated, the tool can be re-run then puts the changes back in place.

Windows Troubleshooting Tools and Tips

Case of the Office Hang on Launch - chentiangemalc

Using Process Monitor (procmon) to Analyze Windows File Share Access (by Paul Offord) - LoveMyTool blog

Guide to Freeing up Disk Space under Windows 8.1 - Scott Hanselman

Fix .NET 4.5/ 4.5.1 issues with Microsoft .NET Framework Repair Tool 1.2 - BetaNews

Download Debug Diagnostic Tool v2 Update 1 - Microsoft Download Center

Download Debug Diagnostic Tool from Microsoft - The Windows Club (info)

VirtMemTest: a utility to exercise memory and other operations - Aaron Margosis' Non-Admin, App-Compat and Sysinternals WebLog

Offline-Update: Get WSUS Content .NET Version 2.7 - Borns IT- und Windows-Blog (original language) and Google Translated link - This was a new “offline update” tool that I recently read about. You may want to see if the feature set it offers is better for your needs than other tools such as WSUS Offline Update (still my favorite), WHDownloader, Portable Update, or Windows Updates Downloader (WUD).

Install Windows 8.1 from a USB stick with WinSetupFromUSB - 4sysops

The 12 step process to download Microsoft SQL Server Express 2014 - istartedsomething

Download SQL Server Express - Scott Hanselman

Download Visual Studio Express - Scott Hanselman

Booting Windows8.1ToGo from a USB Flash drive - RMPrepUSB, Easy2Boot and USB booting...:

Windows Performance Monitor Overview - Ask the Performance Team

Available for pre-order: Windows Performance Analysis Field Guide - Clint Huffman's Windows Troubleshooting in the Field Blog

Email Stuff

Mailviewer Opens Old Outlook, Thunderbird, and Windows Live Emails - Lifehacker

Mail Viewer - MiTeC homepage

PST Viewer - Kernel Data Recovery

OST Viewer - Kernel Data Recovery