Utility of the week

All about the useful utilities I use, updated weekly.

NoScript (Firefox)

Webdeveloper Toolbar (Firefox)

Add block plus (Firefox)

Procmon

Procmon (Process Monitor) from Sysinternals does precisely what its name suggests - it monitors the processes running on your system.

Sounds boring but it's actually really useful. For example, if you find every time you start a program it crashes you can use Procmon to find out what was happening immediately before the crash which should help you track down the fault. Those of you that remember SnoopDos (or Snoopy) on the Amiga will like this tool as it's reasonably similar.

Procmon is part of my post incident response toolkit along with Process Explorer - using both of these tools you can track down a bad process and see exactly what it's doing.

For a clearer description of how to use the power of Procmon see my using Procmon to find malware article on the wiki; it details a real life situation where Procmon has given me the answer. After, Russinovich (the tool's creator) has been quoted as saying "if in doubt, run procmon"!

Firefox

Firefox, my browser of choice is the focus of this Utility of the Week posting and hopefully I can convert a few more Internet Explorer (IE) lovers to a much better browser!

If you consider IE has the dominant market share for web browsers, and that until recently Microsoft didn't openly give users a choice of which browser to use, it's a surprise at all that Firefox has gained any standing on the Internet. "IE comes with every Windows PC as standard, why would I try another browser?" is the question I often get asked when I say "try firefox" so, why should you?

To start off, Firefox is a faster and safer browser than IE with exploits being resolved quicker and updates being pushed out regularly. As an example, I installed an update 2 days after a previous update - clearly a problem had been fixed quickly. Conversely, IE is only patched on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday (once a month).

You can add a huge number of extras to Firefox, something that's not particularly possible with IE. I'm not talking additional toolbars here, I'm talking genuine additional functionality. For example, my Firefox at work uses the Nagios Checker add-on to immediately alert me to problems that my system monitoring system detects, I have HTML Validator installed too which tells me if the web page I'm developing complies with the Web's standards. I have many more addons than just these 2 installed.

On the subject of standards, Firefox is more standards compliant that IE. A quick run of the Acid3 browser test gives 92% pass whereas IE 8 receives a depressing 13% and doesn't even render that part of the test correctly either. Firefox supports HTML 5's new innovations such as Video tags and the ever ageing SVG image format. IE8 supports neither.

Firefox can be configured extensively, from how it receives network traffic (advanced stuff) to how it looks. Firefox 3.6 introduced the idea of "Personas" allowing you to skin your browser to look however you want it to - not a big feature on my list but I know a lot of people enjoy personalisation.

At the end of the day, the add-ons really sell Firefox to me, that and the fact I can use it on my Windows and Linux machines. It's a free download so why not give it a shot?

Synergy

Synergy is a program that allows you to share one keyboard and mouse with a number of computers, each computer still requires its own monitor. Think of synergy as a software based KM (Keyboard Mouse) rather than a KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse).

Synergy is multi-platform being available on Windows, Linux and Mac and is capable of sharing the mouse and keyboard across operating systems. You simply install synergy on all the computers you're working on, choose one to act as the "server", configure the server, and tell the others where the server is and synergy runs. By moving the mouse "off the edge" of one monitor you move mouse and keyboard control to the other computer.

The Windows version of Synergy has a handy graphical configuration utility to remove a lot of the hard work. When configuring Synergy you tell it where your screens are in relation to one another (so, for example, PC1 is to the right of PC2 but below BigPC) and can even stiplulate at which point of each screen the mouse and keyboard move to the other computer (so the top half of the right edge moves to PC2 but the bottom of the right edge moves to PC 3). Just because PC1 is to the right of PC2 doesn't mean PC2 is to the left of PC1 - you have to tell Synergy exactly how you can move between the computers (and getting your config wrong can result in locking your keyboard/mouse onto a computer you can't move off from - just shut the PC in question down if that happens and your keyboard/mouse jump back to the Synergy server).

Synergy has a number of nice features but among my favourites are the shared clipboard (so you can copy and paste text/images from a web browser on one computer to MS Word on another) and screen saver harmony - when the screen saver starts on one computer, it starts on all of them and when it stops on one it stops on all. Fortunately, if you're using PC1 the screensaver doesn't start on PC2!

If you use more than 1 computer on your desk and have more than one monitor I'd recommend giving Synergy a look - you'll save yourself a number of keyboards and mice and that embarassing "ooops I grabbed the wrong mouse" moment that afflicts us all!

Microsoft Baseline Security Analyser

The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyser, or MBSA, is my first stop program when determining how secure a Microsoft server infrastructure is. Using the MBSA you scan the target server to check for missing updates, account vulnerabilities (e.g. accounts with non-expiring passwords, multiple administrators) and known security holes in the OS. MBSA will scan the client OS as well as the server OS making it pretty flexible

More importantly, MBSA will give you advice on applying the fixes and will explain the results. For example, at a couple of institutions where I've run MBSA on Domain Controllers (DC) I've been alerted to the presence of more than 2 administrators. A quick check of a member server in the domain revealed this was not the case so the problem was clearly DC specific and, most worryingly, the additional administrators of the DC were all staff (fortunately not the students as this was an educational establishement). For a while I had no idea where to look to solve this but I could tell you it wasn't group policy and it certainly wasn't the local SAM database as that's disabled on DCs. A quick bit of digging returned nothing but fortunately my Learning Tree course instructor had the answer - they were a member of the BUILTIN\Administrators group.

Had I not had MBSA I would never have known all staff at that institution could administer Active Directory - now they can't.

Running MBSA on the local machine (I tend to run a majority of my scans from a client workstation) then MBSA will also check the firewall for you.

If you're a system administrator, or you just maintain a Windows server for fun (!) I'd recommend you give MBSA a download and run, you may just save yourself an incident!

Memtest86+

Memtest86+ tests your RAM for errors, running multiple tests and reporting in real-time the state of the RAM it's working on. The important thing to remember with Memtest86+ is that it never finishes so don't be fooled into making the rookie mistake of waiting for 3 days before deciding your RAM is good. That said, the longer you leave it testing, the more thoroughly tested your RAM is. The downside to testing for 3 days is that the RAM gets hot as it's used so if you test the RAM for days on end then you'll cook it in the end!

On the plus side, if errors are detected you'll soon know about it - read errors all over the screen (even telling you the precise memory address and megabyte value of the error).

Of course, if you have a RAM stick with errors you're looking at buying new RAM as I don't know of any way to repair RAM short of using it as a paperweight!

Sumatra PDF

The SumatraPDF viewer is a free, open source alternative to Adobe's Reader. Sumatra has a number of benefits, the most important one for me being that it opens and displays your PDF in under 2 seconds (vs Adobe Reader 9.1's 10-15 seconds). Sumatra also has a tiny install footprint - 1.43MB vs Adobe Reader 9.1.3's 222Mb.

Don't get me wrong, Sumatra isn't perfect and some of its drawbacks can be frustrating but for the most part I'm just happy to read my document quickly and get on with life. For example, Sumatra won't allow you to highlight and select text (not that I've found) so you'll need to open the PDF if Reader if you want to do that. All is not lost, however, and Sumatra gives you the option to open the PDF in Reader from the File menu, saving you time scrabling around to re-open the PDF off the right click menu.

Sumatra's GUI is equally lightweight and slim being only a menu bar and a simple toolbar to give you access to zooming the document, changing page or searching for a key word.

Sumatra still considers itself to be in beta but the current version (beta 0.9.4) seems very stable at the time of writing. Unlike a number of Beta applications, Sumatra has already been translated into a number of languages (including Persian and Japanese) and the language can be changed from the Settings menu.

Oh, and the best bit - I've not been made aware of a security flaw in Sumatra yet (unlike Adobe Reader or Foxit).

Putty

The PuTTY client if a full featured SSH client for Windows (although there are Linux versions). PuTTY doesn't only allow you to make SSH connections but also Telnet (don't forget, telnet is an insecured, unencrypted connection but useful for connectivity tests), RLogin and serial connections.

Putty's GUI allows you to save connections and their settings, allowing you quick access to your regular connections from the main screen. For SSH connections there is support for SSH Keys so there's no need to be concerned that your server's insecure by allowing password based logins (mine are all set to login by key only). The Putty developers have produced a key agent (Pageant) to handle keys more appropriately and there's support for Pageant built into putty - more on Pageant another time.

Putty is also capable of logging to text file any human-readable output which makes providing evidence of your connection a doddle. To be honest, I don't touch over half the options in Putty but still find the application really useful. I wouldn't connect to an SSH server any other way on Windows!

BGInfo

The BGInfo tool from Sysinternals (now part of Microsoft) allows you to display information about a workstation on the desktop, logon screen or terminal services desktop.

The first time BGInfo is launched you're presented with the Sysinternals license agreement. Accept that and you're straight into configuring your BGInfo layout. Pre-defined variables exist (machine name, domain name, memory, hard disk free space etc) and you're given a good starting selection by default.

With a bit of fiddling it's possible to make BGInfo run every startup, adjusting any information that's changed (such as "snapshot time" or "IP Address" for computers configured using DHCP). The text that's displayed on screen can be configured for colour, font and position (including the number of times it repeats) meaning that fields you don't want on general display (MAC address perhaps) can be removed. Important fields (hostname perhaps) can be coloured to highlight their importance etc.

I've started using this tool to easily identify any laptops that come into the department. By setting the BGInfo to display on the logon screen (Hostname, Processor, Memory, Network card type, Volumes, OS and Service pack) I can quickly see who the laptop belongs too after merely powering it on.

Given the easy to use nature of this tool, I'm surprised it's not used more!

Image Resizer Powertoy

The Image Resizer powertoy is one of a set of tools released by Microsoft for Windows XP. As the name suggests, this power toy is used for resizing images quickly and easily.

Rather than loading up an image editor, opening the image you want to resize and then resaving the file, this powertoy allows you to resize the image from the right click (context) menu. Simply right click on the image (or selection of images) you want to resize and click the resize pictures menu option. You'll then be presented with a dialog box asking you how you want to resize the image.

The powertoy provides default options for small, medium and large (640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 respectively) and also handheld PC (240x320). Clicking the Advanced button allows you to specify dimensions (custom) but will maintain the aspect ratio at the same time.

By default, the powertoy resizes the images and saves them as a separate file, leaving the original intact but this can be adjusted after clicking Advanced.

Great tool, saves lots of time

Bluefish

Bluefish is a Linux text editor released under the GNU GPL license. Bluefish concentrates on being a dynamic website markup and code editor but also supports editing of any text file and provides syntax highlighting for a number of languages.

Bluefish is incredibly stable and according to its documentation, the developers use it for their day-to-day work so stability is a priority; I've rarely seen Bluefish on my machine.

One of the main features I like about Bluefish, or rather one of the main lacking features, is that Bluefish isn't a WYSIWYG editor - all you see is the code so you're the boss when it comes to what you're typing. Syntax highlighting is certainly helpful, especially given that I write in HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, SQL and the occasional bit of other languages so having the editor highlight keywords at least re-assures me that I'm on the right track.

If editing on the go (I'm a laptop user) and I suddenly find myself in the position of no books and no Internet connection, Bluefish contains the manuals of a number of languages and markups including CSS, PHP and HTML. These are searchable but also sorted alphabetically or by type.

Code can be bookmarked to allow easy return to a work in progress line and Bluefish can also group files into projects to load all required files with minimal mouse clicks.

Bluefish is, however, sadly lacking auto-complete functions and syntax suggestion (pop up text that gives information on the function being used) found in some other editors. I'm hoping this will be in a future release. Bluefish does, however, autoclose HTML tags on open and places the cursor in the middle of the tag to make typing quicker and easier. There's also a quickstart dialog that allows the easy insertion of DOCTYPE and meta tags for easier web page starting.

Overall I'd say this editor was pretty good, lacking a few features but a good all rounder (incidentally it's my main editor on the Linux platform). What I'd like to see now is auto-completion, syntax suggestion and a Windows port if at all possible!

Doublekiller

DoubleKiller is a small utility (less that 2mb if I remember correctly) from Big Bang Enterprises that scans local and/or network drives for duplicate files. There is also DoubleKiller Pro which offers a large number off additional and improved features (see comparison chart).

The problem with duplicate files is they take up additional space and, more importantly, they take up more space on backups and lengthen backup times. By using DoubleKiller it's possible to locate the duplicate files and delete them, saving space. Fewer files means a shorter backup time too so this tool really can save time and money .

© Jonathan Haddock 2008-2010
Jonsdocs, Jonathan's home on the web - About | RSS
Last updated: 2010-03-26 Last blog post: 2010-08-25 21:41:36 Site version: 4b