My Toolbox

There are some tools that you use every day.  Can't do your job without them.  Or sources of information that keep you up to date with everything going on in the world of IT.  Every now and then I'll find a new program or web site that I wish I'd known about sooner.  This is a list of the things I use a lot in my work managing the IT for an office of about 45 people.  Some strictly work, some not quite so much.  As I find new ones I'll try to add them to this page, if you have any suggestions useful for a small/medium business IT department then please mention them in the comments.


Software

IobitUninstaller - When run it lists all of the programs installed on the system.  tick the box next to all the ones you want to uninstall and it works through them one by one.  You still have to go through each apps uninstall wizard but it is much faster than doing the same with Windows add/remove programs utility....

Putty - ssh client for connecting to Linux servers from Windows.  Old program but I still use it all the time.

Dropbox - (pay for extra space, free to start) cloud based file syncing, very good for offsite backups of some files and automatically copying your files automatically to your other computers.  Some concerns over its security so if you have something confidential then encrypt it first.

VMWare - Great virtualisation environment, available from free to very expensive depending on your needs.  I use this extensively to run the servers where I work.  I have written several posts related to VMWare, click HERE to see them.

Keepass - or Lastpass - password management tools. It is getting harder all the time to come up with suitably secure and unique passwords so I've started using Lastpass with a Yubikey to access my passwords and automatically generate stupidly long and complex passwords for new sites. It does cost $12 a year (plus the cost of a Yubikey) but it is easily worth it for the convienience. Keepass is a good open source alternative.

Infrarecorder - Free CD/DVD burning software for Windows.

SpaceSniffer - Excellent tool for finding what is taking up space on your Windows hard drive.  Can filter to only show files older or newer than a certain age, of specific file types, only files bigger or smaller than a size etc. Especially good at finding files on shared network drives.

Eraser - quickly and securely delete files completely in windows

GnuPG - Free very secure encryption system using public key cryptography.  Available for Linux and Windows.  Has command line and graphical interface, I've written a quick command line howto HERE.

Seahorse - Excellent simple graphical interface for GPG which runs under Gnome.  With seahorse-plugins package it integrates into Nautilus and gedit too.

Clonezilla - Live Linux CD for taking images of whole computers, can backup and restore over a network too.

Shrewsoft VPN client - Open source VPN client software that I use to connect to our Netscreen SSG140 firewall.  Can connect to many VPN servers and is easy to use with a small footprint.

Yumi - Lets you run multiple iso's direct from a single memory stick rather than burning each to disk.

Parted Magic - previously free it is now $4.99 however is an excellent all in one tool for hard disk partitioning and maintenance. You can get all the bits individually for free but I find it worth paying the price for the convenience.