Useful Software

Cyberduck

http://cyberduck.ch/

Multi-protocol (FTP, WebDAV, etc) and cloud storage (Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Microsoft) client.

ISOrecorder

http://alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm

Simple utility to create ISO files, and burn folders or ISO's to disk (CD-ROM, DVD)

LastPass

http://lastpass.com/

Password manager. Can be made mobile (iPhone and Android apps) through the Premium Edition subscription.

NameBench

http://code.google.com/p/namebench/

DNS server benchmarking software - allows you to find the best (in terms of locality and speed of response) DNS servers to use

Offline Windows Password & Registry Editor

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

Allows you to break back into a machine for which you've lost the local admin password.

On Windows 2008 you can only clear the password, not change it, but that still gets you back into the OS. From where you can set a new password.

PuTTY Connection Manager

http://puttycm.free.fr/cms/

Allows you to manage multiple PuTTY connections with auto-login, with passwords being stored in an encrypted database file. Perfect if Mr Security has had his way in your organisation and your servers have varying, complex passwords.

Note that the site above appears to have been taken down and no longer exists - I've found a copy of the installer and it can be downloaded from here...

• http://dl.sandfordit.com/3rdparty/puttycm0.7.1.136beta.exe
  • MD5: 81e0129376b4d9e653c5d82179feca84
• http://dl.sandfordit.com/3rdparty/pcmcrypt.rar
  • MD5: 8767e84ebf704ad8bd0302d4ddd4f70f

If you are the original author or were the maintainer of the site and would be happy for me to host the supporting documentation for PCM (or would like me to remove the download link), please contact me at info[AT]sandfordit[DOT]com.

As an alternative, try SuperPuTTY

RealVNC

http://www.realvnc.com

The original VNC. Probably the best remote admin console software there is, once you've worked in an environment that uses VNC properly it'll kill you to have to go back that out of the box limited RDP rubbish.

Its killer feature has to be the ability to copy and paste (binary) files from session to session, excellent.

Its not free if you want the bells and whistles, but if you've got a couple of quid left over in your budget at the end of the year, its well work a look.

RVTools

http://www.robware.net/

RV Tools audits your virtual infrastructure and provides a nice diagnosis list, which is more like a to do of background maintenance tasks. Its best feature is probably its ability to identify orphaned files on your datastores which can enable to free up quite a bit of precious SAN space.

SuperPuTTY

http://automation-nation.org/superputty-tutorial

I haven't actually used it, but this seems to be a logical successor to PuTTY Connection Manager. That said, from a cursory look at the documentation, its not possible to store encrypted session password, which was a very good feature of PuTTY CM.

Synergy

http://synergy-foss.org/

KVM functionality without a KVM - allows you to control multiple Windows machines from the same keyboard. Ideally suited to when you've more than one desktop machine, but would them to be managed as if they were multiple displays from the same machine.

Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool

http://wudt.codeplex.com/

Allows you to create a boot-able USB stick from an Operating System install ISO (eg Win7, Win2k8 etc).

However be aware that you cannot create a 64 bit install stick from a 32 bit machine. The uses the bootsect.exe utility on the source ISO in order to create the boot sector on the USB stick. If you're running a 32 bit OS it won't be able to run the 64 bit version of bootsect.exe that's on the ISO (run from a CLI you'd get bootsect.exe is not a valid Win32 application).

WinImage

http://www.winimage.com/download.htm

CD image extraction and editing software