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Essential Open Source Tools For Windows Admins
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's J. Peter Bruzzese provides a list of 15 open source tools for enhancing your Windows server-side experience. 'You might imagine that the best place to go for improving your Microsoft server-side experience is to the mothership itself. In many cases, you would be right. But the truth is there are a meaningful number of open source tools that go above and beyond what Microsoft has to offer in support of Windows Server, Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint. Many of these alternatives provide — for free — more powerful capabilities than what you'd get with third-party retail products.'"
Linux
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Cygwin is the first thing every windows server needs installed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Really? Do you consider Symantec to be that much better? What experience have you had? In my experience all virus protection is somewhat haphazard.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
While I truly love wireshark, if we're talking microsoft server admin, you might want to think about Microsoft Network Monitor (current ver == 3.4). It does most of what wireshark does but pairs packet streams to windows processes. If you're on an enterprise premier support call with Microsoft, they'll only accept a pcap from netmon.
Probably because we have better things to do than to hit defrag whenever the fragmentation hits 15% or so and that the built in defrag can't defrag files that are in use at the time. A lot of the 3rd party utilties will allow you to have them run automatically every week or two so that you don't have to pay attention to that. Additionally, some of the 3rd party utilities use the same algorithms that the official defragger uses to accomplish the task.
Hover your mouse pointer over the borg face and your question will be answered. Since this is a story about tools for Microsoft servers, it was tagged with the Microsoft icon.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Windows 7 and Vista automatically defragment without user interaction.
Bonus points is the 7 defragmenter will disable itself on SSDs automatically as well.
I use PuTTY daily.
while i am a fan of MS security essentials for end users - MS intentional prevent it from running on their server OS's. (and for good reason, it's not designed for that workload environment). so when it comes to free ClamAV is up there on the server side.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Add Putty, and if you do a lot with AD the joeware tools aren't open source but they are gratis and extremely useful.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I don't have a need to run a lot of servers, but I do really like the VMware Workstation product for software testing and Linux-based development on a Windows workstation. I'm aware that VMware provides a lot of tools that are practically essential for datacenter virtualization. That said, when the Windows 8 Developer Preview shipped, I was surprised to learn that it wouldn't run on VMware -- only VirtualBox. For all VMware's strengths, VirtualBox seems to do a better job of its core function: virtualization. I'd hardly compare that to the difference between GIMP and Photoshop.
Breakfast served all day!
This has been helpful (showing who/what is hogging disk space)
Windirstat
http://windirstat.info/
Your sysadmin can decrypt your bitlocker?
Yes.
Remember that it's an enterprise deployment of BitLocker. This differs from a personal deployment, where the company may sometimes need access to an encrypted computer if the person originally using it was hit by a bus.
MS does license MSE for installation on their compatible server products, and the installer works without problems. They changed the terms almost a year ago with the release of MSE 2.