SmtpDiag is a nifty little tool for diagnosing any smtp or dns issues on your mailserver. Usage: smtpdiag SmtpDiag

Did you know you use an SSH connection as a proxy using PuTTY? I didn’t until today 🙂 Fire up PuTTY but before you connect navigate to Connection–>SSH–>Tunnels. Here you can specify a port you want PuTTY to respond to proxy requests. Choose a port that is not in use on your localhost, I will use 8080 in this example. Choose Dynamic on Destination and click Add. In the forwarded ports part of the windows you will now see D8080....

From time to time you will want to reinstall you os right? And of course you have all your license keys documented right? Well, I don’t 🙂 Thats why I usually extract them from my computer before i reinstall the os. A nice little tool that I have been using for this is ProduKey. It has a small footprint, no need for installation, just run the exe file. It gathers your licensekeys for windows, office, exchange, sql etc....

Stumbled upon a tool from Microsoft called ALTools that I thought were absolutely awesome. It’s over 7 years old so I wonder why I haven’t seen it before Nevertheless it’s as cool now as it was when it was released. ALTools consists of several tools, but the coolest of them are: aloinfo – Displays all user account names and the age of their passwords eventcombMT – Gathers specific events from event logs of several different machines and saves them in a text file LockoutStatus – Shows a list of all domain controllers in a given domain and the lockoutstatus of a given user on those I have used eventcomb a couple of times as it has some predefined searches, for example Account Lockouts....

At the company where I currently work we lease a bunch of Xerox copiers. Those leasing contracts are based on number of prints per device. That means that once a month we have to gather pagecounts from all our printers (about 100 of them) and report them to our supplier, which takes a lot of time. Since we already were using Zenoss for monitoring of the printers I figured I could try and gather the information via snmp....