Three apps for the Windows sysadmin

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Commercial

Three apps for the Windows sysadmin - Holiday Gift Guide

by Todd Ritter Dec 1st 2008

If you have a Windows systems admin (the kind of person responsible for managing a computer network and/or server farm) on your holiday gift-giving list, check out these three commercial apps that they are sure to love:

Hyena ($199) - This Windows application is an Active Directory admin's sidekick. In addition to acting as a an AD Users/Computers snap-in on steroids, it also lets you easily change local account usernames and passwords on multiple computers, create helpful lists of group members, and manage services. Hyena also makes it easy to quickly view the currently logged in users of a machine and shutdown or reboot a group of computers.

S ecureCRT ($99) - Most sysadmins need a terminal emulation program for connecting to network devices, ssh sessions, or communicating with serial devices. SecureCRT has a tabbed interface so the admin can have multiple sessions open, and the sessions can automatically be reconnected upon launching the program if so desired. It also can be minimized to the tray, has a customizable scrollback buffer, and supports keyboard mappings. SecureCRT is Windows only.

VNCScan ($59) - Admins who use VNC in their environments for computer support will benefit from a VNC management tool like VNCScan. It allows the admin to deploy VNC in specific configurations to Windows computers (including passwords, VNC flavor, etc.), maintain computer lists of VNC-capable computers, and do basic tasks like find the currently logged in user and access RDP sessions.

Forego the fruit cake and gift a sysadmin management tool!

Tags: hgg, hgg2008, Hyena, SecureCRT, sysadmin

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Geir said 4:20PM on 12-01-2008

Save $99 by not buying SecureCRT, get PuTTY Connection Manager (http://puttycm.free.fr/) instead.

Mike said 4:36PM on 12-01-2008

If you need free, reliable remote shared drive access, you might want to take a look at Hamachi. Its free, easy to configure, and can be hidden from the user completely (when run as a service with the program window hidden).

Lord knows that all the stooges that came before me at this IT internship were wanting to spend thousands of dollars and weeks of downtime to do what I did with Hamachi for free in 20 minutes. My coworkers now enjoy speedy, autoconfigured, encrypted remote server access and they love me for it :)

Its also nice to throw on a flash drive to access your personal files from home through any firewall.

blaszta said 8:44AM on 12-02-2008

Or you can ditch SecureCRT & VNC Scan all together and use the free mRemote (http://www.mremote.org/)

noroom said 11:09AM on 12-02-2008

mRemote seconded. Please note that mRemote uses putty (included) for it's SSH connections. It looks like VNCScan may have some discovery tools not replicted by mRemote, but any decent admin should know how to port scan.

Todd Ritter said 11:46AM on 12-02-2008

Thanks for your suggestions. I specifically like VNCScan's VNC Deployment wizard so that I can install VNC remotely (and silently) on computers that may not have it.

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