Today I will share with you a few useful freeware tools for your lab. I use them frequently and all of them will run under Windows.
Are you also using interesting freeware tools ? Please post a comment if you do.
Freeping
My lab is filled with all kinds of gear, wireless controllers and APs, routing and switching devices, a whole bunch of virtual machines, etc. To monitor them all, I use a Freeping, a simple tool that pings each device and provides you with a status in real time. Really easy to configure and use. Its configuration is stored in a .ini file, no registry crap.
Download: http://www.tools4ever.com/products/free/freeping/
iReasoning MIB Browser
A MIB browser is always useful to have, especially in a lab. iReasoning distributes freely its MIB browser that supports SNMP v1, v2. SNMP v3 is also available in the Professional Edition and you can download a free evaluation license.
Download: http://www.ireasoning.com/download.shtml
Tail for Win32
Coming from the Linux world, I feel spoiled with the command tail -f <logfile>. This is useful when you need to watch syslog events in real time. There is no known command line equivalent under native Windows. I found Tail for Win32, a GUI version of it that I mainly use with Microsoft DHCP Server log files. It will display the lease renewals, updates, expirations, etc.
Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tailforwin32/
HashCalc
I never trust comparing two files by their size. But I do trust the MD5 and SHA1 checksums. I tried many tools that can provide these checksums. My favorite is HashCalc. Let's say you need to compare two files. You start two HashCalc instances and drag-drop the files onto each instance.
Download: http://www.slavasoft.com/hashcalc/index.htm
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