Category: FREE

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FREE Freeware Linux nLite Windows

How to Create bootable Windows CD Easily with nLite

nLite is a deployment tool for the bootable unattended Windows ISO.  With it you can remove components, integrate hotfixes, drivers and themes, tweaks, patches and more. . .
Features

  • nLite allows you to customize your installation of Windows XP, Windows 2000, or Windows 2003. You can integrate service packs and hotfixes from Microsoft directly into your windows distribution files without having to re-download and install them every time you need to re-install windows. 
  • There is also the option to remove unwanted components from within Windows. Many applications are automatically included every time Windows is installed. Not every person needs or even wants all of these applications which Microsoft considers necessary. By removing these unwanted components you can free up space within your setup and ultimately save space on your hard drive after installation.
  • nLite also provides a way to customize your installation by allowing numerous tweaks to the way windows looks and operates after it has been installed. You can even bypass Microsoft’s bulky unattended setup instructions and do it the easy way – he nLite way!

Download nLite & give it a try.

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FREE Freeware Notepad Replacement Notepad++ notepad++ examples Open Source SourceForge

5 Great Notepad++ Features

Notepad++ is probably the best text editor for Windows – and it’s FREE. It has a huge range of features for working with text files, scripts, HTML files, etc.  Here are some pointers on just a few of those features.

1. Set Language to match your code
One very nice feature of Notepad++ is the ability to color pieces of code. This is very useful when writing C, SQL, HTML or other types of files, allowing you to easily visually distinguish between functions, reserved words, comments, text, and other types of symbols and expressions in your code.

Notepad++ will automatically detect your code based upon the language selected. You can specify the language yourself or Notepad++ will set it based on the file extension.

HTML as text before specifying language.

HTML code after specifying language.

2. Bulk find & replace
If you want to replace a certain entry in your file(s), Notepad++ is the ticket. Not only can it instantly search through all entries in a file, it can search all open files or even all files in a directory (including sub-directories), including, matching only certain file types.

3. Search and replace using regular expressions
When it comes to finding what you want, Notepad++ is not limited to mere words. You can also use powerful regular expression to match dynamic entries. For example, the below search will find (and replace) all tags in the source of HTML files, regardless of the actual image size specified:

Of course, some knowledge of regular expressions is required to use this feature. Not surprisingly, these regular expressions will also serve you well if you dabble in the Linux command line with sed or awk commands.

4. Tidy HTML code

If you’re writing web articles, there’s a fair chance your code will include a bit of unnecessary breaks, misaligned tags and so forth. Notepad++ can Tidy your HTML code.
For example, here is some unformatted text:

Which we want to format with HTML:

5. Save all open files
While this may not sound too exciting, imagine you have several open files – Notepad++ behaves like Firefox in this regard and opens documents in tabs – each one changed after you ran a bulk find & replace earlier. Saving them one by one can be tedious. Notepad++ saves you the hassle. You can save all open files at once.

Similarly, you can close them all at once.

Conclusion

Notepad++ is an extremely powerful and useful tool. We only scratched the surface on its features. With Notepad++ you can use macros or function completion, compare documents, export files to other formats, and a whole lot more.

Notepad++ also has many useful plugins and it comes in a portable version.

More on Notepad++

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FREE Freeware Linux Recovery SSH Utility

Trinity Rescue Kit | CPR for your computer

Trinity Rescue Kit or TRK is a free live Linux distribution that aims specifically at recovery and repair operations on Windows machines, but is equally usable for Linux recovery issues.  TRK is a complete command line based distribution, apart from a few tools like qtparted, links, partition image and midnight commander.

Some of Trinity Rescur Kit’s most significant features

  • Easily reset windows passwords
  • Full read/write and rpm support
  • Multiple virus scan products integrated in a single uniform commandline with online update capability
  • Full ntfs write support thanks to ntfs-3g (all other drivers included as well)
  • Clone NTFS filesystems over the network
  • Wide range of hardware support (kernel 2.6.39.3 and recent kudzu hwdata)
  • Easy script to find all local filesystems
  • Self update capability to include and update all virus scanners
  • Full proxy server support
  • Fun a samba fileserver (Windows-like filesharing)
  • SSH server
  • Recovery and undeletion of files with utilities and procedures
  • Recovery of lost partitions
  • Evacuation of dying disks
  • UTF-8 international character support
  • Powerful multicast disk cloning utility for any filesystem
  • Rootkit detection uitilities

Although version 3.3 is still beta, it is recommended you download this version, as most features which were included in version 3.2 are still running just fine (and are more up-to-date) and the new stuff is presumed to be running fine too.

TRK can be booted three different ways:

  • as a bootable CD which you can burn yourself from a downloadable iso file 
  • from a USB stick/disk (optionally also a fixed disk), installable from Windows or from the bootable TRK cd
  • from network over PXE, which requires some modifications on your local network (version 3.2). Version 3.3 has the ability to act as a network bootserver itself, without any modifications to your local network.

The idea behind Trinity Rescue Kit

From the author:

Back in 2001, I had this great bootable dos cd I created, packed with all great utilities for offline PC operations called “The Vault”.  Unfortunately, the Vault consisted for 90% of software you should pay for. So distributing it in a legal way was certainly no option and I ‘m not the guy that wants to spend his time in maintaining something that ‘s illegal anyway.

So I brewed on the idea of creating a free bootable Linux CD containing all available free tools that can help you in any way of rescueing your Windows installation.  And eventually, this is how far it has gotten now.

Trinity Rescue Kit is based on binaries and scripts from several other distributions, like Timo ‘s Rescue CD, Mandriva 2005 and Fedora Core 3 and 4, as well as many original source packages and tools from other distros.  Startup procedure and methods, several scripts and concept is completely selfmade or at least heavily adapted.

More information.
Download Trinity Rescue Kit.

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Encryption FREE Linux Open Source Passwords SourceForge TrueCrypt Utility Windows

TrueCrypt – Free Open Source Industrial Strength Encryption

TrueCrypt provides a solution for encrypting sensitive data – everything from portable, mountable volumes to entire hard disks.  Encrypting your data renders that access useless, even if your computer or your thumbdrive falls into the wrong hands.

And TrueCrypt makes it not only easy, but nearly un-crackable.  TrueCrypt is both open source and FREE.

There are two approaches to using TrueCrypt:

  • Whole Drive Encryption – you can use TrueCrypt to encrypt your entire hard disk, including your boot partition. In order to boot the machine, you must first supply your pass phrase to enable decryption. Once booted, data is automatically and transparently encrypted and decrypted as it travels to and from the disk. Once your machine is turned off, the data is unrecoverable without knowing the pass phrase.
  • Container Encryption – with this approach you create a single file on your computer’s hard drive that is encrypted. You then “mount” that file using TrueCrypt, supplying the correct pass phrase to decrypt it after which the contents of that file appear as another drive on your system. Reading from and writing to that “drive” automatically and transparently decrypts and encrypts the data. Once the drive is unmounted, the data is once again unrecoverable without knowing the pass phrase.

TrueCrypt is both simple and elegant.

Most users prefer container based encryption for its portability, and for the fact that you need only mount the encrypted drive when you need access. You could keep personal information in a TrueCrypt container that could be regularly copied between machines, onto a thumbdrive, and even backed up to the Internet. When you need to access the encrypted data, simply mount it, specify your pass phrase to unlock it, and use the files that are stored within it.

TrueCrypt is not tied to any one platform, your user account or anything else; just the pass phrase. In fact, you can copy your encrypted file to another machine entirely and mount it with TrueCrypt. Even using other operating systems such as Mac or Linux.

Here are a couple of important caveats:

  • Encryption does not make a bad pass phrase any more secure. If you choose an obvious pass phrase, an attack can certainly be mounted that could unlock your encrypted volume. This is why we talk about pass phrase instead of password. Use a multi-word phrase that you can remember to be the key to your encrypted data, and it’ll be much, much more difficult to break.
  • An encrypted volume does you no good if the files you care about are also elsewhere on your machine.
  • Make sure you have secure backups, updated regularly. Preferably keep them UNencrypted, but secure in some other way, in case you lose your encrypted volume or forget your pass phrase. If you’ve chosen a good passphrase, without it the data is not recoverable.

TrueCrypt is FREE open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux
TrueCrypt Features:

Data encryption is an important part of an overall security strategy. TrueCrypt can be a key part of that strategy.

Download TrueCrypt.

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BareTail FREE Linux Nessus NeWT Passwords Utility Windows Winfingerprint

FREE Windows Utilities for Scanning, Auditing, and Monitoring

BareTail
Many applications keep detailed logging data in straight text files because the Windows event logs aren’t appropriate for certain types of data (e.g., IIS log files). In the course of monitoring or troubleshooting these types of applications, it’s often helpful to watch these log files in real time. However, because they’re text files, that process typically consists of opening the file in Notepad or another text editor, looking at the contents, closing the file, then reopening the file to see what’s changed.


In the UNIX world, a utility that serves this purpose has been available for quite some time: It’s called tail. Fortunately, the good folks at Bare Metal Software have developed a free version of the tool called BareTail.


BareTail is a great utility for watching log files, such as IIS logs, cluster logs, and any other type of logs that can generate a lot of data quickly. BareTail can keep up with large log files (e.g., greater than 2GB) just as quickly as with smaller files, and—for easier visual recognition—it can selectively highlight specific entries that appear in a file based on matching text strings. For example, suppose you want to highlight references to cmd.exe in an IIS log file to easily spot which incoming connections are attempting to exploit known vulnerabilities.


One of BareTail’s most compelling qualities is that it’s a completely standalone executable. There’s no installer package to work with, so you can use the utility on a client’s system and feel safe that you’ve had little or no impact on the system after you complete your work.
NeWT
When I have security on the brain, I generally look to the open-source community for answers, rather than to specific vendors. After all, the open-source community can be voracious in its efforts to find and understand every aspect of a vulnerability or flaw. A shining example of this security consciousness is the open-source vulnerability scanner called Nessus.
Nessus is the world’s most popular opensource vulnerability scanner. An estimated 75,000 organizations worldwide rely on Nessus to assess their networks and check for vulnerabilities. Originally launched in 1998 for UNIX, Nessus has been ported over to Windows by Tenable Network Security in a version called NeWT.
Tenable Network Security provides the standard version of NeWT free for anyone to use for any reason. The only limitation is that the host that NeWT runs on can scan only its local subnet. With more than 6000 known vulnerabilities that it can test for, NeWT is now the best vulnerability scanner available for the Windows platform.
When you unleash NeWT on your local subnet, it starts its process of testing each host it finds for vulnerabilities in its database. You can configure NeWT to test only for certain vulnerabilities—for example, if you’re a 100 percent Microsoft shop, you don’t need to test for UNIX vulnerabilities—and whether to attempt to fully exploit any vulnerabilities found to confirm its tests. NeWT can check for buffer-overflow vulnerabilities, watch for misconfigured application services (e.g., mail, Web), find all the listening ports on a server and determine the OS type, look for backdoors installed on an infected host, and more.
If you provide NeWT with appropriate administrative credentials, it will dive even deeper into your systems and check for local patching or the existence of malicious software. For example, on a test “victim” system in my lab, NeWT detected several spyware and adware packages that I intentionally installed on that host for some tests. NeWT recommended that I remove those applications. NeWT is the first tool I grab when I start a security assessment for a client, and it should be in every administrator’s toolbox.
Winfingerprint
If you’re looking for a quick and simple way to obtain information about a remote system, Winfingerprint is the tool of choice. Winfingerprint is a network scanner that runs on Windows. Unlike most network scanners, Winfingerprint is specifically designed to obtain information about Microsoft hosts and applications. Winfingerprint can use ICMP, RPC, SMB, SNMP, TCP, and UDP to obtain information (e.g., OS version, users, groups, SIDs, password policies, services, service packs and hotfixes, NetBIOS shares, transports, sessions, disks) about target systems. Winfingerprint comes in both a GUI version and a command-line version, so however you prefer to work, there’s a version of Winfingerprint for you.

Winfingerprint determined the number of drives I had installed on my target system, as well as the MAC addresses of the interfaces and the OS and patch level. What you can’t see in the figure, however, is that Winfingerprint went on to enumerate all the share names on that system, as well as the services that were installed and the names of the users. The tool obtained all that data in about 20 seconds, making Winfingerprint a terrific tool for quickly collecting inventory data about networked systems.

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ethernet FREE FTP Grep Linux Networking NGrep Packet Sniffing SSH Utility Windows WinDump WinPCap WireShark

FREE Windows Utilities for Sniffing


WinDump
WinDump is an exceptionally powerful command-line packet sniffer. Ported over from the source of the Tcpdump utility available for UNIX, WinDump carries over the same power and flexibility to the Windows world, all in a lightweight executable.
WinDump is a helpful utility when you need to do some quick and easy packet capturing to diagnose a network problem. It’s flexible, and it can capture and display details about every packet going across the network interface. It can filter the output results based on protocol (e.g., Address Resolution Protocol—ARP, IP, TCP, UDP), source network or host, destination network or host, source port, destination port, and many other criteria.
To use WinDump, you’ll first need to download and install the Windows Packet Capture Library (WinPcap), the Windows port of the open-source packet-capture and network-analysis library libpcap for UNIX. WinPcap runs on all versions of Windows.
After you install WinPcap, you can download the standalone WinDump executable. To launch WinDump, simply run it from the command line with the appropriate options for what you’d like to capture or read. You’ll find the online manual for WinDump here.
The first command you might want to execute is Win-Dump -D, which will display a list of interfaces available on your computer, as well as a corresponding number for each interface, so that you can determine which interface to use for your sniffing activities. After you know which interface to run, you can simply use that number with the -i option (i.e., WinDump -i 3, if number 3 is the interface you’d like to use) to start viewing packet data in real time. (Because these are ports of UNIX utilities, the command-line switches are case-sensitive.)
Ngrep
Although WinDump is a tremendous utility, sometimes it requires a considerable amount of overhead or knowledge to determine what you’re looking for. For example, suppose you’re trying to look up whether a DNS query is making it across your network, but you aren’t familiar with the protocols and that DNS uses by default. Or, suppose a lot of traffic is coming across a network connection, and you’re finding it too cumbersome to work through all the packets just to find the one particular packet you’re looking for. For such situations enter ngrep, the network-aware grep utility.
If you aren’t familiar with grep, it’s probably one of the most widely known and oft-utilized UNIX utilities. Grep finds matching text strings (through a mechanism known as regular expressions) in files on a file system, then outputs the lines to the display. You might compare grep with the Windows command-line Find utility, but grep differs by providing an exceptional amount of power in its search for text strings.
By applying these capabilities to the network layer, ngrep provides the same level of functionality for packet sniffing. As a result, you don’t need to know what protocols, ports, network, or IP addresses that two devices are using to transfer data. You just need to know something about the packet’s payload, and ngrep will find it for you—regardless of how it’s transmitted.
Ngrep is great for troubleshooting DNS query problems. In a large Active Directory (AD) environment, dozens of DNS queries are typically occurring across the network per second. If I’m trying to troubleshoot a specific set of problems, searching each packet to find the one I’m looking for is cumbersome at best. Instead of relying on a straight packet capture of all DNS traffic, I can simply use ngrep to find the text string I’m looking for because DNS queries and responses are performed in plain text.
Ngrep currently recognizes ICMP, IGMP, Raw, TCP, and UDP protocols across 802.11, Ethernet, FDDI, PPP, SLIP, Token Ring, and null interfaces. Like WinDump it requires the WinPcap library to operate properly.
WireShark (formerly Ethereal)
When you face a situation in which you need to roll up your sleeves and dive as deeply as possible into network capture and analysis, one utility needs to come to mind: the world’s most popular network analyzer, WireShark. Network experts around the world use WireShark because it has all the standard features you’ll find in most protocol analyzers, in addition to some you won’t find in any other product. More than 400 developers around the world have made contributions to this open-source application. A decade ago, you would have to pay thousands of dollars for software that had the same capabilities, but WireShark offers it all free.
WireShark can capture data off your network connection, filter the data, dive into the details of each packet, save the packet capture for detailed analysis, send packet captures to other network engineers (or vendors) to help with debugging, and open packet captures from many other leading packet-capture utilities. WireShark can capture data off of various network transports, such as Classical IP over ATM (CIP), Ethernet, Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), Token Ring, 802.11, and loopback interfaces (although it doesn’t support all types on every platform). Across all those network transports, WireShark can “dissect” more than 750 protocol types, including FTP, HTTP, NetBIOS, POP3, remote procedure call (RPC), SNMP, SSH, SMTP, and Telnet, just to name a few.
Like the other sniffing utilities I’ve mentioned, WireShark depends on an installation of WinPcap to function properly, so you’ll need to install that first. Then, after you install the latest Ethereal distribution for Windows, simply access the Capture, Interfaces menu and select the interface you want to start using for capture. Then, you’re ready to start analyzing your traffic.
Categories
Administration BareTail Encryption FREE FTP Grep Linux Notepad++ SSH Utility Windows

32 FREE Windows Administration Utilities

  1. BareTail. A free real-time log file monitoring tool.
  2. CamStudio. Free screen recording software.
  3. CDBurnerXP. Burns CD-ROMs, DVDs, audio CDs, and ISO images.
  4. Comodo Firewall Pro. Is a firewall and antivirus application.
  5. DriveImage XML. Is a program for imaging and backing up partitions and logical drives.
  6. FileZilla. GUI FTP client.
  7. GParted LiveCD. Manages partitions on systems.
  8. InfraRecorder. Burns ISO images and creates data and audio CDs and DVDs.
  9. Lansweeper. Is a network inventory tool that performs hardware scanning, software scanning, and Active Directory (AD) reporting.
  10. LocatePC. Emails you whenever any private or public IP address in your system changes – great for tracking a stolen computer.
  11. MyDefrag (formerly JkDefrag). Defragments and optimizes disks.
  12. Nessus (formerly NeWT). Network/computer vulnerability scanner.
  13. Ngrep. Is a packet sniffer based on finding matching text strings.
  14. Notepad++. Is a text and code editor (more info).
  15. NTFS Undelete. Recovers deleted files that are no longer in the recycle bin.
  16. Open Computers and Software Inventory (OCS Inventory NG). Provides detailed inventory data for an entire network of computers as well as deploys packages.
  17. OpenSSH. Creates secure, encrypted shell sessions.
  18. PageDefrag. Determines how fragmented your paging files and registry hives are, and defragments them.
  19. Paint.NET. Free image and photo editing software for Windows.
  20. PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost) — Backup and Restore Disk Partitions.
  21. PRTG Traffic Grapher. Is a powerful network monitor.
  22. System Information for Windows (SIW). Gathers detailed information about a computer’s system properties, settings, and displays.
  23. TestDisk. Recovers damaged partitions, makes non-bootable disks bootable again, and repairs damaged boot sectors.
  24. TrueCrypt.  Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux.
  25. WinDirStat. Determines how space is being utilized across disks and visually represents the results in multiple ways.
  26. WinPE (Windows Preinstallation Environment). Lets you make a Windows command-line boot recovery DVD.
  27. WinDump. WinDump is the Windows version of tcpdump, the command line network analyzer for UNIX / Linux.
  28. Winfingerprint. Is a network scanner.
  29. Wink. Builds screencast recordings.
  30. WireShark (formerly Ethereal). Network protocol analyzer.
  31. XML Notepad. Is a specialized XML editor.
  32. ZoomIt. Magnifies portions of a screen and lets you draw on and annotate the screen.
Categories
Clipboard FREE Linux Mac SourceForge Utility Windows

Can the Mac OS X clipboard hold more than one item?

What if you want to copy several items, and then paste those items later? You can’t do it with the standard clipboard, but thanks to some free programs, you can bring the Mac’s copy-and-paste functionality into the 21st century.

While there are many clipboard enhancement tools available for Mac, I like to use one of two free ones. The first keeps things simple, but adds that extra dimension that makes your clipboard so much more useful. It is called Jumpcut and can be found at Sourceforge.net.

Basically, what Jumpcut does is to give you a clipboard that is several items deep. With it you can access the menu at the top of the screen and choose to paste in previously clipped items. In fact, it keeps a running record of your most recent copies, and you can choose any one.

You can also use a keyboard shortcut, usually Ctrl+Option+V to cycle through your clipboard items and pick the one you want.

The options for Jumpcut are kept simple. You can have it remember more items if you wish, and display more choices if you wish.  One limiting factor of Jumpcut is that it only works with text. If you want to use images, you’ll need something more advanced like ClipMenu, which can be found at clipmenu.com.

In addition to accepting text and images, ClipMenu also has a more complex menu, including breaking the items into groups of 10 or less and Snippets, which are items permanently available through ClipMenu for pasting.

Plus, when you use ClipMenu’s keyboard shortcut, usually Ctrl+Command+V, you get the entire ClipMenu menu right at the point of your cursor.

You’ll also find ClipMenu’s options more detailed than Jumpcut, with fine-tuning like font sizes in the menu, labels to indicate the type of item, and even the ability to integrate with simple scripts to do things like change the case of clipboard text.

The best thing about Jumpcut and ClipMenu is that they can be used together. Simply install both. They will both remember what you copy. For the simplest of needs I use Jumpcut, and then for things like images or the Snippets feature, I use ClipMenu. And since they are both free and stable, there’s really no reason not to try them out. Except that once you have a clipboard with depth, you’ll never be able to go back to the single-item 1980’s style clipboard again.

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FREE Freeware ISO Linux Utility Windows Windows 2003 Windows Vista

Mount an ISO image in Windows 7 or Vista (also works on 2003 and 2008)

The freeware utility from Microsoft to mount ISO Images in XP and 2003 doesn’t work in Windows 7 or Vista. Thankfully there’s another FREE utility that does, Virtual Clone Drive. With it you can mount .ISO, .CCD, .DVD, .IMG, .UDF and .BIN files.

FYI as of the latest version, it should work on Windows 7 or Vista 64 bit edition.

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FREE Freeware Jam Software Linux Utility Windows Windows 2000

TreeSize Free – ever want to know how big various folders are?

Every hard disk is too small if you just wait long enough. TreeSize Free tells you where precious space has gone. TreeSize Free can be started from the context menu of a folder or drive and shows you the size of this folder, including its subfolders. You can expand this folder in Explorer-like style and you will see the size of every subfolder. Scanning is done in a thread, so you can already see results while TreeSize Free is working. The space, which is wasted by the file system, can be displayed and the results can be printed in a report. TreeSize Free is freeware for Windows 2000/XP/Vista.

Download TreeSize Free (here you can find the more powerful TreeSize Professional as well)