Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

This cool site teaches you how to really personalise your computer by changing the system information in the main tab of System Properties, and information about the company. If you follow these steps you can put anything you want in the tab. And the best part is that all you need to do is create a text file. Pretty cool eh?

Check it out Here

– Suramya

Here’s todays list of software I like/recomend for sysadmins.

Dameware This software allows you to connect remotely to a windows machine and work on it as if you are sitting in front of it. Has two modes: Visible and invisible. In the visible mode the used sees a popup box letting him know that someone is connected to them. In the invisible mode you won’t even know that I am connected. The best part is that even if you remove the service from your system, I can install it remotely without your permission on the system if I have admin rights on the system (Domain Admins). You can also start and stop services/programs from the handy interface without the other person knowing.

Driftnet: Really cool program. This program listens to network traffic and picks out images/mpg video’s from TCP streams it observes. It has some serious privacy implications and must be used with care. One cool application is that it can pipe its output to xscreensaver and display those images as a screensaver. Useful for identifying what kind of sites people are visitng on a coporate network.

Well this is all for now. More later.

– Suramya

Was getting bored and thought you might like to know what kind of tools a system administrator/network administrator has in his disposal to monitor his network and systems and what stuff we sometimes find while using them. Most of the tools I will talk about are Linux based although some of them do have windows ports.

One program I really like called iftop. It tells you how much bandwidth is being used by what connection on a given interface. The main advantage of this compared to Etherape is that this is a text program so it can be run over a ssh connection (Secure Shell, lot more secure than telnet). Helps you identify what program is using up your bandwidth and who is running it.

If you want to be notified every time a new machine comes on the network then you should check out arpwatch. It lets an admin know whenever a new machine requests an ip address from his dhcp server. Very useful on a small network where not a lot of new computers are added each day. This helped me plug a hole in my wireless network.

This is all for starters. I will be posting more links as and when I get the chance but I plan on making this a semi-regular feature so check back often.

– Suramya