Thursday, July 31, 2008

Free Microsoft Exchange Monitor, by Solarwinds

Since a while now, i've been a huge fan of Solarwinds (http://www.solarwinds.com) before knowing and falling in love with Nagios (www.nagios.org). Well, this post isn't to harp on the sexy Nagios but to talk about a quick monitoring tool for Exchange servers. Solarwinds released their monitoring tool for Exchange and i like it for its simplicity to use.

The most significant part is that it's free, which means, go download it even if you don't plan to use it (haha). Here's the link. http://www.solarwinds.com/register/index.aspx?Program=825&c=70150000000Djc6

The good thing about this tool, it not only does monitoring of basic OS health but the health of Exchange at the application level.

Exchange, as many of us know, is like an infant, she will cry bloody murder if you don't stick a suckle up her mouth every once in a while. But, lets admit it, who has the time to stare blankly at the ugly perfmon (Windows Performance Monitor) or run dry WMI scripts to spring VB's blend popups if there's something odd, out of the ordinary odd (i like scripting better tho).

This a true free engine unlike the many baits set out there to lure you into the overly abused word FREE (opensource aside) which won't sneak a time-bomb behind you or skin features down to mere lousy 2 functions of the 1000000 functions a paid one can do. I hope those developers who lure public into these monkeytraps just make their software GPL.

Anyway, why i like this piece is cuz it checks;
  1. In real time
  2. General Win health checks (like disks , CPU, memory)
  3. Exchange services
  4. Mail, PF and SMTP queues (see if they are collectively planning to sink the box down)
  5. ..and more "sensors", but not a lot of customization
  6. Pretty little interface to wrap it up but finally
  7. ITS FREE.
Anyway, if you're interested in a more powerful, enterprise scale monitor (which can do the above and much much much much much more) and FREE software, go stick your mouse into www.nagios.org.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Free DHCP Server

Hi, been a while since i wrote anything here. Anyway, here's something i just had to share with my friends out there.

If you are in a dire need of a DHCP server (i'm laughing at that statement too..), cause the main one crashed or isn't functioning, then you do not necessarily need to install another Windows box or a Unix server just to start pouring out life into our DHCP client devices. Just fire up your XP (or compatible OS) and start this excellent software called TFTPD32.

Firstly, its FREE, yes, FREE la.

TFTPD is a completely functional DHCP server with a TFTP server and client and a SYSLOG server, all in a tiny under 500k binary. Superb stuff. I had to use it to do a TFTP and DHCP to assign a device while upping a TFTP image off the TFTP server.

Its just too simple to use, for DHCP, just define the scope start and the amount of assignable IPs of that scope and usual stuff like Netmasks and also you can create custom DHCP options. Unfortunately, unlike the infamous DHCP server from Windows, the options are not selectable and if you do not know what options are there, you could Google it or simply click here...http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/protocol/bootp/options.htm .

Finally, this tool is a network arsenal, to
1. Do all of what it's capable of (like DHCP-ing, TFTP-ing...)
2. Turnturtle your ex's network by just plugging in this baby into any network and assign bogus IPs thus causing a DHCP offer from yours and an existing DHCP server ....

Their official website where you could download the software: http://www.jounin.net/tftpd32.html

Screenies from my DHCP setup couple of hours ago