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Discover What’s Filling Up Your Hard Drive

Network Jew — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 16:06:53 +0000

It seems like the faster hard drive sizes increase, the faster we fill them up. Multi-megapixel photographs, HD movies and massive music collections start to take up a lot of space very quickly. It’s always nice to be able to see in a visual way, what exactly is eating up all that space.

WinDirStat

Here are three FREE tools you can use- one for each OS- Windows, OSX and Linux. They are all fairly similar.

WindirStat (Windows) – Great graphical disk analysis tool. Lots of custom settings like # of threads, color coding, etc.,This program is fast. Its good for running against a shared directory to see who’s taking up all the disk space.

Disk Inventory X (OSX) – The author says that this was written to be like WindirStat, so its basically the same thing. Although it doens’t seem quite as feature rich. Gets the job done on a Mac.

Disk Inventory X

KDirstat (Linux) – Supposedly, Windirstat is a clone of this bit of software. Although it’s a KDE program it will run in any X11 environment.

KDirStat

All three of these programs can help recover disk space, and keep that old hard dirve from filling up quite as fast.

SVCHOST Viewer Takes the Mystery out of SVCHOST.EXE

Network Jew — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 22:12:23 +0000

If you’ve ever looked at your Windows Task Manager, you’ve seen several SVCHOST.EXE instances running, and wondered “what are all those processes doing?” From Wikipedia:

Svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) within the Microsoft Windows operating system.

In XP you can run the following command to see what services are behind each svchost:

tasklist /svc /fi "imagename eq svchost.exe"

Alternately, you can run this great FREE piece of software called SVCHOST viewer. It’s a nifty little gui to let you see vital info about each svchost instance. Check it out here…

Top 10 Free Windows Network Security Tools

Network Jew — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:45:51 +0000

Here are my top ten Windows security tools. There are so many more that could be included, but these are the ones I use most often. These are tools you can use to help diagnose network problems, scan for vulnerabilities, and analyze your network. These aren’t tools that will increase your security profile, like disk encryption or vpn utilities, but rather ones that you may use in troubleshooting or performing analysis. These are in no particular order, and many of these are available on other OSX and/or Linux.

1) NMAP - incredibly powerful command line utility. In addition to port scanning, it can perform OS detection and do all kinds of other great. Its great for troubleshooting network services availability.

2) Cain and Abel – Careful with this one. Password “recovery”, ARP poisoning, sniffing…

3) Nessus - #1 Vulnerability scanner. It will check for everything under the sun on your network. You’ll be surprised at what’s running out there.

4) BSA - Straight from MS. Microsoft’s free security and vulnerability assessment scan tool

5) Wireshark - World-class packet sniffer. Enough said.

6) Netstat – command line for displaying network connections and other net-related info about your PC. Great quick way to figure out What’s running and who’s it talking to, and no installation required!

7) NetStumbler - This is great for doing wireless network assessments. Where are the dead spots? What AP’s are interfering?

9) TCPView - Great tool from SysInternals (MS). Like Netstat on steroids in a gui.

10) Snort - Open Source IDS (Intrusion Detection System) – very powerful, extensible, Lightweight, IDS.