Transparent Console for Windows

My Notes: Very appealing for its transparency feature. It can also be added in your explorer right click through a simple inf install. It has three running mode ... each of which can be modified for its dimensions and colors. If you use the command prompt in windows a lot, then this will definitely enhance your experience.

Note my desktop background in the console

Source: http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

Console is a Win console window enhancement. It was inspired by eConsole (http://www.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/~corion) Console features include configurable font, color, size, background image and transparency (on Win2000 and later)

Network, Security, Software, Hardware Monitoring - Everest

My notes: I was looking for detailed stats on the motherboard of all PCs in Domain. Everest answers the call. Neat product with lots of information on the network.

EVEREST Corporate Edition is an automated network audit, system change tracking and network monitoring solution for small and large corporate enterprises, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. EVEREST Corporate Edition is an indispensable application for all business network environments that uses the latest technologies including XML and MHTML reporting, full SQL database and Windows Server 2003 support. EVEREST Corporate Edition offers customers a flexible way to collect hardware and software assets information into CSV files or SQL database, and produce a complete network audit based on the collected information. By offering multiple instances of audit it enables customers to keep an archive of assets information, and also offers a unique way to accurately detect any software or hardware changes in the enterprise.

Source : Lavalys Product- Everest Corporate Ed.
Download Link: Trial Version of Everest Corporate Ed.

Hide webserver contents from search engines

Source: http://www.searchtools.com/robots/robots-txt.html

My Notes: If you have a website and would like to keep some content private i.e. not to be used by search crawlers for indexing, then create a file called Robots.txt in your root directory, in which you can disallow indexing of certain files and folders.

check this example of robots.txt file

Writeup from the source:
Search engine robots will check a special file in the root of each server called robots.txt, which is, as you may guess, a plain text file (not HTML). Robots.txt implements the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which allows the web site administrator to define what parts of the site are off-limits to specific robot user agent names. Web administrators can disallow access to cgi, private and temporary directories, for example, because they do not want pages in those areas indexed.

Source: http://www.searchtools.com/robots/robots-txt.html

Firewall Leak Tests

Personal Notes: You'd be surprised!

This website will, on one hand, allow you to test your firewall thanks to different test programs, and on the other hand will show you a global view of vulnerabilities of the most common personal firewall in a summary page.

Nowadays, threats from the Internet are growing, both from the inside and the outside. To answer to a security need from Internet users (us), security software firms have created "personal firewalls", software acting like firewalls on user's computers. These personal firewalls have network level filtering like dedicated firewalls (hardware, dedicated) that we will name "network filtering", and an outbound application filtering that we will name "software filtering".

Due to the fact that most of these personal firewalls offer reasonable protection against inbound attacks coming from the Internet, we will only study here their software filtering, outbound filtering that can be stressed by Trojans which try to initiate themselves by connecting you to the author so that he can hack you.

http://www.firewallleaktester.com/

Unattended Windows CD - Powerpacker

My Notes:
It used to be much harder to create an unattended windows cd... The techs at MSFN have been working to make it easier and easier. Here is another great contribution from one of the members.

PowerPacker will help a user create a Multiboot Windows XP disk with or without DriverPacks. It will do almost everything for you, even hex edit the files needed to be hexed, create the boot directory, boot menu, etc. It makes creating multiboot XP disks a breeze.This program was made with the BTS DriverPacks in mind. Basically it does just about everything you need to do to add a windows XP load to your MultiBoot Disk.It will gather the needed files from your source XP CD and put them into a directory you specify. It will grab the DriverPack Files and install them. It will create a boot directory for your load and even hex edit the files that need to be HEXED to allow you to boot to it. It will put the needed info into the boot list so you can select your XP load. It makes testing the DriverPacks very easy!!!

Download Link
Forum Post Link

Net Limiter - Bandwidth Management

My Notes: Very nice tool. It can be used to study the malwares or any new program that you download to check the hogs in the network.

NetLimiter is an ultimate internet traffic control and monitoring tool designed for Win98/Win98 SE, WinME, Win2000, Win2003 and WinXP. You can use NetLimiter to set download/upload transfer rate limits for applications or even single connection and monitor their internet traffic.
Along with this unique feature, Netlimiter offers comprehensive set of internet statistical tools. It includes real-time traffic measurement and long-term per-application internet traffic statistics.
Screenshots Link
Developer Website

Registry change for all users/computers in Domain

Cut to chase question: Do you want to edit the registry of all the computers or users in a domain with one click? If your answer is Yes, ya, sure, definitely, is that possible, rite on, that would be nice ... then read on.
This one is as simple as changing registry in one PC and then replicate to
other machines.

Now some notes from the developer's site ...

Most desktop administrators quickly become familiar with the need to make adjustments to the Registry on remote computers. The free PolicyMaker™ Registry Extension is a true client side extension (CSE) to Group Policy, providing full registry management capability. The interface is simple and configurations are communicated to client computers through Group Policy. When Group Policy refreshes on a client computer, the registry is updated.

http://www.desktopstandard.com/PolicyMakerRegistryExtension.aspx

My installation Notes

1. Download and install the polreg.msi file
2. Go to program files folder and copy the following file to the network share that all clients have access to. Here is the file to copy...
   C:\program files\DesktopStandard\PolicyMaker\Client\polregcl.msi
3. Open your domain group policy editor and right click on Administrative Templates
4. Now add the desktopstandard.adm file and set some policies...start with the software deployment policies.
5. Now, in the group policy editor, go to User Configuration section and expand user settings... here you will find the registry.
6. Simply right click on registry and select New--> Registry Item.
   
   You will figure out the rest!!!