Ultimate Utilities Toolbox for System Admins & MSPs

We talk to a lot of System Administrators & IT Resellers, so we thought it would be helpful to trawl the web for useful, mostly free, tools for managing networks / systems that have been recommend by System Administrators and IT Resellers. Then publish these along with ones recommended by our own staff, customers and partners.

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Antivirus Removal

Norton Removal Tool (Website) Norton Removal Tool uninstalls all the Norton products from your computer. You can use Norton Removal Tool to remove a failed installation or a damaged Norton product. (Windows)

Auto Updates

Ketarin (Website) Ketarin is a small application which automatically updates setup packages. (Windows) Auto Updates

Ninite (Website) No toolbars. No clicking next. Just pick your apps and click Get Installer. Install and Update All Your Programs at Once. (Variety)

Automation

Puppet (Website) Make repaid changes and enforce consistency of systems, applications and devices on perm on in the cloud. (Linux)

Ansible (Website) Ansible’s natural automation language allows sysadmins, developers, and IT managers to complete automation projects in hours — not weeks. (Variety)

Salt Stack (Website) Fast, scalable and flexible systems management software for data center automation, cloud orchestration, server provisioning, configuration management and more (Variety)

Chef (Website) Chef is built to address the hardest infrastructure challenges on the planet. By modeling IT infrastructure and application delivery as code, Chef provides the power and flexibility to compete in the digital economy. (Variety)

nLite (Website) Deployment Tool for the Bootable Unattended Windows ISO (Windows)

Bootable Devices

FlashBoot (Website) FlashBoot is an ultimate tool for making USB devices bootable. (Windows)

Universal USB Installer (Website)A Live Linux USB Creator that allows you to choose from a selection of Linux Distributions to put on your USB Flash Drive. (Linux)

Rufus (Website) Rufus is an utility that helps format and create bootable USB flash drives, such as USB keys/pendrives, memory sticks, etc. (Variety)

Hiren’s BootCD (Website) All in One Bootable CD which has all these utilities. (Windows)

Easy 2Boot (Website) Easy2Boot itself is just a collection of grub4dos batch files that you can add to a grub4dos bootable USB Drive. (Variey)

Command-line

AstroGrep (Website) AstroGrep is a Microsoft Windows grep utility. Grep is a UNIX command-line program which searches within files for keywords. (Windows)

Console (Website) Console is a Windows console window enhancement. (Windows)

PowerShell (Website) Windows PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management framework from Microsoft (Windows)

Connections Manager

mRemoteNG (Website) mRemoteNG is a fork of mRemote, an open source, tabbed, multi-protocol, remote connections manager. mRemoteNG adds bug fixes and new features to mRemote. (Windows)

Remmina (Website) Remmina is a remote desktop client written in GTK+, aiming to be useful for system administrators and travellers, who need to work with lots of remote computers in front of either large monitors or tiny netbooks. (Linux)

Console Emulator

ConEmu (Website) ConEmu-Maximus5 is a Windows console emulator with tabs, which presents multiple consoles and simple GUI applications as one customizable GUI window with various features. (Windows)

cmder (Website) Cmder is a software package created out of pure frustration over the absence of nice console emulators on Windows. (Windows)

Data Syncronisation

Allway Sync (Website) It uses innovative synchronization algorithms to synchronize your data between desktop PCs, laptops, USB drives, remote FTP/SFTP servers, different online data storages, and more. (Windows)

Data Transfer

cURL (Website) curl is a command line tool for transferring data with URL syntax (Variety)

Wget (Website) GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. (Variety)

LFTP (Website) LFTP is a sophisticated ftp/http client, and a file transfer program supporting a number of network protocols. (Linux)

Download Manager

Free Download Manager (Website) It is a powerful, easy-to-use and absolutely free download accelerator and manager. (Windows)

Defragmenter

MyDefrag (Website) MyDefrag is a disk defragmenter and optimizer (a maintenance utility to make your harddisk faster) for Windows 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, 2008, Win7, and for X64. (Windows)

File Archiver

7-Zip (Website) 7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio. (Winows & Linux)

File Comparison

Windiff (Website) A tool that graphically compares the contents of two ASCII files, or the contents of two folders that contain ASCII files, to verify whether they are the same. (Windows)

RoadKil (Website) Recovers files from disks with physical damage. (Winows & Linux)

File Transfer

File RecoveryRichCopy (Website) What you’ll find most striking the first time you take RichCopy out for a spin is that it’s a multithreaded copying tool (Windows)

RoboCopy (Website) Robocopy (Robust File Copy) is a command-line file copying tool included with the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit, free to licensed users of Windows. (Windows)

File TransferWinSCP (Website) SFTP client, SCP client, FTPS client and FTP client integrated into one software program for file transfer to FTP server or secure SFTP server. (Windows)

CyberDuck (Website) Libre FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, S3 & OpenStack Swift browser for Mac and Windows. (Windows & Mac)

TeraCopy (Website) TeraCopy is designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed. (Windows)

Imaging

FOG (Website) FOG is a Linux-based, free and open source computer imaging solution for Windows XP, Vista and 7 that ties together a few open-source tools with a php-based web interface. (Variety)

ImgBurn (Website) ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! (Windows)

CloneDrive (Website) Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. (Windows)

Infrastructure Monitoring

ImagingNagios (Website) Nagios Is The Industry Standard In IT Infrastructure Monitoring (Variety)

Jumbune (Website) Provides development & administrative insights of Hadoop based analytical solutions. (Linux)

Launcher

Launchy (Website) Launchy is a free cross-platform utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager. (Windows)

Media Usage

Jxplorer (Website) JXplorer is a cross platform LDAP browser and editor.WindowsLDAPScanner by Steffen GerlachWebsiteThis tool uses a sunburst chart to display the usage of your hard disk or other media. The chart shows all major files and folders from all directory levels at once (Windows)

WinDirStat (Website) WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for various versions of Microsoft Windows. (Windows)

TreeSize (Website) TreeSize Free tells you where precious disk space has gone. (Windows)

Network Analyzer

WireShark (Website) Wireshark is the world’s foremost network protocol analyzer. It lets you see what’s happening on your network at a microscopic level. It is the de facto (and often de jure) standard across many industries and educational institutions. (Windows)

Iperf (Website) Iperf is a neat little tool with the simple goal of helping administrators measure the performance of their network. (Windows)

PortQry (Website) Download PortQryV2.exe, a command-line utility that you can use to help troubleshoot TCP/IP connectivity issues. (Windows)

Tail (Website) The Windows version of the UNIX ‘tail -f’ command. (Windows)

Operational Intelligence

Splunk (Website) Search, monitor, analyze and visualize your data to gain new insights and intelligence. Index everything for deep visibility, forensics and troubleshooting. (Variety)

ElasticSearch (Website) An end-to-end search and analytics platform. infinitely versatile. (Variety)

Password Manager

KeePass (Website) KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. (Windows)

PC Management

ManagePC Website ManagePC is an open source .NET application for PC management in Windows environments. Using ManagePC you can inventory all aspects of PCs on your domain. (Windows)

SetACL (Website) Edit permission and auditing entries, Set the owner to any user/group, List permissions, auditing and ownership information, Backup and restore entire security descriptors or only DACL/SACL/owner, Copy permissions between users or domains. (Windows)

Chocolatey (Website) Chocolatey NuGet is a Machine Package Manager, somewhat like apt-get, but built with Windows in mind. (Windows)

Boxstarter (Website) Repeatable, reboot resilient windows environment installations made easy using Chocolatey packages. (Windows) PC Management

PDQ Inventory (Website) PDQ Inventory scans your computers and collects hardware, software, and Windows configurations. (Windows)

PDQ Deply (Website) Use PDQ Deploy to install applications and patches to all the computers in your company. (Windows)

Process

Pencil (Website) Pencil is built for the purpose of providing a free and open-source GUI prototyping tool that people can easily install and use to create mockups in popular desktop platforms. (Variety)

Program Switching

TMUX (Website) Lets you switch easily between several programs in one terminal, detach them (they keep running in the background) and reattach them to a different terminal. And do a lot more. (Linux)

Remote Desktop

RDCMan (Website) RDCMan is a straightforward, lightweight tool for collecting together Remote Desktop sessions into groups of servers and logins. (Windows)

Utilities

Sysinternals (Website) Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. (Windows)

NirSoft (Website) NirSoft web site provides a unique collection of small and useful freeware utilities, all of them developed by Nir Sofer. (Variety)

Cygwin (Website) A large collection of GNU and Open Source tools which provide functionality similar to a Linux distribution on Windows. (Windows)

Molly Guard (Website) Molly-guard installs a shell script that overrides the existing shutdown/reboot/halt/power off commands and first runs a set of scripts, which all have to exit successfully, before molly-guard invokes the real command. (Linux)

Remote Support

Reboot GuardChunkVNC (Website) ChunkVNC is an open source UltraVNC wrapper that allows you to control computers to provide remote support and assistance over a high speed internet connection. (Windows & Mac)

DOSBox (Website) DOSBox is a DOS-emulator that uses the SDL-library which makes DOSBox very easy to port to different platforms. (Windows)

Screenshot Capture

Greenshot (Website) Greenshot is a light-weight screenshot software tool for Windows (Windows)

ShareX (Website)Take a screenshot or a screencast, have it uploaded and get the URL copied to your clipboard with a single hotkey. (Windows)

Security

Sandboxie (Website) Run programs in a sandbox to prevent rogue software, unwanted programs, spyware, viruses, worms, and other malware from making permanent changes to your machine. (Windows)

ComboFix (Website) ComboFix is a program, created by sUBs, that scans your computer for known malware, and when found, attempts to clean these infections automatically. (Windows)

UnrealIRCd (Website) UnrealIRCd is an Open Source IRC Server, serving thousands of networks since 1999. It runs on Linux, OS X and Windows and is currently the most widely deployed IRCd with a market share of over 50%. (Variety)

Server

ServerCobbler (Website) Cobbler is a Linux installation server that allows for rapid setup of network installation environments. (Linux)

Telnet

PuTTY (Website) PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Windows and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. It is written and maintained primarily by Simon Tatham. (Variety)

Text Editor

Simple Search & Replace (Website) Simple Search/Replace is like a replacement for the Windows “containing text” option found in their search window. It is extremely fast and allows for the option of replacing that text with different text. (Windows)

TextSublime Text (Website) Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose. You’ll love the slick user interface, extraordinary features and amazing performance. (Variety)

Notepad ++ (Website) Notepad++ is a free source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. (Windows)

USB Boot

YUMI (Website) YUMI (Your Universal Multiboot Integrator), is the successor to our MultibootISOs. It can be used to create a Multiboot USB Flash Drive containing multiple operating systems, antivirus utilities, disc cloning, diagnostic tools, and more. (Variety)

Virtual Machines

USB CreatorVmware (Website) VMware Tools is an optional, free set of drivers and utilities that enhances both the performance of a virtual machine’s guest operating system and interaction between the guest and the host. (Variety)

RVTools (Website) RVTools is a windows .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual machines and ESX hosts. (Windows)

HoneyDrive (Website) HoneyDrive is a virtual appliance (OVA) with Xubuntu Desktop 12.04 32-bit edition installed. (Linux)

VM Player (Website) VMware Player is a virtualization software package supplied free of charge by VMware, IncVariety

Windows Explorer

Clover (Website) Clover is an extension of the Windows Explorer, to add multi-tab functionality similar to Google Chrome browser. (Windows)

Xming (Website) Xming is an implementation of the X Window System for Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows XP or later. (Windows)