Netscan - a freeware swiss-knife tool

Netscan is the swiss knife of the tools for administrators. It reminds me of Lansweeper, but for realtime scan and information gathering from the computers and devices on the network, thumbs up for the ease of use and list of features:

 

• Pings computers and displays those alive.
• Detects hardware MAC-addresses, even across routers.
• Detects hidden shared folders and writable ones.
• Detects your internal and external IP addresses.
• Scans for listening TCP ports, some UDP and SNMP services.
• Retrieves currently logged-on users, configured user accounts, uptime, etc.
• You can mount and explore network resources.
• Can launch external third party applications.
• Exports results to HTML, XML, CSV and TXT
• Supports Wake-On-LAN, remote shutdown and sending network messages.
• Retrieves potentially any information via WMI.
• Retrieves information from remote registry, file system and service manager.
• It is absolutely free, requires no installation, and does not contain any adware/spyware/malware.

 

Nircmd - when you need batch stuff on remote computers

Nircmd is quite an handy utility, it saves me a lot of work when I need something changed on my site computers.
A sample that shows the flexibility of this great and freeware tool:
- Detect and repair of MS Office is not working since I had a change of the server where Microsoft Office sources where used to install Office, or I want to add a new path (the installer can work with multiple source definitions):

nircmd elevatecmd remote \\hostname_of_computer regsetval sz "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Products\9040110900063D11C8EF10054038389C\SourceList\Net" "2" "\\new_server\O2003pro3\source"

explanation:

elevatecmd - used to ensure you run the command with administrator rights
remote - run the command remotelly on \\hostname_of_computer
regsetval - set the registry value
sz - the value type is string
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Products\9040110900063D11C8EF10054038389C\SourceList\Net" - key in registry

"2" - value name in registry
"\\new_server\O2003pro3\source" - value data in registry

If you need to apply that same fix on multiple remote computers, you can do it like this:

nircmd elevatecmd multiremote "c:\hostnames.txt" sz "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Products\9040110900063D11C8EF10054038389C\SourceList\Net" "2" "\\new_server\O2003pro3\source"

The file c:\hostnames.txt must contain host names of the computers where you want this "fix" to be installed (line by line).

(more to come)