Leading Windows Network Utilities

Windows Sysinternals is a part of Microsoft TechNet website that offers technical utilities to manage, diagnose, troubleshoot, and monitor the Microsoft Windows environments. This article focuses on Windows network utilities that are the software utilities exclusively designed to configure, analyze, monitor and troubleshoot various aspects of computer networks.

AD Explorer

Active Directory (AD) Explorer also known as AD Explorer is an advanced Windows Active Directory (AD) editor and viewer. AD Explorer facilitates easy navigation to an AD database. Using this took you can define favorite locations in the database and can also view object properties even without opening dialog boxes. Using this utility, you can easily edit permissions, execute sophisticated searches, view a schema object, and can do a lot more.

The tool has other advance features like it can save snapshots of an AD database. These snapshots can also be viewed and compared offline. The offline snapshot gives the feeling of exploring the live database. Using the AD Explorer's comparison functionality, you can compare two snapshots of an AD database and check out its attributes and security permissions.

ADInsight

ADInsight is an LDAP real-time network monitoring tool. Here, LDAP stands for Light-weight Directory Access Protocol and it is meant to troubleshoot issues with Active Directory client applications. It is helpful in solving Windows authentication, DNS, Exchange, and other such problems through detailed tracing of Active Directory client-server communications. Using the DLL injection techniques, AD Insight can intercept the calls made by the applications in the Wldap32.dll library. Wldap32.dll library is the standard library that underlies the Active Directory APIs such as ADSI and ldap.

ADInsight is different from other network monitoring tools in the sense that it intercepts and interprets all client-side APIs. In fact, it can even intercept those APIs as well that has nothing to do with transmission to a server. Basically, ADInsight is capable of monitoring any process to which it can load its tracing DLL. It doesn’t require any administrative permission. If run with administrative rights, it is capable of monitoring system processes including windows services.

AdRestore

AdRestore is meant to undelete Active Directory objects. In Windows Server if some objects have been deleted, then using the AdRestore you can restore these deleted objects. AdRestore is basically a simple command-line utility that enumerates the deleted objects within a domain and get it restored. The source code for this utility is based on sample code in the Microsoft Platform SDK.

PipeList

PipeList as the name suggests, display the name of pipes on a Windows system. The listing is extensive as it includes the number of active and maximum instances for each pipe. PipeList can obtain a directory listing of the named pipes defined on a network.

PsFile

This utility reveals the files that were opened remotely. PsFile is a command-line utility that shows the list of files on a system that are opened remotely. The utility also lets you close the opened files either by name or by a file identifier. There is the "net file" command that shows up a list of the files that other computers, connected to a network, have opened and have executed the command. However, it shortens the long path names and also doesn't let you see the information for remote systems.

The aforementioned mentioned Windows Network utilities are some of the leading one, whereas there are many more Windows network utilities such as PsPing that measure network performance. To name a few are PsTools that list the processes running on local or remote computers; ShareEnum that scans the files shared on your network to check their security settings, etc. These utilities are meant to make the Windows computer’s network environment a better place to work upon.

About the Author: Brooke M. Perry is an ardent technician associated with Qresolve remote computer support with wide experience of fixing issues with PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones. With a strong track record of devising effective ways of internet security and system security, she has so far helped thousands of users across the globe.

Brooke M. Perry is an ardent technician associated with Qresolve computer security, with wide experience of fixing issues with PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones.