The Consultant's Toolkit

My background is in Unix administration and network security but many times I've been called upon to help local I.T. support people  figure out what's wrong with their windows machines. More often than not it's a telephone call from one of the Windows support people and we go through a series of steps to obtain the current state of the system. This way of gathering information is tedious for everyone involved and often requires me to type in information that could be easily be captured to a file.

To further complicate this process many of the support people are used to a GUI and often find it difficult to work through a dos prompt to gather the information required.

Also, many of the standard windows tools don't provide the ability to gather information from a system that would be trivial to do on a Unix system. There are excellent freely available tools from the internet that allow a support person to gather a good deal of information to help determine the state of any Windows NT/2k system.

I created the "Consultant's Toolkit" while working for Drexel University in Philadelphia to aid the I.T. support team to deliver information about suspect windows machines in an easy to use manner. With a combination of these tools and some batch scripting it was easy to determine exactly what was running on our windows systems and dump it all into a file that could than be emailed to me.

The consultant's toolkit does the following:

• Determine the coputer name
• Provide the ip address of the computer
• List active/listening network connections
• Determine the processes that have these ports open
• Print the routing table
• List the services currently running
• List the users on the machine
• Provide a list of the processes running on the machine
• List the current service pack and hotfixes installed on the machine

While this is not a comprehensive list of all the types of information that we could gather it does give an excellent idea of idea towards the state of the system. The Consultant's Toolkit was originally written for Drexel University but now I can offer it to everyone. You can download version 1 of the toolkit here. This version is a self-extracting zip file. Or just download the zip file.

UPDATE: have created version 2 of the toolkit that works on Windows XP. I'm using a few of the tools from sysinternals.com. Because the copyright on some of these tools are written in such a way as the user must download from there site I've included a copy of wget that will do the downloading for you. If you are behind a proxy you will need to copy the sample.wgetrc to wgetrc and modify the proxy server information to make it specific to your environment. You can download version 2 here. It is a self-extracting zip file as well, here is the original zip file.

Please feel free to modify the batch script, if you would return the changes to me I'll make those updates available to everyone on the net.
Also, another great site for windows tools is Sysinternals. These people produce excellent tools for use with windows machines.

Copyright © 2002