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The Technician's Virtual Toolbelt

If you had to put every piece of troubleshooting software you could use onto one CD, what would you include? Here are the answers of several ISP administrators.

[September 16, 2004]

On the ISP-Tech list in September, SR posed an intriguing question:

"Hey all,

Here next week or so, the ISP I work at is in charge of turning up the ports for the students in the dorms at the college here in town. Part of that (and the maintenance) includes needing to remove viruses, spyware, adding/removing NICs, drivers, cab files for respective OSs, virus fix tools, service packs for the different OSs, different versions of IE, etc.

That being said, anyone here that could recommend an all around CD (or 2 if I need it) that I could burn and what programs I should look at getting? Anyone else do something like this and what do you use?

I planned on the following:

1. avcleaner (AVG cleaner util)
2. stinger (mcafee cleaner)
3. ad-aware
4. spybot
5. hijackthis
6. AVG (incase they have no av)
7. Updated IE 5.5 (for real old machiens) and IE 6.0 SP1
8. IE-Eradicator (for hosing IE and reinstalling from scratch)
9. Drivers for the college issued RTL8139 (I'd love to know where I could download the most common NIC drivers...)

I can't think of much else... any other freeware recommendations for what might come in handy? I'll have access to highspeed and a cd burner, so I can grab what I don't got... but I want to be ready for almost anything. Thanks for insight!"

[CS replied] "Try:

• About Buster! 3.0
• LSP Fix
• Winsock-Fix
• CWShredder
• XP Service Pack 2 (includes better firewall, and lots of security fixes—our in house testing finds about a 3 percent failure rate, so beware! :)

You may want to include demo version of SpySweeper It removes the most spyware of any of the best 3 (AAW, SB & SSweeper) It will allow you to update 1 time. Good for one time removal of things AAW & SB can't remove. Suggest student buy for $29.95, as it includes real-time monitor. You may want to include Avast! AV (another good free AV, but more difficult to understand) for those cases where you can't get AVG to install."

[MP noted succinctly] "I like Codestuff Starter, especially for its 'right click' capabilities. Great little program to see in depth what's started and what's running."

[JB suggested] "Drop #7 and replace it with Mozilla, Opera or the like, and use #8 to completely remove IE from the system. I would also get a nice freeware firewall and lock the system for 5 mins on all ports except for Microsoft auto-update and check for fixes."

[JM complained] "Where can you find full installations of IE 5.5 and IE 6.0? The downloads most easily found on Microsoft's site, if I'm not mistaken, are only installers that grab the real installation from the 'net. Just happens that I've been called on to 'fix' a friend's computer. He's only got a dialup connection, so the only tools I'll have will be those I burn to CD in the next 1/2 hour."

JT had a related question:

"Continuing the thread "Technician's Toolbelt" down a different track:

Is there any program suite which runs at the command line, that boots from floppy then autoruns the cdrom, and performs all the virus scan, popup, worm, bot, and etc. scan/removal functions? All this done independent of the OS. Initially at start is to recognize/select which OS is running on the 'puter. In the base thread "Technician's Toolbelt" there are a lot of good progys which need to run individually. If I was the IT guy, I wouldn't want to spend hours (+/-) on a bunch of 'puters.

I know police agencies have software which does just what I suggest, with one exception, they ain't trying to fix anything except guilt. They can scan email, images, and whatever they are snooping for, all from their progy. Any ideas?"

[CS enthused] "It's possible to make a win9x boot CD ROM. The autoexec could execute the command line AVG. Then, when that is done you could run spybot and adaware from the command line. I'm just noodling right now but I think I'm going to have one of the techs put that together tomorrow. Good idea."

[AR warned] "I'm working on something like that now, but running Ad-Aware or spybot would be tricky without actually booting into the OS. A lot of the problems that Spybot and AAW fix is in the registry of the OS and I don't think it could do anything to fix them unless the PC is booted into the installed OS that you're trying to fix."

[JM argued] "Something that would completely automate all of those tasks with little or no input would be more dangerous than beneficial. Patching software without regard to other applications installed on the system and indiscriminately installing the latest updates to others isn't usually a good idea. Even automatically removing suspected viruses without some kind of intelligent decision making can wreak havoc on a system. There's a big difference between a technician selectively using powerful software tools and using those tools blindly."

[JT concluded] "You're probably right. Just wishful thinking on my part. As usual with Windows, all simple problems have a complicated solution. Flames un-necessary."

—End