9 wickedly useful Web sites for Windows administrators

The Internet abounds with Web sites that offer volumes of information for Windows administrators. We all know of the popular ones like TechNet, IT World and trade publications like Network World. But the sites I'm about to reveal in this list of nine are smaller gems that tend to fly under the radar. I like to call them the "supporting players” in that they may not be the superstars on the team but you could never win a game without them. Each of these IT Web sites have saved my backside more times than I can count and I'm confident they will do the same for you. To see this whole list quickly, check out the slideshow.

EventID.net

This Web site is single handedly responsible for getting me out of the office on time and home to my family more days that I can count. EventID.net is a great resource for finding the answers to event ID‘s in the Event Viewer. The site has a database of over 9,000 events and contains links to knowledgebase articles and comments on fixes. The site is so valuable because these fixes are submitted by IT admins like you, me and people in the trenches who have tried and succeeded using the methods described.

The site allows you to search by event ID and source, so you can hone in on the issue even if you can't remember the source (or you don't feel like typing it all out). The site lists all the events and sources in alphabetical order.

The site will let you search and look at user comments for free. However, for a small fee of just $9.00 for three months or $24.00 per year you have the ability to use the active links, which will take you to knowledge base documents, or links to other users who have solved the issue, and will provide detailed information to help you resolve the problem.

Much of this information is of course available for free elsewhere on the 'net, but for such a low price, you can save hours of scrolling through TechNet trying to figure out which Event ID on that site matches your problem.

Some other neat resources are the links to firewall and VPN setup and management and the IT tasks links. Sometimes we go through the day just doing and never thinking about each task we perform. If you need to justify to your boss the need for more resources this is a great way to make your argument. Open these up and tweak them a bit and you have the documentation to show exactly what you are doing for them each day.

DNS Goodies

This Web site is great for all things DNS and goes way beyond “who is “lookups. The site offers tools for "extended who is" , which gives information such as the type of web server used for a particular domain. Extended who is also allows you to check for SSL certificates, site keywords and host information.

You can also run DNS lookups for A, MX, SOA and PTR records, reverse DNS queries, ping and traceroute. On the security side you can check for open relays, see if you’re blacklisted as a spam server. You can even find the e-mail address to report abuse from a particular site.

DNS Goodies is a good tool to make sure your systems are configured correctly to the outside world and that they are not part of the spam-relaying problem.

I remember once discovering that my domain had been blacklisted. I went to this site and ran every test they had to offer. When I was done I discovered (to my relief) that we were not relaying spam but that the ISP we were using had been warned several times about one of their other New York customers. When the ISP failed to take action against that customer, ICANN blacklisted an entire block of IP addresses 24 of which were mine. The export and e-mail feature allowed me to show my ISP that problem was indeed on its end and actually got them to take actions to correct the problem.

Being in the accounting industry, I was constantly faced with the issue of clients bringing financial data to us on a CD or a USB thumb drive with file extensions I have never seen.

FILExt is a get site for finding exactly what program they used to create their mystery files so I could figure out how (or if) we could open those files. In a world were anything can be printed or converted to PDF format you would think this does not matter much. But the truth is when you are dealing with clients, you have no control over getting them to use widely accepted file formats and so FILExt is a great resource to save you time and headaches.

But the Web site goes beyond just telling you which program is associated with the file extension. It will let you know the company, versions that extension is associated with and MIME type. And will even in some cases offer information on the installation path and executable file name for the extension.