[
IMHO |
NT
]
This page is grossly outdated. Like, circa 2001 or so, if that
late. Please don't contact me for support on the stuff here. I haven't
touched Windows NT for almost ten years.
Tools to make NT usable
NT falls a little short in the department of having usable administration tools. Admittedly, I'm a Unix bigot, to a certain extent. I can't stand having to navigate 5 levels deep in a menu, wait for a GUI to launch, and click 3 buttons, just to perform a basic task like restarting my http server. (Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Services ... Wait for GUI to launch ... Select "Apache", click "Stop" ... Am I sure? Click "Yes" ... wait ... Now click "Start")
But, with a little bit of research and patience, I've accumulated a collection of tools that make my NT machine almost as usable as a real OS! Here's some of them:
- Perl - Without a question, the most valuable tool in my toolbox. And, while you're at it, buy David Roth's book.
- VNC - The next best thing to telnet, VNC actually lets me manage my NT machines remotely. You can read more about it here.
- AINTX - A collection of Unix-ish tools for NT, containing the only cron service for NT that I've seen that really works like you'd expect cron to work. A real find.
- Unix95 - Another collection of Unix command-line utilities, like rm, ls, pwd, du, and many others. Other good stuff on this page also.
- The NT Resource Kit. Now only available from Microsoft Press. Contains some useful tools. Most of them are also available in AINTX, which I recommend using over the Resource Kit. I consider the Resource Kit an admission by Microsoft that NT is greatly lacking when it comes to actually useful tools. Notice that they ship Perl (albeit a very old version of Perl) with the Resource Kit.
- TweakUI - A set of tools for getting rid of lots of irritating behavior like little arrows, and "shortcut to" on your shortcut icons, animated windows, etc.
- Windmail - Although I've taken to using Perl and the Mail::Sendmail module most of the time now, Geocel's Windmail is avery credible fill-in for having a real mail server on NT.
- Apache httpd - The only real web server.
- A few things I wrote - Over the years I've written a few apps in Perl that keep my NT machines happy. Some of them are on CPAN, and others live here.