If you use MS Windows either by choice or by force, you have probably been perplexed as to what in the hell was going on inside your little beige box. Compared to OpenBSD, Solaris, or OSX the tools supplied by MS don’t give you an easy way to monitor the internal workings of the windows family of operating systems. I have spent the last week working with a CA beta product and had been having a pretty tough time until on of the CA programmers I was working with recommended DebugView to monitor the debug output.
I have also found TCPView extremely helpful in determining the root of problems with the distributed application that I am working with. TCPView shows all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, I have even started running this on my laptop to keep an eye on my network connections (you never can tell when your employer is going to try and slip some new spy ware on your computer)!
There are quite a few other useful tools at Sysinternals.com, and none requires more than unzipping the .exe and starting the program.
May 2nd, 2003 at 5:39 pm
SysInternals.com rocks.
Despite the fact that I now have a hardware router/firewall, I’ve kept ZoneAlarm on my system so I can monitor what processes are trying to connect out to the net on my machine. Very useful, IMO.