Regshot – Registry Compare Tool

Been working hard on Windows 7 this week. Specifically group policy stuff.  In the process I’ve been needing to get in and out of the registry comparing keys to see if changes are taking place. I usually use a tool called Prism Deploy (pictaker) to run a check on the registry to look for changes but for simple changes it’s a bit much. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge Prism fan.  I’ve been using it for years and it’s our main software deployment tool.  However, for this work it’s a bit overwhelming.  I found a cool little tool called regshot at Sourceforge that does the smaller registry compare jobs really well and it seems to run even quicker than Prism.  The tool looks like this:

To make a compare, just run the tool and click on “1st shot”.  Make the registry changes (in my case I do a grpupdate for force group policy changes) and then run “2nd shot”.  When it completes hit the “cOmpare” button and you’ll get a text file or html file of the changes that were made to the registry.  Works well, is stupidly simple and because it’s open source there’s no serial numbers or licensing to worry about.

Enjoy.

TOR – Anonymous Web Browsing

TOR is a tool I’ve known about for some time but never really had a chance to check out.  Tonight I sat down and spent a few minutes with it.  It’s very cool.  I downloaded the TOR browser bundle which is basically a minimalist way to check it out.  The bundle includes a TOR client as well as a version of Firefox portable.  By expanding it into a folder or even onto a USB drive you can run TOR and see what it’s like to browse the net anonymously.  So why would you want to browse the web anonymously you ask?  Well I can think of plenty of reasons. I often want to check some of the web sites I run from a remote connection to test firewalls and connectivity.  TOR basically relays your connection out and around the net.  That makes it possible to remotely test websites without having to use a remote tool to connect to a remote computer.  What I found out about this little bundle is quite cool. It has a built in bandwidth monitor, the ability to check out the nodes on the TOR network, the ability to dynamically change your network identity and the ability to make yourself a TOR relay.  Pretty cool stuff. 

I fired up the Firefox portable browser with TOR and went to www.myipaddress.com  to check out what was being reported as my IP. It came back with an IP address in Germany.  When I went to Google sure enough I was sent to the German version of Google.  Very cool.

So I only have you one reason for browsing anonymously but I’m sure you have your own reason. It’s a very cool tool and will now takes it’s place on my USB utility belt.

Monitoring Internet Health

It seems that there was a rather large issue at Level3 today on the Internet. Our provider was down for an hour or so while they rerouted traffic.  We were on it and rerouted our Firm’s traffic through an alternate site within a few minutes of the outage.  I’m always clamoring for more information as to how well things are running and how wide spread an outage is.  Here are a few links that are useful in investigating Internet issues:

http://www.internethealthreport.com/

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/

http://isc.sans.edu/index.html

Do you have any sites you use for this?  If so, hit me up in the comments.