The Pinged Hobbit » usefull programs

Ammyy Admin – Free Remote Support Utility, Works Like Team Viewer

Andy — Fri, 22 May 2009 23:12:14 +0000

Remote support utilities are one of the things I find very useful in my normal working life. I’ve spoken before about Teamviewer and Logmein Rescue. It’s so much easier to support a client when you can see what they are seeing on their screen. The biggest problem with both Teamviewer and Logmein Rescue is their cost. There not particularly expensive, but if your a small IT company with a few distributed clients it might be too much of a stretch to your budget to afford them. Ammy Admin is a free utility that provides much of the functionality of the paid for apps, but at no cost.With that in mind I present Ammyy Admin, a free utility for providing remote support to your clients (or family members ). Ammyy Admin works in a in similar way to Teamviewer. Just like in Teamviewer you direct the client to a website where they download an application. They then run this app on their computer and it provides a code that they relay to you, one slight difference here is that the system isn’t set to receive remote connections straight away, even with the code you can’t connect until the client hits Start. Once they do, as the operator you put their ID into your copy of Ammy Admin and click connect. Ammy Admin then routes it’s self through their servers to the remote PC and presents you with a view of their desktop. From there you can move the mouse, start applications, open files and input data with the keyboard just as if you were sat at the computer.

While it may not be quite as fast as Teamviewer, Ammyy Admin is more than capable of providing the kind of support your client needs. It might not scale the remote desktop to fit your window but easy to use scroll bars make it easy to move around the screen. Ammyy Admin supports file transfer just as Teamviewer and Logmein do. However it does also support connections through Windows RDP if it is available While the download of Ammyy Admin is free, there is a charge for commercial use. The charges are much lower than the Logmein and Teamviewer ones though. The free version does not have the nag screens seen in Teamviwer either.

Hijackthis: A useful tool to carry on a usb stick

Andy — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:06:47 +0000

Yesterday I talked about a method used by some companies to trick people into downloading and installing some software on to their computer that was less than good. Lets face it, there are a lot of people out there looking to download something on to people’s computers that is less than good. Some are relatively harmless but annoying like the MBS Payment and Windows Antivirus 2008, but others are rather malicious pieces of code. I like a lot of other people probably get asked to look at computers quite often that are running some malicious code on start up. This never used to be a problem Things that ran at startup used to be easy to locate, it was enough to open up msconfig and scroll down the list of processes running and disable the one you want. Of course things evolve, after a while the people creating these programs found ways to start their programs with out showing them on this list. They created registry keys that were hard to find.

Now don’t get me wrong I’m not adverse to booting up regedit and looking around for the keys I need to delete if I can find some good advice on Google, but there are a lot of places to look and to be honest sometimes the advice out there isn’t always that accurate!. Hijackthis makes things a little easier. While it’s not a tool for the less advanced system repairer, for people with a little confidence and some technical ability it is a useful tool:

The tiny program examines vulnerable or suspect parts of your system, such as browser helper objects and certain types of Registry keys. – Editor’s Review on Download.com

And a tiny little program it is, the installer is less than 800kb which means it could easily be kept on that usb key of useful tools you take when you visit one of those troublesome computers. It installs nice and simply too with a clean wizard.

The other thing I really like about Hijackthis is that when you run the scan you can save this list to a log file, this log file can be posted to a forum and there are lots of people willing to give advice on the lists the items running there. A lot of them are quite knowledgeable as well! Once you have a process you wish to stop from running you can check a box next to it on the list and click the Fix button at the bottom.

Hijackthis is now owned by Trend Micro, who are a reputable firm and it’s also free to use!

When is a process not a process

Andy — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:44:33 +0000

Any one thats been reading my past entries may know I dabble in a little software development here and there. Some times for my own amusement but quite often it’s for a reason relevant to work. Recently we have been developing a new application to talk the network connected devices we use. It constantly polls the devices for fresh information as long as the communication software is running somewhere on the network and adds this information to the database.

The idea being that the software runs in a client/server set up with one central machine constantly running the communications software. The communication software was initially developed to run as a normal windows process. This was ok initially, the software was usually running on one PC and only needed to be pulling data in when someone was using that PC. Things got tricky once we started installing on to multiple PC’s.

With it running as a process it meant that what ever machine was running the comms software had to be always logged in other wise the process was shut down. A lot of people are not comfortable with always having their server logged in so this became a problem. The obvious way around this was to have the comms running as a windows service. A windows service does not need the machine to be logged in for it to be running, it will run as soon as the PC is turned on effectively. Much easier than relaying on some one remembering to log the machine on as well.

Doing a Google search on making a process run as a service will pull up a lot of links related to two pieces of the windows server development kit, one called srvany and the other instsrv, or the dos command sc. These can be used to create a service from a process. I tried both of these approaches out, and while I could get them to run my process for me, I could not use them in a way that could be embeddded in my installation package so that the paths to the programs could be updated if changed during the install.

I toyed around for a few months on the various ways and tried making a bat file and compiling it into a exe but this still didn’t all variations in the install location. Then quite by mistake I stumbled upon a little utility called xyntservice. Xyntservice is an open source tool that runs as a windows service and can then run/stop other programs as a process without a use being logged in to the machine. All that is required is to modify an entry in the accompanying ini file and then small dos command will install the xyntservice on the maching and bingo your process will run with no one logged in.

It is possible to write a Windows service as a Windows program, but here I am proposing a much easier solution. I have included with this article the source code for a simple Windows service program that can start and shut down other programs. All you need to do is install this service and modify the INI file. Here are the advantages of using this simple Windows service:

* It can start up to 127 programs of your choice. The started programs behave like Windows services in that they will be running in the background without the user having to log into the machine.
* A user cannot kill the programs started by this service without proper privilege unless, of course, the machine is shutdown.
* You can test and debug your programs outside of the Windows service. For example, you can run your programs in the Visual Studio debugger and step into the source code to find bugs, etc. When it is “bug free,” you can deploy it in production, starting it from the Windows service.
* You can run a broad range of programs using this service, including .NET programs, VB scripts and batch files. This service has been used by the open source world to run numerous Java programs.

Code Project xyntservice page

Using xyntservice I could put the programs files anywhere during the installation, then just have the installer update the xyntservice ini file with the location of them (I set the xyntfiles to always be in the windows installation folder). I then had a nice simple way of installing a service that was easy to control. As an added bonus in some circumstances it is possible to still have the process run a user interface for my communications software if I need it, something that cant be done with a service created by srvany.

Its quite possible that there are other utilities out there that do this in a better way, but xyntservice fits my needs wonderfully and I don’t see the reason for looking anywhere else. I’m sure others might have their own suggestions thought