I asked the readers of my weekly MCP Magazine column to send in their free tools. They responded back in droves. From those submitted, I unscientifically sorted through the entries and picked the ones I found the best.

Those are, in no certain order:

VisionApp
Alan Kass has a lot of Terminal Servers and keeping them all straight or doing administration between them can be a major pain without his favorite tool, VisionApp Remote Desktop. This simple but elegant tool does little more than aggregate all your Terminal Services sessions into a single window, where you can select them via a tree view. But, that’s exactly what a lot of people need when they’re managing lots of Terminal Servers.

“I went to TechEd last year with a co-worker and we found this great replacement for Microsoft's weak Remote Desktops," wrote Kass. "It is visionapp Remote Desktop (vRD 1.5) -- Freeware. It allows you to have multiple RDP connections that you can have in sorted groups. It uses a tabbed model for quick access to multiple opened sessions.”

Interestingly enough, he wasn’t the only person who submitted VisionApp as their favorite -- just the first. Get your copy of VisionApp Remote Desktop at http://www.visionapp.com.

WinSCP
An absolute must if you’re using any kind of Linux or Unix-based product (or even VMware ESX), WinSCP wraps a friendly GUI interface around the somewhat complicated command-line switchery needed to copy files between Windows and Unix/Linux or between two Unix/Linux servers. Capable of supporting both SFTP and SCP, WinSCP is a great tool with a very simple interface.

Thanks to Eric Maier for sending in this great tool. He says, “As a tech that requires moving log files back and forth between Linux and Windows, I get tired of using FTP and changing permissions. WinSCP fits the bill for me. I can change permissions on the fly and the interface allows me to drag and drop the file where ever I need to.”

Get your copy of WinSCP at http://winscp.net/eng/index.php.

The Dude
Responsibility is a heavy responsibility, man ... especially when it comes to the responsibility of network administration. Reader Bruce Brown reports on his friend The Dude Network Monitor, “[Its] documentation is pretty basic but functionality is rich and easy to learn. We gave up our high-cost commercial network monitoring product and are now using The Dude!”

Right on, man. With The Dude, you can discover and map numerous device types like routers, switches, servers and workstations. It even recognized my printer! SNMP capabilities are available for notification and alerting when network elements go down. And, features like Syslog and probing that come with the more expensive packages are all available.

You can get your own Dude at http://www.mikrotik.com/thedude.php.

Spiceworks
Easily one of the most fully-featured tools of any sent in, Spiceworks is a surprisingly rich multi-platform suite of help desk and management tools that comes in a small, 6 MB package. This advertising-driven tool can discover the devices on your network and provide back inventory on their hardware and software, installed patches and lots of other useful bits. The interface is elegant and laid out with a lot of common sense.

But that’s not all. SpiceWorks bakes in all that data with a ready-built help desk ticketing system, remote control tools, automated reports and even alerting capabilities. All this for free? Yup, if you don’t mind the advertisements that flash by as you look through the management interface. Thanks to Matthew Hall for turning me onto this fascinating free tool for our smaller environments. Wow!

Spice up your network environment at http://www.spiceworks.com.

You can read the original columns at MCP Magazine online here and here.