Helge's Tools

If you know a bit about my professional past (hint), you may have wondered when something like this would be coming. As for me, I was baffled to find that Home Assistant has no entity monitoring capabilities whatsoever. Nor do many third-party solutions seem to exist. This is all the more astonishing because the desire to be informed when things break should be a strong one among smart-home owners.

Sambee is a browser-based viewer and manager for files on SMB network shares and on your computer’s local drives. It supports single-pane and dual-pane views and can replace Windows File Explorer as well as Norton Commander-style tools on your PC and on your phone. And yes, it’s free and open source.

DiskLED is a tool I wrote a while ago that displays performance counter data using an animated system tray icon. It comes with a graphical configuration dialog that lets you choose from all performance counters available on the local system – you can monitor network throughput just as easily as hard disk activity or memory usage.

I am happy to announce that my tools Delprof2 and SetACL Studio are now free to use, both for individuals and corporations. Previously, Delprof2 was only free to use commercially if an organization allowed us to use their name in our marketing. SetACL Studio was not available for free at all.

FileIOTest is a command line tool that tests the speed of local or remote (SMB) storage by performing some common file IO operations repeatedly and measuring the duration. These are the main facts:

What could be geekier than a t-shirt imprinted with actual source code from a tool that helps administrators around the world tame one of the most dreaded beasts in IT: permissions?

Due to a lack of visibility permission cleanup is performed far less frequently than it could, and probably should. As a result, ghost ACEs (permissions from deleted accounts) linger in the dark corners of the file system, threatening the unsuspecting admin with the horrors of unresolvable SIDs.

When you are planning a migration of user accounts between domains one task always pops up pretty quickly: reassigning the permissions of the users in the source domain to the corresponding users in the target domain, in other words reACLing the file server.

Last month SetACL reached the magic number of 500,000 downloads. That is a lot, especially for a command-line tool which is focused on a very specific aspect of system administration.

DiskLED is a small tool that displays performance counter data using an animated system tray icon. The new version 1.1 comes with a graphical configuration dialog that lets you choose from all performance counters available on the local system - you can monitor network throughput just as easily as hard disk activity or memory usage. In this article, I am going to show you how to do that.

What do you do when your computer reacts sluggishly to even the simplest commands? You probably look at its hard disk LED to determine if the disk is busy, because if it is, the only thing that really helps is waiting (apart from buying a faster disk or SSD). Problem solved - if you are sitting right next to the machine. But what if you are using a protocol like RDP or ICA to connect to a remote computer or VM? No HDD LED, no quick and simple way to check for hard drive activity. This has been bugging me enough to write a software replacement: DiskLED.

A few weeks ago I published the tool ParseCitrixLicense which displays the contents of Citrix license files in a human-readable form. The original version 1.0 did not support XenDesktop licenses, for the simple reason that I had none to test my program with. Recently my colleague Nicholas Dille provided me with a XenDesktop eval license which I used to implement the missing tags in ParseCitrixLicense. Please see for yourself what ParseCitrixLicense extracts from a XenDesktop license file.

Update: Version 1.1 supports XenDesktop Licenses in Addition to XenApp Licenses Most Citrix products rely heavily on license files. While the basic format of a license file is somewhat documented, most fields used in license files are not. This makes understanding their contents difficult. It does not help that the license files can hardly be called readable with most of the relevant data in one long line.

Recently I got into a very interesting discussion with my colleague Nicholas Dille on various aspects of Windows x64. One question he brought up was especially intriguing: knowing about registry redirection, it is not astonishing to find that the 32-bit version of the registry key HKLM\Software\Classes (aka HKCR) gets to be HKLM\Software\Classes\Wow6432Node. But there is also HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Classes!? How can there be two different Wow6432Node 32-bit keys for one 64-bit key?

I recently had the requirement to refresh the Windows desktop after certain changes had been made to Explorer’s registry entries. This seems simple at first: klick on any item on the desktop and then press F5. It wasn’t, though. The registry changes would be made upon logon by a software installation agent. It was expected by the customer that the end user see the the effects of the change immediately without any user intervention. That sent me hunting for a solution on the internet. I came across many forum posts that showed that many others already had exactly the same requirement. Interestingly, none of the proposed solutions actually worked. Except for one, which I found at last.