OpenDNS

My good friend, mentor even, Steve Marcinek introduced me to a free service today called OpenDNS (www.opendns.com). The scenario goes something like, you have users on corporate machines browsing to places they shouldn't go while using their broadband cellular cards, how do you restrict this? While several solutions come to mind, OpenDNS fits this scenario quite well. Similar to websense you have the ability to control browsing by selecting levels of filtering, which block categories such as pron, hate, violence, social networking, phishing and malware. Once this list is defined you must verify the source IP that you will be filtering from (or subnet) and then configure the users workstation/notebook to use the OpenDNS server for DNS. While an educated user can rearrange these settings, it could be restricted from within Windows. It' s not a perfect solution but once again, for the cost it's incredible.

www.opendns.com

*** Update***
OpenDNS doing conflicker blocking

Spiceworks

I've been meaning to post for several weeks but I've been overwhelmed with work. Anyhow, I had been searching for a network management tool that gave graphs of bandwidth utilization using SNMP, but I was also hoping to manage Windows servers, and look at things like hard drive utilization, and event notification. After testing offerings such as groundwork, nagios, what's up gold, and solarwinds I finally found something that met my needs and budget.

Spiceworks is a network managment, basic network monitoring, notifications and even help desk. I have the ability to perform inventory of the enitre network and do queries against almost any criteria, from service packs, to software applications, to memory installed etc. I've had a great time using it and I'm learning more about it by the day.

Highly recommended.
www.spiceworks.com