Free Search Tool for Windows Server IIS FTP Log Files

FTP Log IP Search
Free Download (36 Kb)



Are you attached to a piece of software that just 'Makes Your Day'? There are thousands upon thousands of software developers that are passionate about building useful tools to help solve everday needs. In many cases the software that developers create are released free to the public as freeware -- software that does not have to be purchased or licensed. There are tons of web sites dedicated to searching and categorizing freeware, but sometimes you can't find exactly what you are looking for.

Recently, we noticed an ongoing brute force attack on our client FTP Server that was degrading system performance and using up system resources. A brute force attack is when someone/something tries to guess usernames and passwords to gain unauthorized access to a system. We have a lot of clients that access their web hosting via our FTP services, but none of them have the username of 'Admin' or 'Administrator' so it was pretty obvious someone was trying to gain unauthorized access.

One way to block the unauthorized access is to go through server log files and look for the attempted logins as 'Admin' or 'Administrator' and block the individual IP Addresses of associated malicious systems at the network firewall. When we realized we would have to search 65 Megabytes of worth of FTP log files (equivalent to 65 thick novels/books) -- we decided it was time to write a little program to handle the specific task for us.



Now, Sharp Hue is not known for building desktop software tools, but we are problem solvers and decided to tackle the challenge anyhow. The product is a freeware utility called, FTP Log IP Search:



The application is rather basic, but easy to use and can rip through 65 megabytes of logfiles while you do other things.

1. First, select the directory containing the log files.


2. Next type in a phrase that you suspect is appearing in the log files -- in our case it was the user trying to login as 'admin'.


3. Specify the column number that the IP Address appears in your log files ... remember that column numbering starts at 0, yes, Zero!


4. Execute the search and go do other things.

When you return you'll have a nice list of matches that you can hand over to your network security person to block at the firewall. Hope you enjoy!

Free Tool to Convert Microsoft Word Bullets to HTML

Word to HTML Lists
Free Download (36 KB)



Web designers and developers that fill their sites with content submitted to them in Microsoft Word format will really love this freeware utility from Sharp Hue. The simple program allows you to quickly take a bulleted list from Microsoft Word and convert it to the correct HTML format that browsers use to render bulleted lists.

While bulleted lists are a great way to organize information and Microsoft Word is a great tool to write content, very few people realize how cumbersome and time-consuming it actually is to convert the Word bulleted list to the correct HTML Lists version.

The main problem when copying and pasting bulleted lists from Word to most HTML editors like Dreamweaver, Visual Studio, and Notepad is that the actual bullet character and a tab are inserted before the list item as seen below. The only way to get rid of them is to move the cursor around and start deleting ... this can take forever!



Even after removing the bullet characters and tabs, one must apply the opening and closing list item HTML tag before and after each item. Even more work! The solution? A handy little tool we built at Sharp Hue to speed this process up: Word to HTML Lists.

The software is rather self explanatory and simple, but if you spend as much time as we do working content into client's web sites, you will be very excited to have a tool like this do all the work for you. As far as we know, such a tool does not exist anywhere else, so enjoy!