What sorts of interesting tools exist to perform admin tasks on a Windows network?  I run linux as my main OS but have to keep a Windows virtual machine going to do certain kinds of administration (or keep rdesktopping to a Windows server).

There seems to be a serious dearth of tools with which to accomplish this task.  It would be really nice to click an icon and do user management in Active Directory.   To not have to rdesktop a server.

I have seen a few different ways to join my linux box to AD but this doesn’t seem to allow me to do the admin piece.  I don’t really care about being part of the domain - I just want to run it.

And while we’re on the topic, are there any simple, non-CLI apps to collect/read/summarize/alert on Windows Server logs?   It seems a little silly to convert them first to syslog format, send them to a syslog server, then try to find a non-CLI syslog reader/aggregator.  Although I hate eye candy, I need a step or two above the CLI (command line interface).

All suggestions gratefully accepted - thanks!