IT Pro Tuesday #109

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Hello IT Pro,

Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

We’ll start with a note about one of last week’s items: peperjay shared the sad news that TechSNAP stopped producing new episodes last month, but you can now find host Jim Salter in a new tech podcast called 2.5 Admins.

This week, we’re looking for your favorite tips to share with the community. Please let us know those that help you do things more easily so you get better at your job!

As always, we’re updating the full, searchable list on our website here. Enjoy.

But on with this week's tools...! Here are the most-interesting items that have come across our desks, laptops and phones this week. Hornetsecurity has no known affiliation with any of these unless we explicitly state otherwise.

Popular Repost: Podcast

Iron Sysadmin is a podcast featuring expert sysadmins covering all manner of topics of interest in their field. Since 2016, Iron Sysadmin has been covering the latest industry news, ideas, strategies, and chat—always with a focus on the practical needs of real-world sysadmins.

A Free Tool

tcpdump is a command-line packet analyzer for Linux/Unix networks. This network monitoring/management utility captures and records TCP/IP data on the run time. Provides statistics for the number of packets received and captured at the operating node for network performance analysis, debugging and diagnosing network bottlenecks and other issues. Descriptions of packet content are available in several formats, depending on the command used.

A Tip

Shortcut to create a new Google Drive document: In the address bar of your browser, type "sheet.new", "doc.new" or "slides.new" to automatically open a new, untitled document of the type specified.

Another Free Tool

hotkeys_popup is a powerful popup widget that shows all the current hotkeys and their descriptions. Kindly suggested by ndarwincorn.

Tutorials

The DigitalOcean community offers thousands of free tutorials on the basics of many applications, tools and systems for developers and sysadmins. New content is added regularly.

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

autoSSH automatically restarts misbehaving SSH sessions and tunnels. It starts a copy of SSH and monitors it, restarting whenever it stops passing traffic. The tool was designed an easier, more-reliable alternative to using rstunnel.

ExaBGP transforms BGP messages into plain text or JSON, so they can be handled by simple scripts or by BSS/OSS. Helps improve service resilience and protect against network or service failures—for example, providing cost-effective DDOS protection. It can be used to take advantage of the flow balancing capabilities of modern routers and watch for network changes by RIPE or other networks with GIXLG. rfc1918m describes it as, “basically a BGP remote control ;)"

Have a fantastic week and as usual, let us know any comments.