IT Pro Tuesday #130
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Hello everyone! Please note that IT Pro Tuesday will be taking a break for the holidays and will be back on Tuesday, January 5th, 2021.
In this final edition for 2020, we're asking for recommendations on your favorite IT-related news sites we can share with the community... the sites that help you do your job better and more easily. Please reply or leave a comment with your suggestions, and we'll be featuring them in the coming weeks.
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.
A Free Tool
Masscan is a blazingly fast, portable port scanner that can be useful for pen testing and finding the attack vectors that are lurking inside your network. This tool is capable of transmitting 10 million packets per second from a single machine, and it features an easily understood interface. Uses asynchronous tranmissions and allows arbitrary port and address ranges. Our thanks to sdmike21 for the recommendation.
Tutorials
Computerphile Youtube Channel offers a mixed bag of informative videos on all things computer-related. According to the recommendation by digitaltransmutation, "It isn't really oriented towards IT professionals, but it is pretty damn good. For me, it is a mix of current events (they sometimes break down the hot new malware) and refreshers on stuff that I haven't focused on in awhile."
Another Free Tool
BatchPatch enables you to load a list of computers and then start the Windows update install/reboot process on all of them at once. Gives you efficient, centralized control of your patching process to save you time. Our thanks go to Calvus for directing us to this one.
A Tip
A Windows time-saver kindly shared by HughJohns0n:
open administrative console
type
perfmon /rel
“Never dig through eventlogs again. Also impresses end users, shows off your leet console jockey skills."
One More Free Tool
CloneApp is a simple backup tool for migrating your software setup when you need to reinstall Windows. Saves you the time you'd otherwise spend putting things back the way you like them. Offers the option for a full backup/restore or backing up settings for the most-popular Windows programs. bawooder offers some advice, it "brings a lot of 'preconfigured' backup-scripts with it (Outlook, Adobe, ...), but if you know where the apps store their shit (folders, registry,...) you can easily write them yourself. Back up your chosen apps, reinstall machine and let the app copy the data back into a new profile. Saved me a lot of time :)"
P.S. Bonus Free Tools
WMI Tools gives Windows admins the ability to access WMI information both locally and remotely so they can monitor all sorts of devices. Offers 7 different views and an intuitive interface that helps you keep tabs on the processes and services, hardware, OS and event logs. Plus, uou can add your own queries and create custom views.
pcapsipdump is an open-source SIP sniffer. This libpcap-based solution listens on a network interface and saves SIP/RTP sessions to .pcap files that can be opened with tcpdump, Wireshark and the like. pnht finds it useful when "you need to debug calls on a pbx/call router (openSIP,asterisk, frepbx, etc.)"
Have a Merry Christmas, and we'll see you in 2021!