IT Pro Tuesday #137

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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

This week, we're asking for your favorite tools and resources we can share with the community... those 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

Vistumbler is wireless network scanner for Windows that uses wireless and GPS data to map and visualize the access points around you. Thanks go to karateninjazombie for the recommendation.

A Blog

Steve on Security offers high-level, practical advice and information on security for Microsoft products. It's the work of Steve Syfuhs, a senior developer on the Azure Active Directory team at Microsoft who was previously a Microsoft Developer Security MVP for many years before joining the MS team.

Another Free Tool

Diagrams.net offers collaborative, security-focused diagramming for teams. Available as either a convenient online tool or a desktop app for those who need maximum privacy and control. Suggested by Gurve1, who finds it to be "amazing at network drawings."

A Tip

Some time-savers kindly offered by fl3abag:

  • Get last reboot: systeminfo | find "Time"
  • Is user in any admin groups: whoami /groups | find "Admin"
  • Reboot in 10 minutes: shutdown -r -t 600
  • Generate battery report: powercfg /batteryreport
  • Generate wifi report: netsh wlan show wlanreport
  • Force an app to stop running: taskkill /f /im notepad.exe
    ...on a remote computer: taskkill /s computername /im notepad.exe
  • Windows update stuck shutting down trustedinstaller and you need to force reboot (run from another networked pc): sc \\computername queryex trustedinstaller
    Taskkill /s computername /f /im trustedinstaller.exe

 

A Script

Meraki-CLI is a wrapper around the official Meraki Dashboard API Python SDK  that makes all 400+ commands available to the user as a standard command-line tool, including -h help options, commands, switches and arguments. Supports classic Linux-style pipelining, so you can pipe the output of one instance of the program to another. Kindly shared by its author, packetsar, who recommends it for "any network engineers out there [who] have had a need for easy Meraki scripting, but didn't want to write code against Meraki's REST API."

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

Bulk Rename Utility is a Windows tool for easily renaming files and folders according to whichever criteria you choose. Allows you to add date/timestamps, replace numbers, insert text, convert case, add auto-numbers and more. pickymeek tells us it "has come in handy more at home, but I could see it being useful in an enterprise situation too."

iTerm2-Color-Schemes is a nice resource for MobaXterm users, kindly shared by Mambaaa, who explains “I’ve taken screenshots of 230+ syntax color schemes from GitHub and assembled them in an Imgur album ... To install you'll need to find the matching entry in the GitHub and replace the corresponding section in your ‘MobaXterm.ini’ configuration file found wherever Moba is installed. Just make sure Moba is not opened when you save the .ini file."

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

IT Pro title: 
Wireless Scanner, Security Blog, Diagramming Tool & More