IT Pro Tuesday #140

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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

FSumFrontend is a drag-and-drop tool that allows you to compute message digests, checksums and HMACs for files and text strings. Can handle multiple files at once. Ninjanomic explains, "[It] generates hash values from a huge number of cryptohash algorithms. Good to prove file integrity when sending out data to other organizations, use it on the daily."

A Blog

DMAC Network Automation Blog is where network engineer Daniel Macuare shares his passion for solving problems with code and improving the state of network infrastructure. You'll find original articles, automation ideas and how-tos.

A Tutorial

Shell Scripting Tutorial covers some of the basics of shell scripting and helps explain the powerful potential of programming available in the Bourne shell. Appreciation for directing us to this one goes to DhaiKhan.

Another Tutorial

This excellent blog post explains exactly how to use the GPOZaurr command. Kindly suggested by ahelsby, who tells us, "I’d highly recommend getting familiar with the GPOZaurr powershell module that in minutes can produce an excel doc of all your gpo’s, let you know which ones have issues, reveal passwords stored in GPO’s and much more."

A Cheatsheet

Sed Cheatsheet is Eric Pement's handy reference to help facilitate Sed scripting. Bluecobra appreciates this compilation of useful one-line scripts because "knowing your way around the gnu toolset has been super useful for me.... Nearly everything I need for Sed [is] in the one-liners cheat sheet."

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

Audacity is an intuitive open-source multi-track audio editor and recorder. mythofechelon tells us, "I'm hardly an audiophile and definitely not an audio engineer, but any changes that I've ever needed to make to an audio file (convert from FLAC to 320 KbPS MP3, add fades, splice tracks, etc.) has been easily handled by Audacity, especially when you add additional libraries (LAME for MP3, FFmpeg, etc.)"

Bees With Machine Guns is a utility for creating micro EC2 instances to load test web applications. You simply enter a target url and an army of "bees" will simulate traffic originating from several different sources to hit the target. Thanks for this one goes to OkPomegranate6125.

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