IT Pro Tuesday #142

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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

This week, we're asking for your favorite free tools 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

Mailcow is an open-source suite for running a self-hosted mailserver. It is a collection of different applications—like SOGo, Postfix and Dovecot—with an intuitive web interface for managing accounts. Recommended by spidernik84, who adds, "[It's] free, dockerized, comes with rspamd, a powerful webgui, easy single-command upgrades and sogo (webmail/calendar/contacts). Obviously based on open-source software. I've been running it for 3 years. Never a single issue, it's just fantastic."

A Podcast

On-Call Nightmares Podcast features the intriguing tales of those brave souls who work on-call in technology. Host Jay Gordon interviews the "survivors" as they share some of their nightmare experiences in trying to understand and resolve the problems that got dropped in their laps.

Tutorials

Robert McMillan’s YouTube Channel offers videos that teach how solve various complex technical problems—with a focus on speed. The videos quickly cover the essentials, so you can get the answers you need without a lot of extraneous detail. McMillan is an IT consultant, MCT and college instructor with over 50 technical certifications. Our thanks for the suggestion goes to Ping_Me_Later_Dude, who particularly appreciates the offerings on server training.

A Tip

Some sage advice from technicalityNDBO for anyone thinking they should probably feel more 'expert' in the field by now:

"IT is like a knowledge treadmill. You're always learning new technology and forgetting obsolete. Other skilled trades allow for spending 100% of your effort into getting better and better. In IT, you have to invest a non-significant amount of effort into just not getting worse."

A Documentation Resource

Affinity symbol set is a collection of printable, manufacturer-independent 2D icons you can use in your computer network diagrams. Kindly suggested by FunderThucker, who tells us, "Just drag and drop these svg icons onto your visio doc. They're high quality and look good."

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

Security Trails allows you to access current and historical DNS, domain and IP data. A free account gets you 50 queries per month. Recommended by DrinkMoreCodeMore: "Security Trails (formally known as DNS Trails) still has free accounts for anyone needing historical DNS data."

Moodle is an open-source, web-based learning management platform. Offers scalability and customizability, a simple interface with drag-n-drop features, good documentation and lots of plugins and add-ons. lorimar explains, "It ties into Banner and plenty of other college ERP systems, but does have a little bit of a learning curve/quirks."

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