IT Pro Tuesday #145

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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

This week, we're asking for your favorite 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

Apcupsd is designed for power management and control of most of APC’s UPS models on Unix and Windows machines. During a power failure, it notifies users that a shutdown may occur. If power is not restored, a system shutdown will follow when the battery is exhausted, a timeout (seconds) expires, or runtime expires based on internal APC calculations determined by power consumption rates.  Apcupsd works with most of the Smart-UPS models and most simple signaling models such as Back-UPS and BackUPS-Office. gerdesj likes that it "has a mini web interface that can show multiple UPS's details."

Training Resource

How to Become a PowerCLI Superhero – 5 Use-Cases to Get Started is a free webinar that will be hosted by two VMware vExperts on April 21. The event is being produced by Hornetsecurity's Altaro team and will feature live demonstrations of highly useful applications of PowerCLI – a VMware automation tool. All attendees will receive a free copy of a connected 100+ page PowerCLI eBook.

Another Free Tool

Pping measures the roundtrip delay application that packets experience relative to any capture point on the connection's path, using the naturally occurring reflected signal that can be obtained when the timestamp option is used in a TCP connection. These delays are collected per TCP connection with outbound packets providing the signal and inbound packets the reflection, and Pping measures the delay of two different round-trips from the monitored packets. jiannone suggests it as a "more intriguing option [for service assurance monitoring] ... It's an edgier solution but not synthetic in any way. The philosophy is spot on. The execution requires a lot of effort though."

A Tutorial

Linux Upskill Challenge is a month-long course for those who want to work in Linux-related jobs. The course focuses on servers and commandline, but it assumes essentially no prior knowledge and progresses gently. This valuable content was offered as a paid course in the past, but is now free and fully open source. Our thanks for this one go to nz_kereru.

A Website

Networking with FISH is a networking website that shares both technical information and relevant career tips and life lessons from Denise Fishburne, a talented CCIEx2 and CCDE. Ms Fishburne's work is well appreciated by VA_Network_Nerd, who described her as "perfectly capable of driving a steel spike through the heart of anyone who would like to suggest "Girls can't route." She's been working in CPOC for 17 years and has probably physically broken more network devices than many of us have installed."

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

Pynetbox is a Python API client library for Digital Ocean's well-loved NetBox. JasonDJ explains, "it’s basically a wrapper for requests and allows you to lookup and delete objects via the API in a python script. You can also create and delete via dictionaries. Very powerful when combined with for loops."

iTop is designed to manage the complexity of shared infrastructures, giving you the ability to analyze the impact of an incident or a change on various services and contracts. This open-source web application is flexible enough to adapt to your processes whether you want rather informal and pragmatic processes or a strict ITIL-aligned behavior. Features include documenting IT infrastructure and the relationships between elements and stakeholders of the infrastructure; managing incidents, user requests and planned outages; documenting IT services and contracts with external providers including SLAs; manual or scripted information export; and mass import (manually and using scripts) or synchronize/federate any data from external systems. Kindly recommended by biswb.

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