IT Pro Tuesday #149

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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 Training Resource

Vscode Vim Academy is a game to help you learn and practice vim and vscode keys in an enjoyable way. Covers 2-5 vim keys per level, with level text and keys randomly generated per level. You race to complete 10 sets of tasks with as few keystrokes as possible. Appreciation for the recommendation goes to quackycoder.

A Free Tool

RackTables helps document hardware assets, network addresses, space in racks, network configuration and more for datacenter and server room asset management. Allows you to compile a list of all devices, racks and enclosures; mount the devices into the racks; maintain physical ports of devices and links between them; manage IP addresses, assign them to devices and group into networks; document NAT rules; describe loadbalancing policy and store configuration; attach files to various objects in the system; create users, assign permissions and allow/deny their actions; and label everything and everyone with a flexible tagging system. Kindly suggested by Alien864.

Another Free Tool

Logstash is a server-side data processing pipeline that dynamically ingests data from logs, metrics, web applications, data stores and assorted AWS services, and then transforms and ships it to your favorite "stash" in a continuous, streaming fashion. Regardless of format or complexity—Logstash filters parse each event as data travels from source to store, identify named fields to build a structure, and transform them into a common format to better facilitate analysis. Thanks for this one go to elk-content-share.

One More Free Tool

Alacritty is a modern terminal emulator with both a nice set of defaults and the option for extensive configuration. It integrates with other applications to offer a flexible set of features with high performance. Supports BSD, Linux, macOS and Windows. While currently in beta—i.e., there are still a few missing features and bugs to be fixed—it is appreciated by many for daily use. zhao-kun likes it as a "fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator."

A Tip

We all hate accidentally sending unfinished emails, especially on sensitive topics, but it happens nonetheless. To eradicate the risk from your life, hasthisusernamegone suggests, "[D]on't compose it in your email client at all. All my ‘this is official, don't get this wrong’ emails are composed in a basic text editor (often Notepad), then copied and pasted over to Outlook when I'm happy with them. Then it gets another proof-read and a chance for the spell-check to do it's thing and only then does it get sent. That way I can't accidentally send a half-finished email to the board or whoever."

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

Network Stuff is a portable, open-source application with a host of useful network tools. Includes TCP/UDP telnet, ping/traceroute, DNS resolver, whois, ARP, stats and TCP/UDP/IP tables (iphelper functions), TCP/UDP/ICMP/CGI multithreaded scan (TCP and CGI scan could be done throw HTTP or socks proxy), raw packet capture (multiple options including application name), raw packet forging, wake on LAN and remote shutdown and interactive TCP/UDP transparent proxy.

Speed Test WiFi Analyzer EXPERT includes a robust set of tools for analyzing network connections. Provides speed tests, wireless coverage 360 analyzer, WiFi analyzer, multi pinger and LAN connected devices. 96Retribution adds, "I use https://analiti.com/ daily on my Android tablet, Amazon fire devices, etc. The free version is good. The paid version is cheap and great."

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