IT Pro Tuesday #156

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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

We're also asking for your favorite tips and 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

Scrapli is a fast and easy Python 3.6+ screen-scraping client for network devices. This flexible tool offers great editor support, sync/async, a pluggable transport system, the ability to add new device support, a Nornir plugin as well as options for NETCONF devices. Kindly suggested by comeroutewithme.

A Podcast

The History of Networking features fascinating discussions about the creation of all the technologies that make the modern Internet possible. It's an opportunity to hear stories about world-changing technologies and the organizations involved from the very people who created them. Credit for this one goes to BPDU_Unfiltered.

Another Free Tool

Dog is a distributed firewall management system for Linux that can manage hundreds of per-server firewalls, with consistent network access rules across servers in different regions across multiple providers. Features defense-in-depth, beyond gateway firewalls; constantly updated blocklists with thousands of addresses distributed across many servers; connection and/or bandwidth usage limits; and auto updates of per-server iptables rules. Appreciated by Humble-Magician6657.

Yet Another Free Tool

ImportExcel is a PowerShell module for importing and exporting Excel spreadsheets without involving Excel. Allows you to read/write Excel files without the Excel COM-object, so you can more easily create tables, pivot tablesa and charts. 229-T explains, "the ImportExcel function in Powershell (all bow before the great and mighty Doug Finke) is life-changing if you manipulate data inside Powershell. If anything deserves a shout-out, it does."

One More Free Tool

sg3_utils is a set of Linux utilities for sending SCSI commands to devices. Works with transports like FCP, SAS, SPI as well as less-obvious devices that use SCSI, like ATAPI cd/dvd drives and SATA disks that connect through a translation layer or bridge device. Our thanks for the recommendation go to Necrowerx.

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

Apache Kafka is an open-source, distributed event streaming platform that captures data in real-time from event sources like databases, sensors, mobile devices, cloud services and software applications. Data is stored durably in the form of streams of events that can be manipulated, processed and reacted to in real-time as well as retrospectively. Event streams can be routed to different destination technologies as needed.

PeaZip is a cross-platform, open-source file archiver utility for reducing the size of large files. Simply add files for compression/decompression using the file explorer on the right, then choose an action to apply from the main toolbar or by right-clicking. A full-featured, user-friendly alternative to WinRar, WinZip and the like that allows you to open and extract over 200 archive formats.

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