IT Pro Tuesday #157

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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 List

Microsoft Mac Downloads is a one-stop shop for all the Mac-specific Microsoft installers. cardboardmoon explains, "It's a cleanly-organized table of download links (automatically updated) for standalone installer packages of Microsoft products for macOS systems. As someone managing a 70/30 Win/Mac workstation environment, this will save me quite a bit of hassle with the Apple side."

A Tip

A great idea for labelling cables, compliments of reddwombat: "Use wrap mode, but not directly on cable. Put a large diameter plastic straw over the cable first. On fiber, it gives you more space to type… also allows spinning to read it, and labels tend to stay stuck."

 

A Podcast

Network Collective is a network engineering podcast with industry experts, pioneers and fellow engineers from the networking community. Topics range from protocol deep-dives to career management, but with a focus on relevance and providing value to those working in the field. Kindly recommended by FlyingPasta.

A Cheatsheet

CSP Cheatsheet is a quick reference on all the supported features and directives of Content Security Policy. Includes example policies and suggestions on how to make the best use of CSP. Can be helpful when you need to identify valid and invalid directives and values.

A Free Tool

SeaweedFS is a fast, distributed storage system for blobs, objects, files and data that stores/serves billions of files. Can transparently integrate with the cloud with both fast local access and elastic cloud storage capacity. Blob store has O(1) disk seek, local and cloud tiering. Filer supports cross-cluster active-active replication, Kubernetes, POSIX, S3 API, encryption, Erasure Coding for warm storage, FUSE mount, Hadoop and WebDAV. chrislusf finds "it is much faster than the 'high performance' Minio."

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

nfdump enables you to collect and process netflow and sflow data sent from compatible devices for both historical analysis and continuous tracking of interesting traffic patterns. Optimized for speed in order to filter efficiently. Our thanks for the suggestion goes to servidge.

Continuous Bandwidth Tester is an internet speed stress test that can run for an unlimited period of time. Measures download/upload bandwidth, packet loss, RTT and ping—to show you the outages and drops of bandwidth affecting the stability of your internet connection. Imburr found it useful for "a client with a home user complaining they are getting kicked off an RDP server randomly... pretty sure it had something to do with their home internet. [It can] execute on their local PC over a few days to see if their internet connectivity is being lost briefly at random times [but without] a constant ping option, which might get them blocked."

 

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

IT Pro title: 
MS Mac Downloads, Cabling Tip, CSP Cheatsheet & More