IT Pro Tuesday #161

Get this in your inbox each week.

Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

First off, we’re asking you to share your expertise by replying with some of your own favorite resources and free tools, so we can pass them along to thousands of other IT Pros in the coming weeks. And 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.

Webinar for Windows Server Admins

Unlock your Storage Potential with these Powerful Built-in Windows Server Features is a free webinar on August 11 presented by two Microsoft MVPs that will show you how to make the most out of the latest in-built Windows Server storage features. It covers storage innovations with Storage Spaces Direct & Azure Stack HCI, ReFS, PMem, QUIC & SMB, and more!

A Script

PS-ScheduledTaskCheck is a script that will check all scheduled tasks running on a Windows server and alert on any failures. It will also generate a report in the install directory of all tasks—which includes the taskname, runas user, command run, arguments to the command run, triggers and server the task runs from. Appreciation for this one goes to its author, poorest_ferengi.

A Free Tool

Supercharger Free provides a single pane view of the entire Windows Event Collection environment. Offers pre-built security filters with noise suppression, wizard-based create/update/delete/view of subscriptions and step-by-step guidance for new WEC implementations. Our thanks for the suggestion go to chinese_buffet.

Another Free Tool

Selenium HQ is a framework and ecosystem that encapsulates a variety of tools and libraries for browser automation to provide an infrastructure for the W3C WebDriver specification—a platform and language-neutral coding interface compatible with all major web browsers. Nik_Tesla explains, "I recently got tasked with changing settings on hundreds of printers, and they have no central management or API. [Selenium] uses a chrome or firefox driver to automate browser actions. It works with several programming languages, but I'm using python to look at a csv of printer IPs and run through them all. Rather than something like AutoHotKey, which relies mostly on the position of the mouse and can get thrown off easily, this is scripted to look for the specific web element you point it at. You can even record it like a macro and view what the code would be for that part if you aren't sure what you need to interact with that element."

Another Script

PS Clear Cisco IOS is a script that automatically clears port security for Cisco IOS. hhhax7 explains, "we use port security on our switches. I used this script to check for devices in err disabled mode, and if they were tripped, to reset the ports and clear port security automatically... I can make it check for anything I want to just by changing a couple lines. I have also used it to shut down unused ports and unused ports in specific vlans."

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows applications on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux, macOS and BSD so you can cleanly integrate Windows applications into your desktop. Translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls on-the-fly instead of simulating internal Windows logic, which enhances performance and memory usage.

Geek Uninstaller is a fast, efficient uninstall tool with an easy-to-use interface for handling clean and force removals, with native X64 support and the ability to uninstall Windows Store apps. Kindly recommended by Duffman36.

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