IT Pro Tuesday #162

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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.

A Tutorial

Understanding Wi-Fi Speed and How 6 GHz Compares is a fantastic post that explains the components of Wi-Fi connections, how they interact to determine performance and how 6GHz compares with 5GHz and 2.4GHz in practical terms. A shout out to the author, mccanntech, for sharing!

A Free Tool

johann is a web-based network device monitoring tool for Cisco IOS XE devices. Allows you to collect configuration and operational data for your networking devices in a structured way—all in a single database. Our thanks go to the author, flopach.

A Website

ChannelE2E is a great resource to help IT service providers stay current. Offers strategic information for MSPs and VARs on business development, talent recruitment and management, financial models, marketing, sales and customer engagement.  Kindly suggested by jmclbu.

Another Free Tool

Fog Project is an open-source network computer cloning and management solution. Can capture, deploy and manage Windows, Mac OSX and assorted Linux distributions. anon_user_acct adds, "I've used it to image 5000+ Dell workstations in a single day… it was great and made the process super simple."

A Tip

JustALittleMoreSpace shares a shortcut to get the uptime: net stats workstation—which allows you to check the complete stats for that workstation.

One More Free Tool

nuttcp is a network performance measurement tool that determines the raw TCP (or UDP) network layer throughput by transferring memory buffers from a source system across an interconnecting network to a destination system, either transferring data for a specified time interval, or alternatively transferring a specified number of bytes. Provides user, system and wall-clock time, transmitter and receiver CPU utilization and loss percentage (for UDP transfers). scriminal suggests it over Iperf3 in high-bandwidth scenarios and for use with UDP.

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

KanbanFlow is a lean project management tool for team collaboration. The board gives you a real-time overview of all tasks, with changes to any team member's board showing up instantly for the rest of the team. Supports the Pomodoro time-tracking technique. Fatality tells us, "Trello is a mess, KanbanFlow is much better."

Lithnet Access Manager provides a user-friendly, web-based interface where users can request local admin passwords, BitLocker recovery keys, and just-in-time admin access to Windows computers in a modern, secure and user-friendly way. Provides a granular permission model and a detailed auditing system that are both extensible with PowerShell. Appreciation for this one goes to chinese_buffet.

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