IT Pro Tuesday #166
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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!
A big thanks to all those who have checked out 365 Threat Monitor—our new tool that allows you to find out how many threats make it through to your organization on M365.
We worked hard to create a truly useful tool that can help sysadmins better protect their M365 users from being tricked, and we’re thrilled so many of you have benefited from that!
For those that missed it, 365 Threat Monitor is a mobile app that detects any threats that breach your Microsoft 365 security and immediately sends you a phone alert, so you can delete it and prevent damage. The app was developed by Hornetsecurity—the people behind IT Pro Tuesday—who currently provide premium email security services to over 40k customers worldwide.
The first 10,000 who download it get a forever-free version that allows you to make a limited number of one-click deletions from right inside the app. Setup takes seconds – Learn more and download here.
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 Tip
Some time-saving automation shared by madv_willneed… Problem: "Man, it's annoying to remember to check the cert expiry dates on all these different servers and make sure the renewal actually worked."
1-line bash solution:
cat <<< $(( ($(date -d "$(echo -n | openssl s_client -servername "$domain" -connect "$domain:443" 2>&1 | openssl x509 -enddate -noout | grep '^notAfter' | cut -d'=' -f2)" "+%s") - $(date "+%s")) / 86400 ))
"Never a problem again, just set up a super simple job to run this against the domains I care about every few minutes or so, and I know if anything is getting close to expiring. Costs basically nothing to do it… I don't really have any reason not to do it every few minutes, even if I could get away with once a day or something."
A Tutorial
How to Integrate Google Forms With Google Sheets walks you through how to make reporting data more consistent by controlling what people can enter. This article explains exactly how to set up a Google Form and link it to Google Sheets, which can save you time and make your workflow more efficient. Our appreciation for the suggestion goes to dvr75.
A Tip
A shortcut, compliments of Atticus_of_Finch: "You can type CMD in the address bar of Windows Explorer in any mapped drive and open a command prompt in that folder. You can also just type PowerShell in the address bar and open a PowerShell session in that folder.
If you need to run a configuration file as a command line argument for a console command, you can drag and drop the configuration file from a Windows Explorer window into your command prompt."
A Free Tool
Account Lockout Examiner is an investigation tool to help you quickly identify the root cause of an AD account lockout. This tool replaces a manual search through cryptic log entries with a single click, allowing you to easily identify improperly mapped network drives, services or scheduled tasks running under stale credentials, or an outdated password saved on a mobile device. Igot1forya adds, "Use this free Netwrix Tool - works great!"
Tutorials
Ben Eater's YouTube Channel provides some terrific explanatory videos on various topics related to electronics, computer architecture, networking and other technical subjects. Includes nice tutorials on some IT fundamentals that are often taken for granted rather than fully understood as well as a nice set of higher-level how-tos. alphaxion suggests it as a source of "some excellent information about networking."
P.S. Bonus Free Tools
CutePDF allows you to create PDFs from almost any application, including the ability to change document properties, add passwords with security settings and more. Also offers basic programmatic access so you can integrate it within an application. Kindly suggested by FortiSysadmin.
Time Card is an open-source solution for PTP-enabled networks that provides the accurate time via GNSS—with a high stability (and holdover) oscillator such as an atomic clock as a backup in the event of GNSS failure. zeroibis recommends it for those who "need to go the full self-hosted NTP route."
Have a fantastic week and as usual, let us know any comments.