IT Pro Tuesday #172
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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!
We're looking for your favorite tips and 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 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
OpenVAS is a vulnerability scanner featuring unauthenticated and authenticated testing, various high- and low-level internet and industrial protocols, performance tuning for large-scale scans and a powerful internal programming language that can implement any type of vulnerability test. Tests are pulled from a feed with a long history and daily updates. Our thanks for this one go to sughenji.
IT Humor
This inspired practical joke was shared by its evil-genius author, Sunsparc, who definitely earns points for creativity. (Just to be clear: We are definitely NOT suggesting you do anything like this to someone you know.)
"I push a Powershell script to one particular user that fetches a random cat fact from a website then reads it through their computer speakers out loud. They're thoroughly convinced that their boss, a non-IT person, is doing it to them."
Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Speech
$SpeechSynth = New-Object System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer
$SpeechSynth.SelectVoice("Microsoft Zira Desktop")
$Browser = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
$Browser.Proxy.Credentials = [System.Net.CredentialCache]::DefaultNetworkCredentials
[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12
$CatFact = (ConvertFrom-Json (Invoke-WebRequest -Verbose -Uri https://catfact.ninja/fact -UseBasicParsing))
$CatFact.fact
$SpeechSynth.Speak("Did you know ?")
$SpeechSynth.Speak($CatFact.fact)
A Tutorial
Structured Cabling, Plenum Spaces, and you: A *brief* guide to ethernet and fiber cabling in your building(s) is a comprehensive how-to on properly running cabling that also covers some relevant legal and code questions (from the perspective of a Florida contractor with an Alarm Systems 1 Electrical Contractor license). Our appreciation goes to jacobjkeyes for sharing this useful resource.
Another Free Tool
AS-Stats is a simple tool that uses Perl scripts to generate per-AS traffic graphs for one or more routers based on the NetFlow/sFlow records. Kindly suggested by sbbr.
More Tutorials
Dave's Garage is the YouTube channel of retired Microsoft engineer, Dave Plummer. Features useful DIY info and practical tutorials that make complex topics easy to understand. Offerings include Windows v. Linux comparisons, Arduino project tutorials, shop projects, ESP32 information, info on Windows history and more. Sharp_Eyed_Bot finds it "worth a watch."
P.S. Bonus Free Tools
BurnAware allows you to create all types of CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs—even M-Disc. Advanced options include control of boot settings, UDF partition and ISO levels, session selection, audio CD text, data recovering, disc spanning and direct copying. Fruguy01 tells us, "BurnAware was my choice of free burning software for a long time. Haven't used it in a while, but it's still a good product."
FancyZones is a MS utility that allows you to quickly arrange and snap windows into efficient layouts and restore different layouts. You can define a set of desktop locations that serve as drag targets for windows. When the user drags a window into a designated zone, the window will be resized and repositioned to fill the zone. Thanks for the recommendation go to meest.
Have a fantastic week and as usual, let us know any comments.