IT Pro Tuesday #173
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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 Tip
Some helpful advice from TheBigBlueTuna: "Documentation feels less like extra work… if you do it up front while you are building a system. This helps to pause at each major step and document any whys or gotchas that can be difficult to remember once you hit the next bump in the road during setup.
Personally for each new system deployment I create a minimum of 4 pages:
- The build process so others can see what I did.
- Any topology or overview diagrams.
- A page dedicated to systems info, requirements (system, firewall, permissions), service accounts, other dependent or connected systems.
- A how-to page full of common admin tasks.
While it is a bit of a pain to always have to do this for every system, it is a far greater pain when something breaks and you don't have this basic info ready to go."
A Free Tool
Prime95 is a CPU bench-marking application that tests the power of your processor by finding prime numbers—those that are only divisible by 1 and themselves. This pushes a CPU to its limits and gives you a window into the performance level and stability of a CPU, and by extension, a PC. A shout out to manvscar for the suggestion.
A Script
The only command you will ever need to understand and fix your Group Policies (GPO) is a GPO cleanup script that analyses Group Policies using assorted methods to provide you with views from different angles. It also suggests how you might solve the identified issues, which can make it easier to fix what's wrong. Kindly recommended by maxcoder88.
Another Script
Google App Script to set a signature template on domain users explains how you can apply a signature template to your Google Workspace users. The author, MrCaspan, encourages the community to modify as needed for their own environment, and adds, "I have added a bot to mine so that I can trigger a manual refresh of the signatures for all users using a bot command."
Tutorials
Lawrence Systems YouTube Channel offers lots of explanatory videos on firewalls, storage solutions, MSP tools, security tools and open-source topics. Also features a live show every Thursday. D0T1X likes their "videos about open-source firewalling solutions (and other sysadmin/homelab stuff)."
P.S. Bonus Free Tools
Kaleidoscope enables you to find the differences in text and image files as well as folders for the MacOS. Locates all the changes in seconds, no matter where things are located. Drag and drop files and folders, use the Clipboard, macOS Services, the command line, and many pre-configured integrations. Credit for sharing this one goes to Forgery.
Ruffle is an open-source Flash Player emulator that runs natively on all modern operating systems as a standalone application, and on all modern browsers through the use of WebAssembly. Enables you to run the multitude of legacy application GUIs that still use Adobe Flash, while leveraging the safety of the browser sandbox and the memory safety of Rust. Once you install the web version, existing flash content will work without additional configuration. Ruffle detects all the existing Flash content on any website and "polyfills" it into a player that makes seamless, transparent upgrading of websites that still rely on Flash content easy. Our appreciation for this suggestion goes to chittershitter.
Have a fantastic week and as usual, let us know any comments.