IT Pro Tuesday #175

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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.

And 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 Training Resource

Learn and Test DMARC is a console designed to help you understand DMARC by displaying the background communication that occurs between servers when SPF, DKIM and DMARC are validating as an email gets delivered. Also enables you to test how your email is performing. Author freddieleeman adds, "A few years ago, I set up a mail server and noticed that email would regularly fail to reach its destination. While looking for solutions, words like SPF, DKIM, DMARC and alignment started popping up in blogs and manuals. Unfortunately, while there is a lot of information on this subject on the web, I had a hard time understanding these mechanisms and how they relate to each other… I started working on a project with a friend that could probably and hopefully help people with this by visualizing the communication between servers when an email gets delivered."

A Blog

How I Wifi offers informative posts on the art of wireless design, including the tools that make it easier. Covers surveying, deploying, certification study and wireless standards plus tech and troubleshooting. Our thanks go to PrettyDecentSort for directing our attention to this one.

A Tutorial

How to remote desktop fullscreen RDP with just SOME of your multiple monitors walks you through how to span a variable number of monitors in Windows RDP, since the feature is buried with no user interface. YellowOnline explains, "I added a third screen to my setup and was wondering how to get RDP over two screens but use my third screen for (local) my communications, e.g. CTI, Teams, Zoom, Webex. Other sysadmins might have a use case too, so I thought I'd share how to edit the rdp file."

A Free eBook

How to Get the Most out of Windows Admin Center – 2nd Edition is Altaro's new ebook that explains the optimal configurations and applications for harnessing the full potential of Microsoft's powerful management tool. Covers installation & configuration, getting started, Hyper-V management, security, Azure & PowerShell connections and more. This newly released edition addresses all the latest updates and features Microsoft has added since the original publication in 2019."

A Tip

Some practical advice from ThePurpleBuffalo that might save your from succumbing to ‘cried wolf’ syndrome, "High alert volume will inevitably lead to 'Alert Fatigue,' which puts your environment at risk.

All alerts need to be:

• Relevant (I don't care if something in a dev environment goes down.)
• Timely (I don't care that something was down 8 months ago.)
• Actionable (If I can't do anything to fix it, why am I getting an alert for it?)

If you are receiving alerts that fail to meet any of these criteria, you need to spend time tweaking your alerts. Managing alerts is an ongoing process. If after you have done all of that cleanup and tweaking you are still experiencing high alert volumes, then you need to spend time improving your infrastructure to either be more reliable or self healing. See also [this resource]."

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

NoMachine is a fast, secure, easy way to access an enabled computer from anywhere. Functions as your own personal server, creating a private and secure means of accessing your remote machine via Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and Raspberry. Our appreciation for this suggestion goes to derspy.

Screencast-O-Matic is a screen recorder for Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android and Chromebook. Allows you to capture any area of your screen and add audio from your microphone or video from your webcam. chazza7 adds, "I've been using Screencast-O-Matic to record ‘how to’ videos, and it works really well without a lot of unnecessary features getting in the way."

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