IT Pro Tuesday #177

Get this in your inbox each week.

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 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 Free Tool

Batfish is an open-source analysis tool that locates configuration errors on your existing or planned networks to help minimize outages and security breaches. Appreciated by ratulm, who explains, "It will accept your configs as input and allow you to run various analyses like which flows are/not permitted and shadowed rules."

Another Free Tool

SuperOrca allows you to scan and manipulate MSI database tables via an intuitive GUI—with powerful compare and search functionality. Can be used to facilitate new MSI package distribution, and since it doesn't lock the file you are working on, you can still use other tools on that file or even install it while open. Kindly suggested by SevaraB.

A Tip

For anyone who's been wondering, "Does QoS really matter and improve Zooming latency?" ranthalas kindly provides a concept clarification: "This is a bit of a common misconception that is actually correct in most circumstances… let's address the 'bandwidth is never fully utilized'… for example, you have a 1Gbps link between two switches. According to graphs, this link never uses more than 200Mbps. No issues. However, in latency-sensitive applications, what you're seeing as a 'not even close to full link' is misleading. Think of any link as either fully utilized or not utilized. When a packet comes into a switch, if there are no other packets on the wire, it gets put on the wire. If there is another packet being put on the wire, it gets queued and then put on the wire. It's an all-or-nothing situation.

What QoS does in the case of latency-sensitive applications is to say: 'If this type of packet comes in, it needs to be put on the wire ahead of any other packets that are waiting.' So while the difference is likely milliseconds, in voice and video that matters. In this case, we're not using QoS to shape or police traffic [but] simply to assign priorities and force other traffic to get preferential treatment.

So, yes, even if your link is not fully utilized, QoS does make a difference, especially in voice and video applications. Even more so in a shared collision domain medium such as wireless."

One More Free Tool

Rainbow CSV is a Vim plugin that highlights columns in different colors in your CSV and TSV files and runs queries in a built-in SQL-like language. Provides additional information about a column when you hover, plus an automatic consistency check for CSV files. Recommended by digitaltransmutation.

A Tutorial

Lets talk about email spoofing and prevention (Alt: "That's not how SPF works....") is a brilliant post that explains exactly what SPF, DKIM and DMARC can and can't do, plus what SMTP allows and why. reddittttttttttt describes it as, "Probably the best DMARC, DKIM, SPF breakdown out there."

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

nmaptocsv is a simple python script that converts your Nmap output to CSV so you can use and manipulate the data to fit your specific aims. youngeng explains, "It returns a CSV, which you can easily import in Excel to get a properly formatted spreadsheet (using copy - paste as… or the Data tab)."

Easy-GPU-P is designed to make it easier to do GPU Partitioning on Windows Hyper-V. Allows you to create a VM, automatically install Windows 11 on it, partition your GPU and copy the required driver files, and install Parsec on the VM. Author jamesstringerparsec explains that you simply provide “an ISO, the name of the GPU you want to partition and what other resources you want to assign the VM - the script takes it from there to build and boot the VM, copy all the drivers and partition the GPU."

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