IT Pro Tuesday #179

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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 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

MCastTest allows you to test IP multicast routing on your network, with the ability to add multiple transmitters and listeners on different IP multicast groups. By checking from assorted machines and locations on your network, you can discover if all your multicast traffic is arriving where it should. Our appreciation for this one goes to mas-sive.

Another Free Tool

Trilium Notes is a hierarchical notetaking application designed with the creation of large personal knowledgebases in mind. The editor includes  tables, images and math with markdown autoformat, plus support for versioning and editing notes with source code and syntax highlighting. Features fast, intuitive navigation, full text search, strong note encryption and more. hakoen recommends it as "a very nice note taking app.”

A Tip

A simple-but-powerful idea for keeping things running smoothly for your users, compliments of bkindle2003: "Easiest [IT fix] I ever implemented was the walk-around. I just started walking around for 30 minutes in the morning or afternoon and just checked in with people. Small enough org to do so (about 50-75 people in one building). Carried a notebook just in case I needed to write something down to take care of. Just talking to people goes a long way to keeping ahead of what your users need from IT."

Yet Another Free Tool

NetSpeedMonitor is a simple, straightforward tool that lets you test to find out your current download speed or how much data volume you are using. Kindly recommended by Kenneth D, who adds, "It’s a tiny program that’s showing you the current traffic that is going via your network card. But before install, you have to enable compatibility mode."

Tutorials

Learn Windows Powershell in a Month of Lunches YouTube Channel is a free, video resource offered by the author of the well-loved book by the same name. The material is designed to take you from novice level to understanding all the practical techniques you would need in order to leverage Powershell to make your life as a sysadmin a bit easier. Appreciation for the suggestion goes to kkt_98.

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

MySQL Workbench is a unified visual tool for data modeling, SQL development that offers comprehensive admin tools for server and user administration, backup and more. MattF lists it as "one of my favorite tools for working with MySQL databases. You can work locally or remotely with this well-designed GUI tool… It also helps you design, develop and administer MySQL databases [and] easily migrate Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, Sybase ASE, PostgreSQL and other RDBMS tables, objects and data to MySQL. That alone makes it worth using."

MkDocs is a fast, easy and elegant static site generator that was designed to help you build project documentation. The documentation source files are written in Markdown and configured with a single YAML configuration file. A shout out to onmf for the recommendation.

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