IT Pro Tuesday #182

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 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 Free Tool

Parallel-SSH is an asynchronous parallel SSH library designed to simplify large-scale automation. Uses the least resources and runs fastest among all Python SSH libraries. thenumberfourtytwo likes it because "all you need is a file containing all your ssh hosts—which in hindsight is quite similar to ansible, in its simplest form."

A Tip

kuldan5853 offers this advice to reduce security risks associated with network print servers: "[T]his is not for print servers only, but really look into Micro Segmentation of your network - there is no reason why printers need to be exposed to the clients directly for example, or why the print server should see your HPC cluster.

It is vastly more effort to manage if you divide your network in many small subnets that are segregated via firewall, but the gain in security is about the biggest you can imagine (if the firewall rules are implemented strictly as needed and not what is convenient)."

Another Free Tool

PDFescape is a surprisingly capable online PDF editor that allows you to annotate & modify PDFs, create forms, and more… entirely for free. Works with any modern browser, with no downloads or account required and no watermarks.

Yet Another Free Tool

Bulk Crap Uninstaller is an uninstaller for removing the vast majority of crap applications that weigh down Windows, with little user input or technical knowledge required. Can detect most applications and games (even portable or unregistered), clean up leftovers, force uninstall, automatically uninstall according to premade lists, and more. IntelligentCanary902 says, "I'm a big fan of the portable version."

One More Free Tool

PSAppDeployToolkit facilitates the performance of common application deployment tasks, including interacting with users. It offers functions that simplify the scripting needed for deploying applications in the enterprise and that help create a consistent, more-successful deployment experience. Can be used to replace your WiseScript, VBScript and Batch wrapper scripts with a single versatile, reusable, extensible tool. A shout out to knawlejj for pointing us to this one.

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

macapps.link is a Ninite alternative for the Mac. It provides a list of all the apps available, then you simply choose what you want and it automatically takes care of all the installations, quickly and without the need for you to babysit. Kindly suggested by omlet05.

Passbolt is an open-source password manager for browser, emails, terminal and chat. This self-hosted, extensible solution is based on OpenPGP and uses GnuPG to authenticate users and verify secrets server side. Our thanks for the recommendation go to R8nbowhorse.

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