IT Pro Tuesday #183

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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 Script

[PowerShell] Advanced HTML reporting explains how you can use some simple scripting to create feature-rich reports you can share. Author MadBoyEvo clarifies, "While it says in the title Advanced HTML reporting, it's actually advanced in terms of what you can achieve but not complicated to use."

A Tip

Some sage career advice for the junior sysadmin, compliments of cliffhnz: "Never EVER be afraid to ask! That’s how you learn! Maybe they are doing [whatever you are wondering about] purely out of habit and shouldn’t. Maybe they have found that after following all instruction from the maker of the software… for now, this is the “easiest way” to get things done. Be curious. Ask away. This is what gets a junior up to a senior level, gaining knowledge."

A Free eBook

A SysAdmin Guide to Azure IaaS – 2nd Edition is a free 100+ page guide from Altaro that teaches how to set up and maintain a high-performing Azure IaaS environment. Covers the whys and hows of VM sizing and deployment, migration, storage & networking, security & identity, infrastructure as code, backup & replication, Azure Active Directory, Azure Arc, Automanage and more.

A Tutorial

What is Reverse Telnet and how do I configure it? is a helpful post that explains how to telnet to a device and then console to another device from there so you can remotely recover a device that loses network access because of a boot failure or config error—without an expensive console server at each remote site. crznet66 shares, "I do this all the time… Ensure you set an ACL on your AUX line too, as it would be reachable once enabled."

Another Tip

itdumbass offers a clever metaphor to explain the impact of latency to a non-technical individual: "A man got a job painting the white lines down the middle of a highway. On his first day he painted 10 miles; the next day six miles; the next day less than a mile. When the boss asked the man why he kept painting less each day, he replied: 'I keep getting farther away from the paint can.'"

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

NTLite is a powerful yet simple Windows configuration tool to help with maintaining images. Supports all standard image formats plus image joining/splitting/conversions. Can create a bootable ISO from any image where the normal folder structure is present as well as editing images in all supported host combinations. Y4sou uses it "to remove all the crap that comes preinstalled, change privacy settings, name the computer and a bunch of other settings.”

LOLBAS (“Living Off the Land Binaries And Scripts”) is a well-maintained list of the Windows system tools provided by Microsoft to perform system maintenance, updates etc. XavierM explains, "This is a good starting point when you need to investigate suspicious processes activity on a system (proactively or in forensics investigation)."

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