IT Pro Tuesday #193

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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

Looking for the best Hyper-V management tools? The latest SysAdmin DOJO podcast has just released a two-part series exploring the management and tooling ecosystem for Hyper-V; the best tools for on prem and best tools for hybrid cloud. Listen/Watch on the DOJO or on your favorite podcast player.

We're looking for cool tips and tools we can share with the community... those that help you do your job better and more easily. Please reply with your latest finds, so we can help others benefit from your experience.

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 Tutorial

How does public key encryption work? is a well-written explainer on what exactly “asymmetric encryption” is and how it functions within the TLS/SSL protocol to secure communication during transmission. Our thanks for sharing this great resource go out to SecureWeeb.

A Tip

projectself shares some great advice on how to approach the need to change IP addressing on multiple subnets: "Change the DHCP lease timeout down to 5 minutes or so. Add the new address in, replacing the old IP. Add the original IP in as secondary interface. Let it bake a few days. It will continue to run. Go look at the arp cache to find statically defined devices like printers. Go from arp mac to mac-address table on the switch and have desktop address them until the arp cache on the old subnet is empty. Remove the secondary address on the interface and from any routing protocols. Restore DHCP lease times."

A Free Tool

PDF Catfish is a simple script for pulling information from one PDF file for use in another. Author foonathan explains, "I needed to concatenate lecture notes into a single PDF file, but wanted to preserve the bookmarks for easier navigation. [This script] extracts the bookmarks, updates the page numbers, and puts them back into the next file."

Another Tip

Sin_of_the_Dark kindly shares some helpful Intune magic: "You can sync devices to Intune with a single-line PowerShell command:

Get-ScheduledTask | where {$_.TaskName -eq 'PushLaunch'} | Start-ScheduledTask

That's it. That's all. It doesn't help to invoke a sync remotely unless you have PS access to the computer somehow. This can be a quick and dirty way to invoke a sync for all your devices by pushing this command to them; either through Intune or your RMM. Since, for some reason, Intune still won't let you bulk sync."

Another Free Tool

MKVToolNix is a toolset for creating, inspecting and altering Matroska files. Shishire adds, "I try to output video files exclusively in mkv containers until they hit deployment locations, since mkv is so malleable. MKVToolNix is a great toolkit for mucking with them, including replacing audio and/or video tracks, adding embedded subtitles, as well as the ability to examine and edit properties and other embedded files."

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

Registry to PowerShell Converter is a simple online tool for doing precisely what the name suggests: converting from a .reg file to PowerShell code. Our appreciation goes to mikeparkie for directing us to this helpful tool.

Barrier is open-source KVM software that allows you to interact with multiple machines using a single set of input devices without the use of specialized hardware. Our appreciation for the suggestion goes to rpoliticsthrowaway1, who explains, "having the program on 2 PCs allows you to control both from 1 set of kb & mouse."

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