IT Pro Tuesday #196
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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!
As the hybrid cloud management story is becoming critically important, The SysAdmin DOJO podcast is talking to various tech experts to get their take. We’ve just talked to Thomas Maurer from the Azure Advocacy team at Microsoft about Hybrid Cloud Management via Azure Arc. [Did you know you can setup your on-prem Azure Stack HCI deployments as “Custom Locations” inside of Arc so they appear as sites within the Azure control plane?] Get informed. Watch/listen to this SysAdmin DOJO podcast.
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 Free Tool
Portecle provides a user-friendly GUI for creating, managing and examining key- and certificate-related information. Allows you to easily interact with and keep track of you keystores, keys, certificates, certificate requests, certificate revocation lists and more. Appreciation for the recommendation goes to peanutbuttersmack.
A Tip
A word of caution from LifeOnDeathRow regarding the temptation to clean up racks of messy cabling when you have some free time: "Don't f*ck with a running network when there are critical services running just to make it look pretty. Wait until a switch replacement or a re-cabling job, but the risk vs reward is just not even close on this one."
Another Free Tool
OBS Studio is an open-source solution for video recording and livestreaming on Windows, Mac and Linux. Offers high-performance, realtime audio and video capture and mixing from a wide variety of sources. Recommended by mikeparkie, who reports he finds it useful for screen recording.
Yet Another Free Tool
PlantUML is designed to help you more-quickly draw clear, human-readable network diagrams. cr0ft appreciates it because "[network diagrams] can take a shit ton of time, especially if you want to create something good looking.… Personally I'm just not that artistic... so I'm currently working on making diagrams with [this tool]."
One More Free Tool
emptty is a simple, lightweight CLI Display Manager that gives you a console login screen as an alternative to a typical login manager GUI that displays in place of the default shell at the end of the boot process. Kindly suggested by antyhrabia.
P.S. Bonus Free Tools
QTTabBar is a handy extension that brings the convenience of tabbed browsing (as well as some other nice features) to Microsoft's Explorer file browser. According to tomk14, "QTTabBar is brilliant for having multiple tabs on windows file explorer."
mergerfs is a union filesystem for simplifying the storage and management of files spread across numerous devices by making them appear as if on a single drive. scex explains, "It creates a pool of storage across multiple drives, without relying on something like RAID etc. The idea being that you don't want to check which drive data is on, but instead have it all accessible from one location. People often combine it with SnapRaid, which is used to offer some protection against a drive failure."
Have a fantastic week and as usual, let us know any comments.