IT Pro Tuesday #204

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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

What does it mean to be Cloud-Native? In this SysAdmin Dojo Podcast, Tech Evangelist Andy Syrewicze and IT Consultant Paul Schnackenburg look at who cloud native architecture is for, how to navigate common stumbling blocks and ultimately… is it better? Watch / listen on the SysAdmin 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 Free Tool

Uyuni is an open-source solution designed to facilitate automated deployment and infrastructure management for those tasked with managing hundreds or even thousands of Linux machines. digdilem adds, "It's a fork of Redhat's Spacewalk but fully up to date. Also known as suse manager, but supports many more distros."

A Tutorial

Top 10 Microsoft Graph PowerShell Cmdlets for Office 365 Admins is a nice tutorial on how to perform your O365 reporting with PowerShell cmdlets. Includes instructions on how to generate reports on users, licenses and groups; plus how to export Microsoft 365 Reports to a CSV and view in Grid View. Our thanks for this suggestion go to Emma__24.

A Tip

itdumbass shares a clever system for patch-cable labeling:

Use "a date-sequence number, like yyyymmdd-xxxx, where xxxx is a zero-padded sequential number. If new patches [are] added, [you don't] need to try to figure out the last used number, as any day would start at 0001. You’re databasing the patches, so all you need is a unique id for the patch."

Another Free Tool

Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit 1.0 is a set of tools to download, analyze, test, edit and store the recommended security config baselines for MS products as well as comparing them against other configurations. NotAnExpert2020 appreciates that it can "export and import local group policy to human readable files."

One More Free Tool

Appwrite is an end-to-end backend server that makes it easier to build a modern backend API from scratch as well as making it faster to build secure apps. WenYuGe explains, "It's a general purpose backend tool with a feature set comparable to Google's Firebase, plus it's self-hosted and open-source. If you're building web apps, there's probably something useful in Appwrite for you to use (you can disable unwanted services). You can do authentication, OAuth, user management, file storage, cloud functions, database, and a load of other features… It's useful if you want to build and host your own web/mobile apps and own your own deployments and data. I use it personally for building Discord bots, 'cause I don't want people snooping my chat data."

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

Openbooks is an improved way to search and download ebooks from irc.irchighway.net. It greatly improves on the IRC interface by handling all the extraction and data processing, so you simply click the book you want. ZelenskyyInPandoraPp says, "Along with libgen and zlib, it can make for a great resource."

Authelia is an open-source authentication and authorization server that can provide two-factor authentication and single sign-on for your applications via a web portal. Works as a wonderful companion for reverse proxies like nginx, Traefik or HAProxy to let them know whether requests should be allowed or redirected to Authelia's portal for authentication. Kindly suggested by 0x6b-dev.

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