IT Pro Tuesday #207
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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!
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 Website
Petri is a professionally oriented IT knowledgebase with an extensive library of how-tos, news, industry perspectives, webinars, conferences, whitepapers and more—all intended to help sysadmins solve problems, become more effective in their work and advance their careers. You'll find a ton of useful information on Microsoft products as well as dozens of other IT platforms and technologies.
A Free Tool
Portmaster is an open-source monitor that allows you to see all the network activity on a computer to expose questionable activity from applications that may be up to no good. Appreciation for this one goes to infiniteapecreative, who suggests it as a "Windows firewall and network monitor."
A Training Resource
How to Crash an Airplane is a natural companion to last week's item on Three Mile Island. But this time, team optimization is approached from the positive side: In a worst-case scenario, what makes a team come together to achieve the impossible? This entertaining, informative presentation helps you understand specific dynamics to cultivate in your team in order to help them overcome obstacles. A shout out to whetu, who suggested, “This guy is one of the best presenters I've seen. You learn something with every one of his talks. Put one in every one of your releases until you run out of them."
Another Free Tool
Mail PassView is a simple password-recovery tool for revealing account details for email clients in a large variety of programs. For each email account, the following fields are displayed: account name, application, email, server, server type (POP3/IMAP/SMTP), user name and password. stompy1 finds it "great to get people off imap into exchange as you can script and scoop passwords."
Another Website
DZone.com is an online community and knowledge resource aimed at professional software developers. Features information on the latest trends and loads of user-generated content on on new technologies, methodologies and best practices. While anyone can submit articles, everything is reviewed by experts to ensure consistent quality.
P.S. Bonus Free Tools
Snapdrop is an open-source, browser-based AirDrop alternative to easily transfer files with no setup or signup. This peer2peer, private solution allows you to securely and instantaneously share images, video, documents and links across devices. AdrianEarnshawMusic says, "It’s like airdrop but runs on your own network. Great for moving single files between computers on different operating systems."
PA-Ping is a self-hosted uptime and availability monitor for pinging an unlimited number of devices. Offers full alerting, including event escalation, alert suppression, and event deduplication; full historical reporting (configurable) and remote access to monitored computers without a VPN. Monitoring templates make configuration fast and easy. jr_sys adds, "the coolest feature is the tunneling - you can tie remote installations together, and then RDP to those remote servers, or monitored devices at the remote site, safely across the Internet (no incoming ports opened at the remote sites)."
Have a fantastic week and as usual, let us know any comments.