IT Pro Tuesday #211
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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!
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As usual, 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.
And you can always find 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
ping.pe is a nice ping/MTR combination for troubleshooting connectivity problems. Includes a TCP port checker and DNS diagnostics with dig from multiple locations. sixbux explains, "I work for an ISP so I'm often looking at routing on a more global level - what route is traffic taking inbound, what loss exists and where, are neighbour networks accepting route advertisements, etc. I'll often start with ping.pe to get a general overview, and then start digging into public route servers from there."
Another Free Tool
NAPS2 (Not Another PDF Scanner 2) is a simple tool for scanning documents to PDF (as well as other file types). This one-click scanner allows you to rotate, crop and rearrange scans and includes an integrated OCR. There's also an optional CLI that can help with automation and scripting, an MSI installer and application-level configuration available for group policy (GPO) deployment, plus portable archives available with no installation required. 85185 describes it as a "very quick/simple-to-use PDF scanning tool, newbie friendly."
A Podcast
TechSequences offers lively conversation on the consequences that have come along with the internet and related technologies. Discussions explore the impact these world-changing innovations have had on our lives and cultures as well as future possibilities. riw777 finds it "quite useful."
Yet Another Free Tool
Windows Terminal is a fast, powerful, open-source modern terminal application for command-line tools and shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell and WSL. Features include support for multiple tabs, panes, Unicode and UTF-8 characters; a GPU-accelerated text-rendering engine; and custom themes, styles and configurations. gbarnick adds, "Combined with WSL2 and your choice of Linux distro, it's nice to work in a Linux shell instead of command prompt sometimes. Windows Terminal gives you both in the same window. I spend most of my time doing network troubleshooting in Linux instead of cmd."
One More Free Tool
PerigeeCopy is an answer to some of the annoying limitations of the built-in file operations of Windows Explorer. This configurable Win32 shell extension lets you copy, move and delete files and more with the ease of the Explorer GUI. allenflame calls it a "great copy/paste utility. Allows you to automatically rename files if you're copying or moving them."
P.S. Bonus Free Tools
Windows Sysinternals is a collection of general sysadmin tools for file and disk, networking, process management, security and collecting system information on Windows hosts. It's a great collection of free sysadmin tools for looking deeper into the Windows host. And they've recently added a set of how-to videos from their 25th-anniversary event. Thanks for this one go to MattF.
SyncMLViewer allows you to see the SyncML protocol stream between the Windows 10 client and the management system, as well as some parsing to extract details that can make your troubleshooting analysis a bit easier. lt uses ETW to trace the MDM Sync session so you can see exactly what the client sends and receives. NotAnExpert2020 appreciates that it allows you to "view the commands sent by an MDM (Airwatch or Intune) to a Windows PC in real time."
Have a fantastic week and as usual, let us know any comments.