IT Pro Tuesday #230

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Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

We’re looking for your favorite tips and tools we can share with the community... those that help you do your job better and more easily. Please reply or leave a comment with your suggestions, and we'll be featuring them in the coming weeks.

As always, we’re updating the full list on our website here. Enjoy.

A Free Tool

Dual Monitor Tools is a set of open-source tools designed for Windows users with dual- or multiple-monitor setups. Individual tools can be installed independently, so you are able pick and choose exactly what you want. DisturbedUnit lists it among "my favs."

A Podcast

Command Line Heroes shares fascinating stories about the developers, hackers and assorted other geeks who are changing the world of technology. The show is hosted by Saron Yitbarek, a developer and the founder of the CodeNewbie community. testing_cock reports, "Command Line Heroes is a fun one."

A Script

Dell Command Script for Intune offers a time-saving, automated option for updating Dell systems—including even changing the BIOS password, if applicable. Author SenikaiSlay explains, "[it] basically locks down DCU, updates on a schedule, and applies a BIOS password to both the BIOS and DCU. It also hides all notifications and does not auto-reboot or prompt for it.… [and] takes away Dell bloatware."

Another Free Tool

GoFlow2 is a high-performance sFlow/IPFIX/NetFlow collector that gathers network information and serializes it in a common format. This fork of CloudFlare's GoFlow provides horizontal scalability, consistent format and the ability to work with raw samples and build aggregation and custom enrichment. Our thanks for this suggestion goes to SuperQue.

A Blog

Faris Malaeb - The System Admin is full of useful tutorials and other information on how you can use PowerShell to automate sysadmin tasks and solve problems. It is the work of a highly credentialed enterprise architect, consultant and certified trainer with deep expertise in the Microsoft realm.

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

L0phtCrack is an open-source password auditing application that can also be used to recover lost passwords. Uses dictionary, brute-force and hybrid attacks as well as rainbow tables to test password strength. Kindly suggested by KillingRyuk.

DATAGERRY is an open-source CMDB and asset-management tool that leaves the definition of a data model to the user. Can externally push stored information to DNS, ticketing systems, configuration management software like Ansible, monitoring systems and more—triggered by events or when objects are added, updated or deleted. Appreciation for this recommendation goes to RedR4dbit.

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