IT Pro Tuesday #238

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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

WeKan is an open-source, self-hostable kanban board collaboration tool. Designed to keep projects and tasks organized—offering a visual overview of what's what, to-do list, and planner. ford_crown_victoria describes it as a "highly recommended tool," and thinmonkey69 adds it's "easy to set up and intuitive."

A Script

Convert archives to 7z.bat recursively converts all .rar and .zip files to the .7z format with highest compression. Allows you to specify which formats to convert and removes the original archive once the new version has been created. Author vocatus explains, "I surprisingly couldn't find a script for this anywhere, so I wrote one myself."

Tutorials

Tech Field Day YouTube Channel features tons of informative presentations offered by IT innovators, experts, and vendors at these industry events. Another resource recommendation from Dramatic_Golf_5619.

Another Free Tool

Ralph is a powerful Asset Management, DCIM and CMDB system for data center and back office. Features include: tracking asset purchases and lifecycle, a flexible flow system for asset lifecycle, data center and back office support and built-in dc visualization. colttt appreciates that it "also includes things like rack management."

A Tip

Career wisdom for sysadmins, compliments of HouseCravenRaw:

  • Irreplaceable is unpromotable
  • Documentation is king
  • Know your exits (rollback plan, etc.)
  • Always get a CYA
  • Toot your own horn—modesty doesn't make money
  • ‘No’ is a complete sentence
  • Stability is paramount—don't aim for newest or best, aim for reliable and dependable
  • Cattle, not pets
  • Make sure your cattle are self-minding—the less fiddling and doting and button-pressing you need to do, the better
  • Make your own roadmap, be it your career or your department, have a direction and test it
  • When you do a thing, understand why you are doing it. Google might give you an answer, but it doesn't give you comprehension. Running a StackOverflow solution without understanding what's going on will only lead to more problems in the future
  • Don't stay in one place too long
  • Test your parachute, be it a tape backup or a rollback plan or a snapshot

 

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

NVDA is an assistive tool that enables blind and vision-impaired people to interact with Windows and many third-party applications. Includes support for popular web browsers, email clients, internet chat software, music players and Office programs; a speech synthesizer supporting over 55 languages; support for many refreshable braille displays and more. Our thanks for directing us to this one go to NoConfidence_2192, who adds, "Free, but they request donation. Good quality.”

n8n is a Zapier-style, extendable workflow automation tool that lets you connect any app that has an API with any other, then manipulate its data with little or no code. uglymuglyfugly explains, "We have probably a dozen or so Workflows automating different aspects of our business. It’s truly incredible."

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

IT Pro title: 
Collaboration Tool, Asset Management, Tech Tutorials & More