IT Pro Tuesday #249

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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

TrueNAS allows you to build a professional-grade storage system for data-intensive applications. Features user-friendly access to the self-healing OpenZFS filesystem—with built-in RAID, powerful data management tools and the ability to automatically detect and repair silent data corruption and bit rot. mr-phillips lists it as his "favorite opensource NAS."

A Website

LinuxToday offers the latest news and loads of helpful technical information for the Linux admin, with an international community of contributors focused on solving problems that range from personal computing all the way to enterprise-level IT operations. Appreciated by ItchyMeat1.

A Training Resource

Under the Wire is a fun way to learn how to use Windows PowerShell in a variety of situations. This innovative training option was inspired by the Linux CLI wargame, Over the Wire, which owes its effectiveness as a training tool in no small part thanks to the game-style format. state_of_alaska describes it as "a windows powershell version [of the overthewire wargames]." And thanks to siftekos: "if anyone is trying to access the war games powershell practice, it seems like the slack channel isn't working anymore but the servers are up and the username/pw is century1/century1 for the rooms. Looks like it works."

A Tip

jaykeblakk shares a suggestion for organizing your documentation:

"Use OneNote as a Knowledge Base! It has so many features that make using it as a KB so much easier than other forms like Word and PDF documents:

• Integrated graphs for excel spreadsheets or stat tracking—Copy/Paste from Excel and it will automatically paste the entire spreadsheet correctly into OneNote
• Built-in OCR for images posted anywhere in OneNote— OCR is native to OneNote, so take a screenshot, and all the words on that screenshot will be searchable!
• Freeform formatting—You can type, draw, insert pictures or shapes, or almost anything anywhere on any page in the entire OneNote.
• Collaboration—No need to share word documents anymore, you can give your team access to the OneNote and everyone can edit it all at the same time!
• Organization—You can organize the KB by topic, section, or any other way you can think of.
• Edit auditing—You can view the most-recent edits, who made them, and when they were made. No more trying to figure out who wrote the wrong thing in a KB!
• Microsoft Teams Integration—You can add it to a Teams chat and access the KB on your phone, tablet, or anywhere else that you have access to Teams.
• And more—Embedded files, links between pages/sections, notifications in each section for new content, the list goes on!

Every company I’ve been with so far had random KB folders full of documents or PDF’s, and I’ve always consolidated it into a OneNote. My coworkers and supervisors have always been impressed with the functionality that the OneNote KB provides, and loved the simplicity of putting everything in one place."

Another Free Tool

Night Eye is a tool that can enable dark mode on any website. Analyzes the colors on each page and converts them intelligently to provide a smooth and consistent dark mode, with no bright spots or flashes. Our thanks for this suggestion go to Wdrussell1.

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

pywinauto is a Python tool that allows you to automate the sending of mouse and keyboard actions to the dialogs and controls in the Microsoft Windows GUI. Enables you to create startup and testing scripts that are capable of interacting with GUI elements, so your system can do what you need without interruption.

HAProxy is a fast, reliable TCP/HTTP load balancer, with high availability and proxying. This open-source tool works particularly well for high-traffic websites, which is why it’s currently under the hood at a large portion of the world's most-popular internet destinations. Kilobyte22 finds it "extremely powerful if you do anything with http."

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