IT Pro Tuesday #96

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Hello IT Pro,

Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

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. EveryCloud has no known affiliation with any of these unless we explicitly state otherwise.

Popular Repost: Tool

Attack Surface Analyzer 2.0 is the latest version of the MS tool for taking a snapshot of your system state before and after installation of software. It displays changes to key elements of the system attack surface so you can view changes resulting from the introduction of the new code. This updated version is a rewrite of the classic 1.0 version from 2012, which covered older versions of Windows. It is available for download or as source code on Github. Credit for this one goes to Kent Chen.

A Website

Group Policy Administrative Templates Catalog. TomatHunter recommends this resource, adding "any time I've ever needed to find something specific in GPMC, I would find it here first."

A Cheatsheet

Python Mega-Cheatsheet is a Python 3 notes cheatsheet that's focused on fundamentals as well as useful interview tips. Sir_Herpicus adds, "I find it incredibly useful to reference, both for day-to-day use and for interview prep. Hopefully some of you find it useful as well :)"

A Blog

CyberDrain is the blog of Kelvin Tegelaar, a MS certified engineer, CTO and System Architect. His motto, "For every monitoring automation there is an equal PowerShell remediation" hints at the type of useful content you'll find. Kelvin shares what he learns while working with most of the latest technologies—like Server 2019, RDMi, WVD, Azure and Office 365—in his "regular" job. You'll also find many scripts and how tos.

A List

30 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know provides the built-in commands plus a few add-on tools that will equip you to monitor the performance of Linux servers. Gives you what you'll need to make the best use of the monitoring tools that come with most distributions of Linux so you can identify the possible causes of a performance problem.

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

dcprom0 tells us that Group Policy Management editor has a built in filter and keyword search:

To enable, select a node under Administrative Templates in the left panel.

Go to View > Filter Options and set up your filter.
Choose View > Filter On

"Just thought I'd share this because I've been working with group policy a long time and never knew this was a thing."

epsiblivion suggests this article to see the purpose and use of all Control Panel (.cpl) files. "Also there are the miscellaneous msc's for other stuff.”

Run this to find the full list:

dir c:\windows\system32\*msc

and likewise for other control panel items:

dir c:\windows\system32\*cpl

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

Graham | CEO | EveryCloud