IT Pro Tuesday #23

BASH Shortcut, Security Podcast, Free Tools & More

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Hello IT Pro,

Great response last week — thank you for all the comments, suggestions and feedback. As you may know, I also post these on reddit each week. If you’d like to join the discussion there, just check out the latest post on my profile. You can also follow us on Twitter to get these daily.

Here are the most interesting items that have come across our desks, laptops, and phones this week. As always, EveryCloud has no known affiliation with any of these unless we explicitly state otherwise.

A Free Tool

Healthstone is a lightweight, self-hosted, agent-based system-monitoring solution that runs lots of customizable health checks. The dashboard runs on a Windows or Linux server, and it has agents for the Windows and Linux hosts you want to monitor. You can customize the dashboard to send notifications via email, Pushbullet, or NodePoint tickets whenever a client stops checking in or any of the configured checks fail. Configuration is retrieved from the dashboard by all agents in the form of templates, which are stored in the templates folder and can be customized for your needs. Thanks to mikedopp for this one!

A Podcast

StormCast is a daily 5–10 minute podcast from the Internet Storm Center covering the latest information security threat updates. New podcasts are released late in the day, so they’re waiting for you to listen on your morning commute. While the format is compact, the information is very high-level and provides a real overview of the current state of affairs in the info-sec world.

Another Podcast

Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast is hosted by Scott and Ben, two IT Pros with expertise in SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure. The podcast focuses primarily on Office 365 with some discussion on Azure, especially as it relates to Office 365 in areas such as Azure AD and Mobile Device Management (MDM) or Mobile Application Management (MAM).

Another Free Tool

Rufus is another utility for formatting and creating bootable USB flash drives. This one works with MRB/GPT and BIOS/UEFI. Rufus is about twice as fast as UNetbootin, Universal USB Installer, or Windows 7 USB download tool when creating a Windows 7 USB installation drive from an ISO. It is also marginally faster for creating a Linux bootable USB from ISOs. We first heard of this one from Gianks, but there were quite a few others who shared the recommendation as well.

A Tip

BASH keyboard shortcut: ‘Control + r’ initiates a name/command lookup from the bash history. As you type, this ‘reverse incremental search’ will autocomplete with the most-recent match from your history.

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

Graham | CEO | EveryCloud

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