Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

In the latest Security Swarm Podcast: “Passkeys in Microsoft Entra: Benefits, Implementation Tips & More,” we discuss passkeys in the Microsoft ecosystem, including topics such as the definition of passkeys, prerequisites, tips for implementation, and the user experience. We also highlight the user-centric enrollment process, the role of conditional access, and the potential challenges and advantages of transitioning to passkeys.

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 share your suggestions on the IT Pro Tuesday subreddit, and we’ll be featuring them in the coming weeks.

Now on to this week’s list

A Podcast

5 Bytes Podcast covers the week’s highlights in enterprise IT as well as useful sysadmin resources like scripts, tips, tricks, and more. Extremely concise, with episodes running roughly 5-7 minutes. beefyplesiosaur says, “[It’s] great… Enterprise IT/End User Computing focus. One of the few that is still appointment listening for me.”
External Attack Surface Management Attack Surface Summary

A Free Tool

NTTTCP is a simple Windows tool for benchmarking network bandwidth and throughput performance. savro finds it useful for troubleshooting network problems.
External Attack Surface Management Attack Surface Summary

A Tutorial

Switching from VMware? Explore XCP-NG, The Open-Source Virtualization Platform is a blog post that covers the latest developments in the XCP-ng platform, new features of Xen Orchestra 6 and XO Lite, the transition from VMware to Vates, the integration of REST API, and advancements in auto-restore health-check timeout.

A Tip

Favorite shortcuts shared by Sunfishrs:  Shift right clicking a file gives you the option “copy as path” Typing the first few letters of the file / directory / key while in explorer will bring you to the file. Works in the registry as well. Typing .LOG At the top of a notepad file (not sure if it works on new windows 11 notepad) makes a time stamp every time you close (assuming you save) the file.

Another Tutorial

Automatically Schedule Microsoft Teams Do Not Disturb Presence Based on Outlook Calendar Events walks you through a cool approach that automates changing your DND status based on what’s scheduled on your calendar.
External Attack Surface Management Attack Surface Summary

P.S. Bonus Free Tools

Ntrights is a Windows resource kit utility that allows you to grant or revoke user and group access privileges. This command-line utility works to edit account rights related to logon, system admin, service, and more. Our thanks for directing us to this one goes to thephotonx.

CVS is an open-source version control system that allows you to record the history of sources, files, and documents. Offers some nice advantages over RCS, like unreserved checkouts and vendor-branch import/merge. The server works on most Unix variants, and clients for Windows NT/95, OS/2, and VMS are available. Kindly suggested by serverhorror.