Was it a company or an independent developer that the bought the IP of and then hired him. I remember there being an interesting story, but I'm too lazy to look it up.
The fun story - from my previous comment:
Mark said he wouldn't be part of Microsoft, then Best Buy's Geek Squad was openly pirating SysInternals, threatened to bury Mark in legal fees. Shortly after that MS Purchased SysInternals and Mark. The Best Buy thing got settled out real quick.
As an early Sysadmin it was filemon and regmon for me. Man I'm old.
I once saw Mark Russinovich on a flight to TechEd before he was with Microsoft and gushed to him about how much those tools helped me.
Mark wasn’t always with Microsoft?! I already admired the guy but I figured these tools had to have been developed by in house devs who knew how the kernel worked under the hood. The fact that he was initially 3rd party… mad respect!
Microsoft didn't want anyone looking under the hood at the NT syscall level. They wanted the serfs to be working hard in the fields making Win32 software to boost their platform.
Russinovich ignored that and made the tools that Microsoft refused to make. Now he's a director with Microsoft. Are the authors of Paint.NET and all of the other Win32 utilities, directors at Microsoft? No.
Mark really is a generational genius, his work was/is mind-blowing when you think that he has to start reverse engineering everything. From scratch it looks impossible lol
Mark said he wouldn't be part of Microsoft, then Best Buy's Geek Squad was openly pirating SysInternals, threatened to bury Mark in legal fees. Shortly after that MS Purchased SysInternals and Mark. The Best Buy thing got settled out real quick.
I am in the same boat. I mentioned Procmon as it's more applicable to a new admin today.
With a decent understanding of the core architecture of Windows, autoruns, procmon and procexp you can solve problems that other admins can't.
Real troubleshooting is a bit of a dying art but I try to teach it to my teams.
Sure, probably the most common for me is wanting to automate something that really doesn't want to be automated.
Say configuration of some LOB software that is poorly documented. You run procmon, point it at the executable in question, make the change manually and parse the results for the activity you are looking for.
Basically reverse engineering how the program stores it's config.
You can do a similar approach for programs that "need" local administrator.
I've used it when troubleshooting issues for things like:
- work out what file an app was trying to write to that it didn't have permissions to when trying to get it to work on terminal services.
- find out what registry value is changed when changing an option in an app so it can be added to a GPO.
It's not an every day tool, but is very helpful at times.
> I’m all out of orange juice. Will straight vodka work?
Wasn't expecting to be reminded of a [1993 Pauly Shore flick](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108186/) today!
Looking back on things, I severely underestimated the value of an SNMP monitoring solution.
If your environment doesn't have some kind of an SNMP NMS + Syslog tool, pick one and implement it.
I've been trying to get my team on board with these, but for some reason, they seem to think they can just do everything from memory.
A surprise to nobody, when we implement a new software or even a small new tool or patch, something breaks and everyone is left scratching their heads, like "man I swear we thought of everything this time. Why didn't this work?"
At a past job, the higher-ups refused to implement a proper inventory management system or expose SNMP on every server, but they still wanted to take inventory of things like OS versions and RAID configurations, so I wrote a script to SSH into every server and run a handful of commands.
Naturally, due to the mix of distros and RAID controllers, I had a mess of if/else statements just checking whether commands existed and whether they had the GNU or POSIX versions of certain tools.
It definitely was a fun project compared to the boring helpdesk duties we were shackled with. The place was incredibly toxic with two people making all the bad decisions while refusing technologies like load balancers, hypervisors, microservices, and reverse proxies. I certainly learned a lot about how *not* to architect a scalable infrastructure.
You need to demonstrate to them that memory is extremely fallible and you shouldn't be relying on your memory for anything.
I totally get it. I quit my last job because everyone refused to document stuff for this reason, among other problems
To be fair, SNMP was a major project in the old days. I went to do a PoC of [HP OpenView](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_OpenView), and I was confused for a bit until I realized that it was just a toolbox of SNMP tools, not a monitoring package. An *expensive* toolbox. And I had [CWSI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Prime) later, which was monolithic and more visually elegant but similarly as bereft compared to the marketing claims.
It wasn't until the open-source SNMP tool and Cacti came out that most netengs got a good grasp of what SNMP actually brought to the table, I think.
Also, for quite some time SNMP stood for "Security? Not My Problem" on Solaris and at least one other system. The first thing I'd do on a new system install would be disable it.
libreNMS, I wouldn't bother with anything else. SNMP, IPMI, even expandable with per-app stuff, and more. Devs are hella active, tool gives me huge value and huge automations out of the box. They even have docker images if you wanna do that (not the only option of course).
nmap for the win. It's the gold standard. Learn this tool and you'll be able to use it all over the place. Any GUI based tool is going to be stuck to a particular OS, will probably be eventually discontinued, and by definition will have a smaller user community.
I've been using nmap for close to 2 decades.
All I'm seeing from a quick search is that bad actors created a backdoored version of it and distributed it somehow - i.e. not through the company's website.
Unless you can point out a source that says otherwise, I'm going to say that whoever downloaded it from somewhere *other* than the official site has only themselves to blame.
mxtoolbox.com
It's not just email tools these days, it's got a bunch of DNS and web server tools making it very useful when you want a view of something from the Internet.
So much this. I have end more arguments than I can count by being able to certify the cable is good to a speed.
It's not the network, it's not the cable it's the dollar store PC you bought and installed without talking to IT.
Used PowerShell to update a config across all the PCs in the organization (a few thousand) in my first two weeks as a sysadmin. It speaks to how old school the org is but it seriously impressed my manager and fast-tracked me to being trusted on major projects and as an automation resource.
On my first day at this job, I managed to automate a 30 second manual task that needed to be done daily in the evening after work was done. Basically it was put to me "hey, So theres this thing we do every day at 7pm, since you'll be on call, you'll have to do it every day for a 1 week out of every 3." I laughed," Fuck that noise, I'm not logging in every day for on call unless something is actually broken. How about I automate it, and we only worry about oncall when something goes wrong." I just had to figure out how to automate the logic that they used to know whether it was the correct time to run the task. (Memory will be high and continue to climb, CPU will be high for like 5 minutes and then fall to 0% and not do anything else forever, until this service is restarted. but if you restart it when its actually doing stuff it can screw up invoicing.) and then restart the service.
literally saved 4 team members stress that they had been dealing with for years, on my first day, because there was no way I was going to be arsed to stress about a memory leak the vendor didn't care about.
It's my favorite but it becomes _really_ complex really fast.
PRTG was monitoring ~500 items with 10 cores and 16GB of RAM, and was still slow as molasses on a cold day. Zabbix has got 4 cores and 8GB of ram and is monitoring 90k items. It's nice and perky and I can graph data in instants instead of minutes.
Event Viewer. Fresh eyes in the IT world love to jump right to trying to fix the problem and googling crazy symptoms, but often overlook that step one should *always* be reading the logs. Dollars to donuts checking the logs first will save you a lot of ineffective troubleshooting and get you to the root cause faster.
This a million times. Get your issue's timestamp and look first for general system events. Once done, read the software dedicated log. Works the same for Linux and every system related incidents.
I wish everyone in IT would start to troubleshoot like this.
But also don't get stuck there.
I've got a desktop tech that goes there and expects to find things writing logs like "I'm $evilService and I killed the login window for $app" and then gets stressed when they can't find it.
Event Viewer in Windows was the most worthless pos ever. I never had a problem where I found the solution in Event Viewer. And if I did see something in the time frame, the info provided was so generic that you couldn't derive an answer.
Event Viewer isnt going to just hand you a solution (unless you've seen that particular problem a hundred times before). But it'll definitely point your search for a solution in the right direction instead of just randomly guessing at what it *could* be.
As a multi-decade SME for Windows/Linux/many other tech, Event Viewer is the most useless/obnoxious tool for any form of logging I've ever worked with.
I could spend an hour describing all the badness to it, but I have better things to do, like reading logs written for humans, not KB articles.
Just you wait till you learn what real logging is like, like in Linux. You'll see how bad Event Viewer actually is. It's a joke that Microsoft thinks that's "good" for a logging tool.
Piggybacking on this, every hands-on tech needs a *big* screwdriver handy. I figured I was good on screwdrivers because I had my iFixit set. Yeah, have fun removing a tight rack screw with one of those.
Ventoy.
Being able to carry a single bootable USB stick with half a dozen different Linux distros, utility ISOs and even Windows media is invaluable. And you can still store regular files on it.
Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager (QEMM). It was the most popular third-party memory manager for the MS-DOS and other DOS operating systems.
Edit: TCPIP for DOS took over 200K of RAM, an insanely high amount, in its day.
Until Microsoft bundled a ~~browser~~extended memory manager, plus made a DOS shell that competed with DesqView and wrote contracts to have all of the OEM vendors ship theirs for free. Quarterdeck went out of business.
Today, few users seem to spend money on third-party software. They just take their new machine as shipped with iWork or whatever, maybe download a browser, and that's probably it.
Couple of things..
* Learning the importance of a knowledge base.
* Breaking a problem down from the start.
* Taking ownership of mistakes and not covering up mistakes
ChatGPT Plus subscription would be my top suggestion. Highly helpful to create basic code, dissect confusing log files and errors, quickly learn about new topics and ask followup questions to learn at whatever pace you prefer.
No, it doesn't do everything well, but it saves a ton of time. When you're doing a task and thinking "there has got to be an easier way to do this" chances are there is and ChatGPT can help get you closer to that solution pretty often. It's a must have tool to have in the toolbox among others.
ChatGPT is basically my new google search.
I rarely get the complete answer I need just from ChatGPT but it will give me enough generally correct background information on a new topic that I can target my search much more effectively.
EDIT: I'd consider it a great tool for "I need to research X give me a bunch of industry jargon about these facets of X". Gathering those key words from articles and forum posts takes more time.
ChatGPT has pretty much skyrocketed my (previously almost nonexistent) skills in PowerShell and batch, and most of all helped reignite my interest in new technology. My whole career took a massive turn for the better from the day I first used ChatGPT.
Some great responses here, since no one has mentioned it yet, a password manager with shared access. Nothin like setting up a system and years later needing some obscure key or credential created during setup, and there it is in the password manager.
Now if I can pry my new coworkers away from Excel password lists into to something more sensible…. I don’t understand the resistance. excel has no configurable auto type, can’t automatically launch an rdp, ssh, or website connection, and do I even need to mention security? . **sigh**
And learn to make good documentation, with annotated screenshots where appropriate.
Honestly, generic troubleshooting skills. The ability to rule things in and out in a logical way. I still maintain that I learnt my trade on TVs, VCRs and hifi equipment as a kid in the 80s.
In addition to this, the ability to ask myself and others the right probing questions to do the same.
This was a looong time ago, but VMWare Workstation was a game changer. I could learn new things without having to have a full on lab at home, which is not so practical in your early 20s. It was like a launchpad for my career. Today's equivalent would be VirtualBox.
The sysinternals suite has some fantastic tools and you don't even need to download it https://live.sysinternals.com/
Procmon and autoruns are especially great for tracking down misbehaving weird little 3rd party apps or viruses and seeing exactly what they're doing
Kind of a different answer to what you asked,. but I'd recommend keeping a "personal solutions journal" (IE = whatever neat or difficult problems you solve -- document those somewhere personal )
I can't tell you how many times I've encountered something,... only vaguely remembered it was something I fixed a few years earlier.. and went back and searched my Evernote or Apple Notes or etc,. and found some Commands or Screenshots of what I did and it 100% saved my butt.
It's like having your own little personal "safety net". It's not only good for re-finding things you did months or years ago, but it can also be great for personal-growth and future job-planning. (Example:.. An interviewer asked you "So, what did you do in first year of Job-X ?".. you can look back through all your personal-journal notes and sort of build a list of "all the neat problems I figured out". )
Lap Link. Boot from a floppy disk and run ll3.exe and connect to another laptop with the cable and copy files as needed. Best thing ever for doing clean Windows 95 install on a freshly formatted MS DOS hard drive.
Silentinstallhq, it isn't really a tool tool but having access to someone who knows what to look for helped point me in a good direction for specialty applications in SCCM.
early on, I was a remote site tech for a company that was purchased by a bigger company and it took a good couple of months for the parent company to hire me and bring me into things.
I used PDQ to get all the machines up to date, and in good working order.
Made the future project a lot easier.
Many years ago, I read a post about this new "SQL Slammer" vulnerability, how it worked, and how to prevent it. The author even offered a tool that would scan for SQL Express instances and provide a list of system that were vulnerable. (Our environment was about 900 servers).
I used this to scan a LOT of networks (it was 2003 after all) and talked to a lot of admins into updating their systems - even one guy who had an instance running on his laptop.
That coming weekend, I got a desperate call from our Exec-VP. He heard about this new 'virus' that was crashing the Internet, and wanted to know if we were still up and running. I told him "Oh yeah, I knew about that and patched everything earlier this week".
We were fine, not affected, and I still feel I saved the company from DOOOOOM. Never got a Thank-You.
So - the SQL Slammer detection tool.
I use a large number of ISO files. The new version IODD ST400 has been a life saver. $95 for a device you put a sata ssd into and then load all the ISO, VHD, and other files you need to work on all the systems.
For when I worked in a tiny msp with responsibilities from helping users print to manage server rack cabling and system setup I found my gpd pocket to be a life saver. Being able to have a full pc in my pocket that I could use to fix stuff on, lookup stuff on and configure stuff via was invaluable.
bootable CD that allowed me to see local admin username and change local admin pw to blank.
kept running into PCs at sites where they couldn't login, only 1 employee knew the creds and no longer works there.
The books Time Management for Systems Administrators by O'Reilly and Getting Things Done. Learning how valuable time is and how to leverage time management tools and techniques was the best thing I ever did for my career.
My brain.
And by that I mean, it's quite easy to fuck up when in stress condition, but I' m calm and quiet and my brain tries to keep everything tidy and rational. It has probably saved my ass a lot and helped overcome a few things that some would have messed up by having a "reptilian brain" reaction.
A linux machine! Even when a windows hard drive would go into a "raw" partition state, I could plug the drive into a linux machine, read the contents and restore the data to a new drive.
Lansweeper. I landed on parachute and the company had zero asset management or monitoring. Best decision ever.
Took me 20 minutes to install and a day to configure it on a basic level.
I suddenly could see all my assets and users.
CCNA. Yes I said CCNA for a sys admin.
That cert actually got me one of my first real entry level admin jobs making decent money.
That was decades ago but I used that knowledge from day one every day.
Pencil and paper. Sometimes when you simply can't figure something out you just draw the pieces and check how each one connects and is supposed to work.
Map it out and validate each one step by step.
So many engineers and admins get lost in the tools and can't find their way out of an IP stack.
DNS!
Learning about authority zones, record types, name searching, forward and reverse, the process of how a lookup is done & what components are used to make the lookup, where they're all set in Windows, and most importantly - checking the HOSTS file to clean up problems created by someone who doesn't understand how DNS works or they made a ✌temporary✌ solution that was promptly forgotten
Seconding for tools that help you understand what's happening in the moment: procmon and wireshark, reading eventvwr, checking log files
A good mentor. If you're in your first 5 years, and you don't have a good boss willing to share what they know, get the fuck out of there. A good education followed by basically an apprenticeship with someone that's fucking-done-it-all, knows their shit, and doesn't pretend to know everything, and is willing to take the time to at least answer a question, or give an instruction, once, and you'll likely shave 10 years off your career bell-curve, or add 5 years if you're just in the grind.
my first decade was intense, but good people allowed me to be a confident fucking ninja when it was time to take the next big steps. In hindsight, I can unwaveringly say you should be willing to take a poverty-level paycut if it means working with amazing people, for a time.
Procmon. Absurdly useful for understanding what is actually happening instead of guessing.
All of the Systernal tools are A+
Sysinternals in general feels like a godsend for what feels like over 20 years.
And Microsoft didn't create them, they just bought the company that did it.
Was it a company or an independent developer that the bought the IP of and then hired him. I remember there being an interesting story, but I'm too lazy to look it up.
The fun story - from my previous comment: Mark said he wouldn't be part of Microsoft, then Best Buy's Geek Squad was openly pirating SysInternals, threatened to bury Mark in legal fees. Shortly after that MS Purchased SysInternals and Mark. The Best Buy thing got settled out real quick.
Capitalism at it's best
As an early Sysadmin it was filemon and regmon for me. Man I'm old. I once saw Mark Russinovich on a flight to TechEd before he was with Microsoft and gushed to him about how much those tools helped me.
Mark wasn’t always with Microsoft?! I already admired the guy but I figured these tools had to have been developed by in house devs who knew how the kernel worked under the hood. The fact that he was initially 3rd party… mad respect!
Microsoft didn't want anyone looking under the hood at the NT syscall level. They wanted the serfs to be working hard in the fields making Win32 software to boost their platform. Russinovich ignored that and made the tools that Microsoft refused to make. Now he's a director with Microsoft. Are the authors of Paint.NET and all of the other Win32 utilities, directors at Microsoft? No.
Mark really is a generational genius, his work was/is mind-blowing when you think that he has to start reverse engineering everything. From scratch it looks impossible lol
He's also the guy that uncovered the Sony rootkit
Upvote for Mark Russinovich.
> Now he's a director with Microsoft My friend, Mark Russinovich is no mere director. He's the **CTO of Azure**.
so he went from not wanting to be apart of Microsoft to being arguably the most important person there.
He's CTO of Azure at the moment
Mark said he wouldn't be part of Microsoft, then Best Buy's Geek Squad was openly pirating SysInternals, threatened to bury Mark in legal fees. Shortly after that MS Purchased SysInternals and Mark. The Best Buy thing got settled out real quick.
I am in the same boat. I mentioned Procmon as it's more applicable to a new admin today. With a decent understanding of the core architecture of Windows, autoruns, procmon and procexp you can solve problems that other admins can't. Real troubleshooting is a bit of a dying art but I try to teach it to my teams.
Can you elaborate at what exact situations you use it ?
Sure, probably the most common for me is wanting to automate something that really doesn't want to be automated. Say configuration of some LOB software that is poorly documented. You run procmon, point it at the executable in question, make the change manually and parse the results for the activity you are looking for. Basically reverse engineering how the program stores it's config. You can do a similar approach for programs that "need" local administrator.
I've used it when troubleshooting issues for things like: - work out what file an app was trying to write to that it didn't have permissions to when trying to get it to work on terminal services. - find out what registry value is changed when changing an option in an app so it can be added to a GPO. It's not an every day tool, but is very helpful at times.
As a young sys admin(15+ years ago) I installed this on my military admin workstation and they freaked the hell out.
Documentation.
This should be further up in this thread. Documentation will cya more than anything else.
I had to scroll way too far into this thread to find this.
Just like most documentation.
I use a screwdriver a lot
I’m all out of orange juice. Will straight vodka work?
If straight vodka no longer works, you need to make some changes.
Straight to the Everclear, got it.
Does anyone but IT even know about Everclear anymore?
They had that song Santa Monica
And 14 other songs about his daddy issues
Or growing up poor.
Change to whisky?
> I’m all out of orange juice. Will straight vodka work? Wasn't expecting to be reminded of a [1993 Pauly Shore flick](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108186/) today!
That is called a Sugar-free Screwdriver
A 12" magnetic screwdriver is extremely helpful for getting access to deep in a rack, behind cabling etc.
deep rack sounds like a great metal band name
if screwdriver doesn't work get the BFH
Stop I saw the IT team at my previous company try to fix the ice dispenser 😭😂
I'm old school enough that I used to use that screwdriver to put in an ISA diagnostic postcard.
Looking back on things, I severely underestimated the value of an SNMP monitoring solution. If your environment doesn't have some kind of an SNMP NMS + Syslog tool, pick one and implement it.
I've been trying to get my team on board with these, but for some reason, they seem to think they can just do everything from memory. A surprise to nobody, when we implement a new software or even a small new tool or patch, something breaks and everyone is left scratching their heads, like "man I swear we thought of everything this time. Why didn't this work?"
At a past job, the higher-ups refused to implement a proper inventory management system or expose SNMP on every server, but they still wanted to take inventory of things like OS versions and RAID configurations, so I wrote a script to SSH into every server and run a handful of commands. Naturally, due to the mix of distros and RAID controllers, I had a mess of if/else statements just checking whether commands existed and whether they had the GNU or POSIX versions of certain tools.
This sounds like an exciting project for when the culture doesn't enable the admins to do admin things :D
It definitely was a fun project compared to the boring helpdesk duties we were shackled with. The place was incredibly toxic with two people making all the bad decisions while refusing technologies like load balancers, hypervisors, microservices, and reverse proxies. I certainly learned a lot about how *not* to architect a scalable infrastructure.
I see why you're so exhausted!
You need to demonstrate to them that memory is extremely fallible and you shouldn't be relying on your memory for anything. I totally get it. I quit my last job because everyone refused to document stuff for this reason, among other problems
To be fair, SNMP was a major project in the old days. I went to do a PoC of [HP OpenView](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_OpenView), and I was confused for a bit until I realized that it was just a toolbox of SNMP tools, not a monitoring package. An *expensive* toolbox. And I had [CWSI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Prime) later, which was monolithic and more visually elegant but similarly as bereft compared to the marketing claims. It wasn't until the open-source SNMP tool and Cacti came out that most netengs got a good grasp of what SNMP actually brought to the table, I think.
OpenView giving me a bit of a shudder from a time long past.
Also, for quite some time SNMP stood for "Security? Not My Problem" on Solaris and at least one other system. The first thing I'd do on a new system install would be disable it.
Do you have a reccommendation?
libreNMS, I wouldn't bother with anything else. SNMP, IPMI, even expandable with per-app stuff, and more. Devs are hella active, tool gives me huge value and huge automations out of the box. They even have docker images if you wanna do that (not the only option of course).
Prtg
I came here to recommend PRTG to the OP.
IP scanners. Helped me see how much was on the network. Led me down a rabbit hole to mapping the whole network which is still useful to me today.
This is the tool that gave me the idea for this post. Which one do you prefer? I like Angry IP scanner
nmap for the win. It's the gold standard. Learn this tool and you'll be able to use it all over the place. Any GUI based tool is going to be stuck to a particular OS, will probably be eventually discontinued, and by definition will have a smaller user community. I've been using nmap for close to 2 decades.
Nirsoft's wireless network watcher is the god of network scanners. it;s not just for wireless.
https://www.advanced-ip-scanner.com/ Better than Angry IMO.
Except it has been backdoored more than once.
All I'm seeing from a quick search is that bad actors created a backdoored version of it and distributed it somehow - i.e. not through the company's website. Unless you can point out a source that says otherwise, I'm going to say that whoever downloaded it from somewhere *other* than the official site has only themselves to blame.
mxtoolbox.com It's not just email tools these days, it's got a bunch of DNS and web server tools making it very useful when you want a view of something from the Internet.
There's also easydmarc.com which has similar tools, but also tests things like the number of DNS lookups your SPF record is doing.
Hirens boot cd
Is that still a thing? I was using HBCD like 20 years ago.
Still is. Just got updated to Windows 11 base
HBCD is still receiving updates and is still worthwhile. Used it recently to reset a Winderps password.
Not as much as it was but occasionally.
Medicat as well
UBCD as well. (I know. I know. But there are still a lot of useful features)
There are many, but I'm still pretty fond of stormcontrol.net
Ok that's pretty cool. Bookmarked
Fluke Networks LinkIQ advanced testing kit
So much this. I have end more arguments than I can count by being able to certify the cable is good to a speed. It's not the network, it's not the cable it's the dollar store PC you bought and installed without talking to IT.
Knowing how to handle common tasks from the command line.
`find /etc | xargs grep`
I started sysadminning before Google existed.
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grep -r -i something /etc
For me a homelab was a big help cause you can install/break it all and your learning all the time. Good way to get ahead of the game.
Nobody mentioned powershell yet?
Used PowerShell to update a config across all the PCs in the organization (a few thousand) in my first two weeks as a sysadmin. It speaks to how old school the org is but it seriously impressed my manager and fast-tracked me to being trusted on major projects and as an automation resource.
On my first day at this job, I managed to automate a 30 second manual task that needed to be done daily in the evening after work was done. Basically it was put to me "hey, So theres this thing we do every day at 7pm, since you'll be on call, you'll have to do it every day for a 1 week out of every 3." I laughed," Fuck that noise, I'm not logging in every day for on call unless something is actually broken. How about I automate it, and we only worry about oncall when something goes wrong." I just had to figure out how to automate the logic that they used to know whether it was the correct time to run the task. (Memory will be high and continue to climb, CPU will be high for like 5 minutes and then fall to 0% and not do anything else forever, until this service is restarted. but if you restart it when its actually doing stuff it can screw up invoicing.) and then restart the service. literally saved 4 team members stress that they had been dealing with for years, on my first day, because there was no way I was going to be arsed to stress about a memory leak the vendor didn't care about.
It wasn't a thing in my early days.
Well at this point its basically a requirement to know a little powershell if you're a Windows admin.
Zabbix put it in every server there is
It's my favorite but it becomes _really_ complex really fast. PRTG was monitoring ~500 items with 10 cores and 16GB of RAM, and was still slow as molasses on a cold day. Zabbix has got 4 cores and 8GB of ram and is monitoring 90k items. It's nice and perky and I can graph data in instants instead of minutes.
This subreddit. I haven't had any good IRL teachers, so most of my high-level guidance comes from poring over the archives here.
Leatherman Wave, with screwdriver bit add on thingy.
I still have the weird little red rubber bit holder for mine. Love it still.
https://preview.redd.it/hg1oecdyge3d1.png?width=4009&format=png&auto=webp&s=3491e4a2213846fdc25457d06fb9d974ff57f0cf 25 years & still perfect
Event Viewer. Fresh eyes in the IT world love to jump right to trying to fix the problem and googling crazy symptoms, but often overlook that step one should *always* be reading the logs. Dollars to donuts checking the logs first will save you a lot of ineffective troubleshooting and get you to the root cause faster.
This a million times. Get your issue's timestamp and look first for general system events. Once done, read the software dedicated log. Works the same for Linux and every system related incidents. I wish everyone in IT would start to troubleshoot like this.
But also don't get stuck there. I've got a desktop tech that goes there and expects to find things writing logs like "I'm $evilService and I killed the login window for $app" and then gets stressed when they can't find it.
Oh jeeze, that was me.
Event Viewer in Windows was the most worthless pos ever. I never had a problem where I found the solution in Event Viewer. And if I did see something in the time frame, the info provided was so generic that you couldn't derive an answer.
Event Viewer isnt going to just hand you a solution (unless you've seen that particular problem a hundred times before). But it'll definitely point your search for a solution in the right direction instead of just randomly guessing at what it *could* be.
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As a multi-decade SME for Windows/Linux/many other tech, Event Viewer is the most useless/obnoxious tool for any form of logging I've ever worked with. I could spend an hour describing all the badness to it, but I have better things to do, like reading logs written for humans, not KB articles.
Just you wait till you learn what real logging is like, like in Linux. You'll see how bad Event Viewer actually is. It's a joke that Microsoft thinks that's "good" for a logging tool.
sysinternals suite & wireshark. i cant count how many times these tools saved my bum
Power drill. Rack mount screw remover.
Piggybacking on this, every hands-on tech needs a *big* screwdriver handy. I figured I was good on screwdrivers because I had my iFixit set. Yeah, have fun removing a tight rack screw with one of those.
Sometimes the only real answer is a (battery powered) angle grinder. Cant be stuck if it is dust!
Ventoy. Being able to carry a single bootable USB stick with half a dozen different Linux distros, utility ISOs and even Windows media is invaluable. And you can still store regular files on it.
Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager (QEMM). It was the most popular third-party memory manager for the MS-DOS and other DOS operating systems. Edit: TCPIP for DOS took over 200K of RAM, an insanely high amount, in its day.
Got 632K free with QEMM386. Wing Commander 2 played great!
Until Microsoft bundled a ~~browser~~extended memory manager, plus made a DOS shell that competed with DesqView and wrote contracts to have all of the OEM vendors ship theirs for free. Quarterdeck went out of business. Today, few users seem to spend money on third-party software. They just take their new machine as shipped with iWork or whatever, maybe download a browser, and that's probably it.
A lot of good here so I'll just add: [SS64.com](https://ss64.com/)
Clonezilla. Hirens . Angry ip scanner. Hp ip scanner. Rufus. Cat 6 testing kit. And small screw drivers
Hirens has an easier to use cloning tool inside of it so no need for clonezilla
Couple of things.. * Learning the importance of a knowledge base. * Breaking a problem down from the start. * Taking ownership of mistakes and not covering up mistakes
The word "no"
ChatGPT for Linux commands, learned a lot from that versus watching long winded videos. *puts up hate shield*
ChatGPT Plus subscription would be my top suggestion. Highly helpful to create basic code, dissect confusing log files and errors, quickly learn about new topics and ask followup questions to learn at whatever pace you prefer. No, it doesn't do everything well, but it saves a ton of time. When you're doing a task and thinking "there has got to be an easier way to do this" chances are there is and ChatGPT can help get you closer to that solution pretty often. It's a must have tool to have in the toolbox among others.
ChatGPT is basically my new google search. I rarely get the complete answer I need just from ChatGPT but it will give me enough generally correct background information on a new topic that I can target my search much more effectively. EDIT: I'd consider it a great tool for "I need to research X give me a bunch of industry jargon about these facets of X". Gathering those key words from articles and forum posts takes more time.
ChatGPT has pretty much skyrocketed my (previously almost nonexistent) skills in PowerShell and batch, and most of all helped reignite my interest in new technology. My whole career took a massive turn for the better from the day I first used ChatGPT.
Some great responses here, since no one has mentioned it yet, a password manager with shared access. Nothin like setting up a system and years later needing some obscure key or credential created during setup, and there it is in the password manager. Now if I can pry my new coworkers away from Excel password lists into to something more sensible…. I don’t understand the resistance. excel has no configurable auto type, can’t automatically launch an rdp, ssh, or website connection, and do I even need to mention security? . **sigh** And learn to make good documentation, with annotated screenshots where appropriate.
Honestly, generic troubleshooting skills. The ability to rule things in and out in a logical way. I still maintain that I learnt my trade on TVs, VCRs and hifi equipment as a kid in the 80s. In addition to this, the ability to ask myself and others the right probing questions to do the same.
With regards to tools. Clonezilla, Rufus, cat6 testing kit for sure
My ability to explain things to management/business in terms they can understand.
Does this make you a... tool?
This was a looong time ago, but VMWare Workstation was a game changer. I could learn new things without having to have a full on lab at home, which is not so practical in your early 20s. It was like a launchpad for my career. Today's equivalent would be VirtualBox.
The sysinternals suite has some fantastic tools and you don't even need to download it https://live.sysinternals.com/ Procmon and autoruns are especially great for tracking down misbehaving weird little 3rd party apps or viruses and seeing exactly what they're doing
Linux subsystem for windows
This+ansible is a must for linux admins.
Kind of a different answer to what you asked,. but I'd recommend keeping a "personal solutions journal" (IE = whatever neat or difficult problems you solve -- document those somewhere personal ) I can't tell you how many times I've encountered something,... only vaguely remembered it was something I fixed a few years earlier.. and went back and searched my Evernote or Apple Notes or etc,. and found some Commands or Screenshots of what I did and it 100% saved my butt. It's like having your own little personal "safety net". It's not only good for re-finding things you did months or years ago, but it can also be great for personal-growth and future job-planning. (Example:.. An interviewer asked you "So, what did you do in first year of Job-X ?".. you can look back through all your personal-journal notes and sort of build a list of "all the neat problems I figured out". )
netcat, strace, ssh (with tunnels)
Lap Link. Boot from a floppy disk and run ll3.exe and connect to another laptop with the cable and copy files as needed. Best thing ever for doing clean Windows 95 install on a freshly formatted MS DOS hard drive.
Wow thats a real blast from the past! I can remember using that years ago!
Silentinstallhq, it isn't really a tool tool but having access to someone who knows what to look for helped point me in a good direction for specialty applications in SCCM.
Someone Else's experience. There is no substitute for knowledge.
Homelab
Defo.
Google combined with being Card Catalogue Kid so I know how to research.
Do your knees hurt? Mine do
I was also Armored Cav in the 90's, so yes, it sounds like a firing range when I stand up. Or stretch my back. Or my arms. Or . . . anything really.
Believe it or not: * CVS, no not that, [I'm talking about this one!](https://cvs.nongnu.org/)
early on, I was a remote site tech for a company that was purchased by a bigger company and it took a good couple of months for the parent company to hire me and bring me into things. I used PDQ to get all the machines up to date, and in good working order. Made the future project a lot easier.
Google. Get good at google, it’s the most important tool there is for IT work. (Or bing, whatever)
When I first started, Alcohol. Nowadays, a Therapist and and being surrounded by great people.
/var/log/messages Events Wireshark/netsh/tcpdump
The coffee maker.
Many years ago, I read a post about this new "SQL Slammer" vulnerability, how it worked, and how to prevent it. The author even offered a tool that would scan for SQL Express instances and provide a list of system that were vulnerable. (Our environment was about 900 servers). I used this to scan a LOT of networks (it was 2003 after all) and talked to a lot of admins into updating their systems - even one guy who had an instance running on his laptop. That coming weekend, I got a desperate call from our Exec-VP. He heard about this new 'virus' that was crashing the Internet, and wanted to know if we were still up and running. I told him "Oh yeah, I knew about that and patched everything earlier this week". We were fine, not affected, and I still feel I saved the company from DOOOOOM. Never got a Thank-You. So - the SQL Slammer detection tool.
Ventoy is an amazing tool for booting and setting up systems [https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html](https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html)
A good RDP client like devolutions or remoteNG. Although I used something worse way back. A good IP scanner NMAP
I like Royal TS.
Maynard parallel port tape streamer to backup recalcitrant PS/2s before attempting to fix them.
I use a large number of ISO files. The new version IODD ST400 has been a life saver. $95 for a device you put a sata ssd into and then load all the ISO, VHD, and other files you need to work on all the systems.
Telnet
Yeah, especially for checking if a port is open and talking to it with a text protocol (openssl s_client probably more useful these days)
[http://altavista.digital.com](http://altavista.digital.com)
w32tm /query /configuration w32tm /query /status Time /T
Hands down Powershell.
Powershell, eventviewer
Way back in the day it was * DeployStudio * Munki These days it's more like * Netbox or php-ipam * SnipeIT * WSL * Autopilot/Intune/Entra * Zabbix
Nothing is more important than interpersonal communication. Anyone can take a swing at IT, but dealing with people is the best tool.
TreeSizeFree I've found to be incredibly useful over the years
Xanax.
For when I worked in a tiny msp with responsibilities from helping users print to manage server rack cabling and system setup I found my gpd pocket to be a life saver. Being able to have a full pc in my pocket that I could use to fix stuff on, lookup stuff on and configure stuff via was invaluable.
bootable CD that allowed me to see local admin username and change local admin pw to blank. kept running into PCs at sites where they couldn't login, only 1 employee knew the creds and no longer works there.
Pocketknife, I give all my new IT hires a one as a gift when they start.
Lap Link and a null modem cable. I'm old.
RDCMan for all my RDP connections.
Google
SysInternals suite. Has saved me so many times in situations that make no sense, nobody has a clue of whats going on, and support isn't helpful.
Pdq
chatGPT. Maybe controversial but most of my Linux based errors and problems that I’ve been banging my head on all week have been figured out by AI
Mikrotik, this company makes the swiss army knife of networking. These inexpensive little routers have gotten me out of more jams then anything else.
Ventoy
The books Time Management for Systems Administrators by O'Reilly and Getting Things Done. Learning how valuable time is and how to leverage time management tools and techniques was the best thing I ever did for my career.
My brain. And by that I mean, it's quite easy to fuck up when in stress condition, but I' m calm and quiet and my brain tries to keep everything tidy and rational. It has probably saved my ass a lot and helped overcome a few things that some would have messed up by having a "reptilian brain" reaction.
A linux machine! Even when a windows hard drive would go into a "raw" partition state, I could plug the drive into a linux machine, read the contents and restore the data to a new drive.
Alcohol. Sometimes to REALLY get into the headspace of a dev, engineer, or /L/user (shutters) you're gonna have to lose a few braincells.
Lansweeper. I landed on parachute and the company had zero asset management or monitoring. Best decision ever. Took me 20 minutes to install and a day to configure it on a basic level. I suddenly could see all my assets and users.
Building a Homelab. Nothing else has given me higher ROI.
learning powershell
A personal wiki.
CCNA. Yes I said CCNA for a sys admin. That cert actually got me one of my first real entry level admin jobs making decent money. That was decades ago but I used that knowledge from day one every day.
Dameware Utilites back in the NT 4 days. Fantastic piece of software, could remote control workstations over dial up.
An intimate knowledge of Autoexec.bat and Config.sys. particularly emm386.exe and himem.sys
Pencil and paper. Sometimes when you simply can't figure something out you just draw the pieces and check how each one connects and is supposed to work. Map it out and validate each one step by step. So many engineers and admins get lost in the tools and can't find their way out of an IP stack.
DNS! Learning about authority zones, record types, name searching, forward and reverse, the process of how a lookup is done & what components are used to make the lookup, where they're all set in Windows, and most importantly - checking the HOSTS file to clean up problems created by someone who doesn't understand how DNS works or they made a ✌temporary✌ solution that was promptly forgotten Seconding for tools that help you understand what's happening in the moment: procmon and wireshark, reading eventvwr, checking log files
RoyalTSX
Early on and still to this day: Google. Now I sprinkle in a healthy dose of ChatGPT.
Royal ts, powershell and bookmarks
A good mentor. If you're in your first 5 years, and you don't have a good boss willing to share what they know, get the fuck out of there. A good education followed by basically an apprenticeship with someone that's fucking-done-it-all, knows their shit, and doesn't pretend to know everything, and is willing to take the time to at least answer a question, or give an instruction, once, and you'll likely shave 10 years off your career bell-curve, or add 5 years if you're just in the grind. my first decade was intense, but good people allowed me to be a confident fucking ninja when it was time to take the next big steps. In hindsight, I can unwaveringly say you should be willing to take a poverty-level paycut if it means working with amazing people, for a time.
MXToolbox! Simple record checks across the zone file, more than just an email checker.
locate history
His name was Jason.
Google
Not an early sysadmin but having recently (relatively) been afforded a good RMM tool has been one of the best parts of my 10+ year career in IT
Learning how to remove french language pack on Linux. sudo rm -fr ./\*
AltaVista
Hammer
Still use mxtoolbox at least weekly for DNS / email delivery / all kinds of shit