058 - What Tools Do SysAdmins Actually Use Every Day?

The tools that stay in the kit for a decade are the ones that still work when the network, the domain, or the boot volume is the thing that broke.

Andy Syrewicze and Eric Siron open their real toolboxes and argue about what earns permanent residency. nmap and Wireshark for what is actually on the wire, Sysinternals for what a box is really doing, GParted and SystemRescue for the volume that will not mount, and the chkdsk, DISM, then SFC sequence Eric can run in his sleep. Andy's list skews hard toward triage because MSP work meant walking into a stranger's burning network every week. Remote access is missing on purpose; RDP, SSH, and overlay networks are getting their own episode.

Chapters: 00:00:00 - Cold Open: The Tools That Save Your Bacon 00:01:13 - Welcome and Show Plugs 00:03:11 - News React: Anthropic's Enterprise Frontier Safeguards 00:07:01 - News React: The US Goes Openly Offensive in Cyber 00:12:57 - Nerd Hour: CC Top and a Pomodoro Timer That Remembers 00:15:53 - What Earns a Permanent Spot in the Toolbox 00:17:32 - Why MSP Years Produce a Triage Kit 00:20:13 - nmap, and the Licensed Cisco Utility Story 00:22:31 - Sysinternals and Process Monitor 00:23:16 - Wireshark Past the Basics 00:24:09 - netstat and nslookup Are Not Wizardry 00:25:12 - dig, and Why ping Is Not a DNS Tool 00:27:22 - Test-NetConnection Instead of ping 00:27:59 - Why Anyone Blocks ICMP in the First Place 00:30:11 - MXToolbox, PingPlotter, and the Neighbor's Air Conditioner 00:33:18 - GParted, SystemRescue, and the Live CD Shelf 00:35:58 - chkdsk, DISM, then SFC, in That Order 00:38:06 - DBAN and Decommissioning Disks 00:40:51 - The Multi-Pass Wipe Myth 00:43:25 - Greenshot and Capture Last Region 00:46:07 - Spectacle, Client Hypervisors, Docker and Podman 00:47:33 - Get-Help and man: Nobody Remembers Syntax 00:48:28 - OpenSSL, Qualys SSL Labs, and testssl.sh 00:50:13 - WSL as the Whole Toolbox 00:51:37 - The Everyday List: Vim, Bitwarden, Git, Package Managers 00:54:20 - Remote Access Gets Its Own Episode 00:55:30 - The Platform Tax After Leaving Windows 00:58:18 - Edge on WSL on Windows, for Certificate Chains 01:01:02 - Do This Monday 01:03:31 - Eric's Advice: Go Look for the Tool 01:04:37 - Wrap Up and Outro

Resources / Show Notes:

- Anthropic, Developing Enterprise Frontier Safeguards: https://www.anthropic.com/news/enterprise-frontier-safeguards

- Nmap: https://nmap.org/

- Wireshark: https://www.wireshark.org/

- Microsoft Sysinternals, and Sysinternals Live: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/

- MXToolbox, external DNS and blacklist checks: https://mxtoolbox.com/

- PingPlotter, latency and packet loss per hop: https://www.pingplotter.com/

- GParted, and the live image: https://gparted.org/

- SystemRescue: https://www.system-rescue.org/

- DBAN, still there, spinning disk era, not for SSDs: https://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/

- Greenshot, Windows only: https://getgreenshot.org/

- Qualys SSL Labs, tick the box to stay off the public board: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

- testssl.sh, for internal sites: https://testssl.sh/

- DevToys, clipboard certificate parser: https://devtoys.app/

- SysAdmin Weekly, all show links: https://www.sysadminweekly.com

- SysAdmin Weekly Newsletter: https://newsletter.sysadminweekly.com

- AndyOnTech: https://www.andyontech.com

- Project Runspace: https://www.projectrunspace.org

- GitHub Discussions, what is in your toolbox: https://github.com/ProjectRunspace/sysadmin-weekly/discussions