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 Bacon00:01:13 - Welcome and Show Plugs00:03:11 - News React: Anthropic's Enterprise Frontier Safeguards00:07:01 - News React: The US Goes Openly Offensive in Cyber00:12:57 - Nerd Hour: CC Top and a Pomodoro Timer That Remembers00:15:53 - What Earns a Permanent Spot in the Toolbox00:17:32 - Why MSP Years Produce a Triage Kit00:20:13 - nmap, and the Licensed Cisco Utility Story00:22:31 - Sysinternals and Process Monitor00:23:16 - Wireshark Past the Basics00:24:09 - netstat and nslookup Are Not Wizardry00:25:12 - dig, and Why ping Is Not a DNS Tool00:27:22 - Test-NetConnection Instead of ping00:27:59 - Why Anyone Blocks ICMP in the First Place00:30:11 - MXToolbox, PingPlotter, and the Neighbor's Air Conditioner00:33:18 - GParted, SystemRescue, and the Live CD Shelf00:35:58 - chkdsk, DISM, then SFC, in That Order00:38:06 - DBAN and Decommissioning Disks00:40:51 - The Multi-Pass Wipe Myth00:43:25 - Greenshot and Capture Last Region00:46:07 - Spectacle, Client Hypervisors, Docker and Podman00:47:33 - Get-Help and man: Nobody Remembers Syntax00:48:28 - OpenSSL, Qualys SSL Labs, and testssl.sh00:50:13 - WSL as the Whole Toolbox00:51:37 - The Everyday List: Vim, Bitwarden, Git, Package Managers00:54:20 - Remote Access Gets Its Own Episode00:55:30 - The Platform Tax After Leaving Windows00:58:18 - Edge on WSL on Windows, for Certificate Chains01:01:02 - Do This Monday01:03:31 - Eric's Advice: Go Look for the Tool01:04:37 - Wrap Up and OutroResources / 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