Welcome back to IT Pro Tuesday!

In the latest Security Swarm Podcast: “Passkeys: The Future of Authentication?” we talk with veteran Cloud Consultant Jan Bakker about the revolutionary concept of passkeys, a technology that aims to replace traditional passwords and enhance security by providing phishing resistance. The conversation delves into the significance of passkeys and their value in improving user experience and security as well as what is currently public about passkeys in M365.

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

removebg is a simple, AI-powered online image editor that specializes in removing the background from any image. You can quickly make any background transparent or transform it to white, depending on the need. Tamara-for-GoTo adds, “Anytime I needed to remove the background from images, really found this web tool handy.”

RoboCopy GUI is a nice visual interface for RoboCopy that offers job queuing, monitoring, and logging. Lets you easily add jobs to a queue, adjust settings, analyze what needs copying, and monitor the jobs as they run. Can even parse existing RoboCopy command lines to populate the GUI settings. DarrenRose999 explains, “If you are looking for a GUI to use with RoboCopy, then take a look here—regularly updated and available from the Microsoft Store.”

ChumpyCarvings shares, “one trick I find I need rarely, which makes me look like a wizard and few still remember: Program is ‘open’ but not visible… where is it? huh?

• ALT (hold) – SPACE (context menu open) – X – see if it maximizes. If it does, it’s ok (almost always!)
• Then ALT (hold) – SPACE (context menu open) – R (Restore window back to how it was)
• Then ALT – SPACE – M (this used to be V. I’m sure of it, it’s M now)
• Move the window with the cursor keys, and you’ll find which weird X/Y location it moved over to.

I don’t use it often; but when I do, people are bamboozled, including other techs.” btc– adds an easier way than using cursor keys, “Once you do ‘alt+space+M’ and use the cursor key once, you can then move your mouse (no clicking) and the window will move with the mouse cursor. Click to release the window. To be fair an even easier way now is just to hold down the windows_key and tap left or right a few times to snap the window over.”

389 Directory Server is an open-source, hardened, high-performance LDAP server for Linux. This horizontally scalable solution has been extensively tested with sanitization tools, a rich feature set of fail-over and backup technologies, and a database size that is limited only by available disk space. Kindly suggested by ericross1623.

Capsule VPN allows you to securely access resources from a Windows Phone via a full layer-3 VPN tunnel. Offers SSL support, a variety of authentication methods, connection persistency upon device roaming, and auto connection attempts after session expiry or device reboot. Appreciation for this suggestion goes to itanassa.

TurnKey Linux Virtual Appliance Library is an open-source project offering assorted Debian-based server software appliances that can be deployed as a VM, via a cloud-computing service, or on your own hardware. Recommended by david-eaton, who adds that it “should probably get more attention than it does… Basically, TurnKey Linux makes it easier to hit the ground running with a lot of open source apps/tools including things like PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Jenkins, OpenLDAP, etc.”

Clockify is a feature-filled time tracker and timesheet solution for teams. Provides a clean interface that allows you to track productivity, attendance, and billable hours for an unlimited number of users. Our thanks for directing us this one go to reenasun.