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
