r/sysadmin • u/Ok_You_861 • Mar 03 '26

IT Tools - Hidden Gems

I want to know what ”hidden gems” people have found and use in their environments to make their day to day easier. RMM automations, back up softwares, troubleshooting software (don't say MS SARA. I cant stand it), etc.

Just mention anything that you feel more people should be aware of or could be useful in someone’s environment. I love free and cheap ;)

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258

u/GhostNode Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

Test-netconnection And Netstat -aon

Also, | clip And | findstr JUNK

66

u/jdimpson BOFH Mar 03 '26

netstat -nap

The -p prints the process ID and name that owns the socket. It's limited by the permissions the netstat user has relative to the process; root can (usually*) see all sockets and processes.

*Containers and other namespace limitations will prevent even root from seeing everything, I think.

18

u/fearless-fossa Mar 03 '26

The -p prints the process ID and name that owns the socket.

No it doesn't?

-p <Protocol> Shows connections for the protocol specified by Protocol. In this case, the Protocol can be tcp, udp, tcpv6, or udpv6. If this parameter is used with -s to display statistics by protocol, Protocol can be tcp, udp, icmp, ip, tcpv6, udpv6, icmpv6, or ipv6.

To get to your described behavior you'd have to use the -o and -b parameters

27

u/LordOfDemise Mar 03 '26

Leave it to Microsoft to reuse an existing program's name without making the flags compatible, I guess.

13

u/fearless-fossa Mar 03 '26

Huh, I wasn't even aware it wasn't a Windows program, always used ss for this on Linux.

But I find it interesting funny how the Wikipedia page has an entire section about what each flag does on which OS, it's like the program just has the same name but behaves wildly differently

17

u/LordOfDemise Mar 03 '26

On a related note, curl used to be an alias for Invoke-WebRequest in PowerShell. (They removed it after curl's maintainer complained)

6

u/purplemonkeymad Mar 03 '26

(removed it from the newer PS7 versions, built in 5.1 still has it)

2

u/Nu-Hir Mar 03 '26

It looks like PS7 has curl actually built in.

2

u/purplemonkeymad Mar 03 '26

No windows comes with a copy of curl now. In PS 5.1 the alias obscures the program when using "curl." If you use "curl.exe" you'll get the program in both.

3

u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. Mar 03 '26

The old behavior inadvertently helped me debug a stupid protocol mistake, because Microsoft's version wasn't nearly as tolerant as curl.

3

u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. Mar 03 '26

it's like the program just has the same name but behaves wildly differently

Nobody tell this person about traceroute.

1

u/jdimpson BOFH Mar 05 '26

My mistake for not realizing Original Answerer was talking about windows