If you’re planning a business trip abroad for yourself or your team, it’s essential to confirm the need for VISAs or any other form of travel authorization.

Passportindex.org provides a one-stop resource, consolidating all the details you may need on a single place.

The website also offers other useful features, such as a passport ranking, a display of each passport cover, a comparison tool, and various filters to analyze different aspects of a passport in groupings.

URL: passportindex.org

HashiCorp Packer is a tool used to automate the creation of identical machine and container images across multiple platforms.

By using a single source configuration, Packer streamlines the process of building system images, ensuring efficiency and consistency. It supports multiple cloud providers and private infrastructure, allowing users to create images for various platforms in one go.

Packer is highly extensible, enabling users to add plugins for builders, provisioners, post-processors, and data sources. It is commonly used for automating image builds, managing “golden images,” ensuring image compliance, and integrating with other HashiCorp tools like Terraform.

Terraform revolutionizes the way we manage infrastructure. By adopting Terraform and embracing Infrastructure as Code, organizations can simplify and automate the process of provisioning resources, improve collaboration, and ensure security and compliance across their infrastructure.

Through the adoption, building, standardization, and scaling of Terraform workflows, teams can operate more efficiently, manage costs effectively, and meet the ever-growing demands of modern cloud environments. Terraform’s flexibility and power allow organizations to extend these practices across their entire infrastructure ecosystem, from development to production.

If you’re looking to modernize your infrastructure management and embrace IaC, Terraform is a powerful tool to help you get there—providing the scalability, automation, and collaboration needed to thrive in today’s cloud-native world.

More information can be found here.

This web site becomes very useful when you want to share a list of available operating system images for Azure VMs to a project manager that doesn’t have Azure CLI installed.

URL: az-vm-image.info

If you are fortunate enough to be in a multi-cloud provider organization, then cloudprice.net becomes a great ally in cost optimization. Despite only including some of the larger cloud providers, it allows for multi-tier and multi-region comprehensive analysis in convenient form.

URL: cloudprice.net

Sometimes, small changes can result in costly application downtime, emergency rollbacks, accompanied by several hours of troubleshooting, followed by days of analysis and planning. One of the most common changes involves updates and patches to operating systems. These are typically driven by security concerns but may also introduce new functionalities.

The first step to increasing the chances of successful patching is basic organization and planning. Tracking successful or failed changes on servers and applications is essential in IT management, often using tools like Jira or ServiceNow. It’s also important to stay informed about known issues with the patches that are about to be installed, and understand which changes will be made. For example, a few years ago, a Windows update disabled SMB 1.0, and a subsequent update altered how Windows Features are activated.

Keeping application owners informed and involved in approvals is crucial to avoid unintended consequences. By ensuring they approve maintenance windows, downtime and disruptions are minimized, as their input is vital for assessing risks and timing of updates effectively.

By implementing update rings and testing groups further enhances patching reliability by allowing updates to be gradually tested and rolled out. For example starting with the test and development environments is a the best way to do this.

Another way to ensure successful patches and updates is by using patching applications like Azure Update Manager, WSUS or SCCM. These tools provide reports on the latest patches, track the status of each server and their patch level, and allow for automated patching based on predefined conditions and grouping. However, be cautious with fully automated patches without prior testing, as they can lead to issues, such as the recent Crowdstrike patch failure that caused a widespread downtime in hundreds of businesses on a Friday. Additionally, ensuring free disk space is essential for successful updates.

Another important step is to plan how to revert any changes if something goes wrong. For this, I recommend automating pre-update snapshots and deleting them if everything goes well.

By combining these best practices, you can significantly reduce the risks associated with patching and ensure a smoother, more reliable update process.

I didn’t use my Macbook for a long time, so I decided to put it up for sale. Before posting any ad, I wanted to be fully sure it was working correctly, to avoid any surprises to the future owner. My computer was a 2019 Macbook Pro, with an Intel CPU, therefore I ran a series of tests to ensure it didn’t have any issues. Besides the onboard diagnostics available in the pre-boot environment, I wanted to run additional tests. I also recommend, to guarantee the best and most realistic results, running the tests a few times and comparing the results.

Disk

Most modern Apple computers come with non-removable internal drives, because they are directly soldered to the motherboard. Hence, SMART Utility, a GUI tool for querying and verifying SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data becomes very important, as its showing the number of hours, GB/s written to the drive, and it’s overall health. This is important because HDDs and SSDs have a limited amount of writes.

Memory

MemTest86 is a self-booting USB tool that allows testing with detailed reports of almost every x86 based CPU and RAM type in the market. It requires creating a bootable USB pen-drive and an adapter, but its worth it.

FAN

Intel based Macbooks need a fan to run at optimal temperatures, that’s why a full blast fan for a couple of minutes with Mac Fan Control can help diagnose any issues with it.

Battery

The application coconutBattery will show the battery health, cycle count and even the temperature.

Stress test

The benchmarking tool novabench will run 11 tests that span from CPU, GPU, HDD and RAM, that will show actual performance in usable units such as GFLOPS or MB/s. The build in stress test is also super useful.

Ever landed somewhere and realized that your laptop or phone changer wont plug to the local electrical socket?

These days the majority of SMPS power supplies are designed to adapt themselves to most mains voltages and frequencies around the world, but the physical sockets may still have completely different designs.

Before any trip, a quick glance at the information present in worldstandards.eu, will allow you to confirm if your chargers will manage with your destination’s voltages and frequencies, but also let you know if you need a special adapter for the sockets. Every IT technician, should stock adapters according to the visitors you may receive, and the possible business trips your coworkers may have to international branches of the company.

URL: worldstandards.eu

This tool improved my daily routine by securely storing my remote sessions , for example RDP, FTP or SSH, and credentials under strong authentication (2FA). Some of my favorite features are the notes, tags, password manager, and credential batch editing.

The tool is has free and feature rich paid version, both available here.

The original fan supplied with the 52Pi NAS case had quiet operation, but the RGB LED flickering proved to be a distraction. I opted to upgrade it by installing a NOCTUA fan coupled with a temperature control circuit.

The fitting required slightly bending the heatpipes towards the board, to ensure a perfect lid closure. The cooling performance increased without any visual or audible disruptions.

Grateful to share that Techlogist.net has reached its 5th anniversary milestone, with hopes for many more years to come!

If you need to benchmark the major components of your Windows or Mac OS computer, then novabench can help you. It will run 11 tests that span from CPU, GPU, HDD and RAM, that will show actual performance in usable units such as GFLOPS or MB/s. It also has a built in stress test.

The tool is free and available to download here.