Question

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• RELI
• PSR
• PathPing
• MTR
• Sysinternals
• GodMode

In 2012, I left the great state of Louisiana for Colorado to take a position with the Communications‐Electronics Command (CECOM) at Fort Carson for the U.S. Army. My job was to train soldiers for information assurance (IA). The Department of Defense has a requirement that any full‐ or part‐time military service member or contractor with privileged access must have certain computer certifications. This was known as DoDD 8570. My role was to teach these certification classes to help soldiers achieve the correct IA level needed so they could perform their job.

My commandant Ryan Hendricks is a networking guru, and he wanted to stay in his Cisco classes. Someone was needed to teach A+, Network+, Security+, Server+, CASP, and CISSP as well as Microsoft Active Directory, SCCM, and SharePoint. We both held the opinion that it wasn't fair for us to teach the class if we didn't hold the certification. He continued down the Cisco path, and I skipped down the CompTIA/Microsoft certification path.

While studying for these certifications, I had many “aha” moments that are still relative today. In fact, when I am teaching my certification classes for Rapid7, I often take a few moments while everyone is getting settled into his or her seat after lunch to show class members some of these cool troubleshooting tricks for Windows. It's a bit of a bonus for coming back to class on time.

Even seasoned professionals who work with massive networks and have years of experience have uttered a few choice words when they see tools that are meant to make their life easier after they've been doing it the hard way for years and years. If nearly 90 percent of your network is Windows, you need these tools to make your administrative life easier.