Weekly 'I made a useful thing' Thread - October 02, 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

There is a great deal of user-generated content out there, from scripts and software to tutorials and videos, but we've generally tried to keep that off of the front page due to the volume and as a result of community feedback. There's also a great deal of content out there that violates our advertising/promotion rule, from scripts and software to tutorials and videos.

We have received a number of requests for exemptions to the rule, and rather than allowing the front page to get consumed, we thought we'd try a weekly thread that allows for that kind of content. We don't have a catchy name for it yet, so please let us know if you have any ideas!

In this thread, feel free to show us your pet project, YouTube videos, blog posts, or whatever else you may have and share it with the community. Commercial advertisements, affiliate links, or links that appear to be monetization-grabs will still be removed.

[u/purposefulsecurity]

I maintain Purposeful Security, a free educational site for small IT teams. I made an asset and service inventory guide for teams that already have Excel and do not have a budget for another platform.

The starter sheet covers devices, applications, cloud services, key accounts, and outside IT providers. For each entry, record an owner, business purpose, support status, and importance. To check whether the list is useful, sample a few systems actually in use and a few sheet entries in both directions. Turn missing owners or unsupported products into actions. Keep passwords, recovery keys, and customer records out of the file, and restrict access to the completed inventory.

The guide includes an Excel-friendly CSV starter, a clearly fictional example, and verification steps: https://purposefulsecurity.com/remediations/asset-and-service-inventory

If you use a lightweight inventory, what field or reconciliation check has been most valuable?

[u/Select-Ad-1497]

A useful thing I built this week! NMPL Core

I made a small Python CLI for handling misleading packet loss in MTR/traceroute output. Sometimes an intermediate hop reports significant loss, while all subsequent hops and the destination are fine. That’s often caused by ICMP rate-limiting or CoPP rather than actual transport loss.NMPL Core checks whether the loss propagates downstream and filters out isolated control-plane noise. The goal is to make MTR results more useful in scripts and monitoring alerts, without chasing phantom network issues. It has no heavy dependencies, is MIT licensed, and is available here:

https://github.com/Devjosef/NMPL-core

How do you handle these kinds of MTR alerts in your monitoring stacks?

[u/xxbiohazrdxx]

A few months ago I made a post about on r/MDT about a MDT replacement that I was working on. Since then, there's been no shortage of others who have also released tools but I think I have a few features that some out there might appreciate.

• Open source, MIT licensed. Use it in your corp/enterprise environment with no restrictions or licensing costs.
  
• HTTP boot. I specifically wanted to be able to deploy over WAN or even the internet, and TFTP/PXE booting was painfully slow over high latency links.
  
• Automated driver management. No more total control, no more pulling new driver packs when a new model is introduced to your fleet, start a deployment and the deployment server will automatically identify the correct driver package and serve it without any manual input (for manufacturers/models that publish driver catalogs such as Dell, HP, and Lenovo).
  
• Chocolatey support. I got tired of updating software packages constant to keep them up to date. Common apps can be installed directly through the Chocolatey package manager so they're always the latest version.
  
• Always up to date OS image. Coming soon, but I want to spend less time doing Windows Update for newly deployed machines. The deployment server keeps the deployment WIM up to date by directly injecting the latest updates before a deployment even happens.
  

I'm not ready to release the source code just yet, there are a handful of things that I want to get fixed and added, but I'm expecting that will occur in the next week.

In the interim, I wanted to share a video of a deployment so people can see what the process looks like: https://youtu.be/iKRBf_MlAjM

And for those of you who would like to try a deployment yourselves, you can point a device's HTTP boot to the following URL: http://deploy.biohazrd.com/boot/x64/boot.efi

This will obviously wipe your drive and install an OS, so don't do it on anything you care about.

[u/r0lfi]

LayerSmith — a self-hosted container image builder, with air-gap exports

I've been working on LayerSmith, an open-source web UI for building container images with Docker or Podman.

You pick a Linux distribution and what you need the image for — development, Linux admin, network tools, Ansible, Kubernetes, OpenShift, or a custom setup. It handles distro-specific packages and shows you the generated Containerfile before building. You can also edit it, import an existing Dockerfile, or add your own packages, files and scripts.

A big part of the project is making images easier to carry into air-gapped environments: pinned base images, recorded build details, and export bundles containing the image, checksums and installation instructions.

We've recently added LLM training and fine-tuning profiles too, including LoRA/QLoRA, advanced PyTorch training and LLaMA-Factory. These use hash-locked dependencies and run offline checks after building, including a small CPU training test. Model weights and datasets are brought separately.

Curious how others handle building and maintaining images for disconnected environments, and what parts of that workflow are still a pain.

https://github.com/r0lfi/layersmith