Paessler Blog
Archive for "2006"
2006-Dec-27
Updating IPCheck Remote Probes Remotely
Since the remote probe software version needs to match the IPCheck host software version it is always necessary to update the probe's software each time the host's software is updated. In order to automate the process and to update the software in such a manner that the actual users working on the target machines barely notice the process, the following steps can be taken for a "silent" install.2006-Dec-20
Monitoring a WRT54G/GS with PRTG
The LINKSYS WRT54G/GS routers are quite popular and offer the ability to upload your own firmware. With the right firmware you can monitor the router using SNMP.2006-Dec- 5
New beta version of IPCheck Server Monitor
We have published a new beta of IPCheck Server Monitor that adds a couple of new and interesting features.2006-Nov-27
New Beta available: PRTG V6.0.6 adds Aggregate Graphing
The latest beta version of PRTG 6 adds a feature that has been requested numerous times by many customers: Graph Aggregation! Using aggregated graphing you can now sum up the traffic data of two or more ports and use it just a like a new sensor for graphs, tables and reports.2006-Nov-24
Monitoring non-integer SNMP values with IPCheck Server Monitor
We have published a new article in our knowledge base that explains how you can use the Custom Script sensor of IPCheck Server Monitor to monitor non-integer values via SNMP.2006-Nov-24
Paessler MIB Importer V1.0 Beta
Now there is a brand new version of our MIB Importer Tool available on the website. With this software you can easily import MIB files and convert them into OID libraries for PRTG Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitor.2006-Nov-23
Microsoft enters the Virtual Appliances Arena
Microsoft now offers preconfigured virtual machines that enable you to test drive setups of some of their server systems using MS Virtual Server 2005 R2.2006-Nov-15
Admin's Toolbox: Webpage elements download timing analysis
A new interesting online tool helps you to analyze how a browser downloads the elements of a page. All single HTTP requests with their timing are shown in an easy to read graph.2006-Nov-10
Four seconds is the maximum time online shoppers will wait for a Web page
A web shop has 4 seconds to deliver its webpages according to a study from JupiterResearch that examines consumer reaction to a poor online shopping experience - or the customer goes someplace else. While a few years ago usability expert Jacob Nielsen suggested 10 seconds to be the maximum time obviously the growing use of broadband connections has pushed the limit even further. The report ranked poor site performance as second only to high product prices and shipping costs as leading factors for dissatisfaction among online shoppers. While prices may not always be so easy to change the speed of your online shop can be checked and optimized with tools like our Webserver Stress Tool.2006-Nov- 1
Five reasons to get serious about bandwidth monitoring
Here is a short list of the top five reasons why you seriously should consider to implement bandwidth monitoring in your network:2006-Oct-31
The 64 Bit Counter Mystery: Trouble with a HP Procurve Gigabit Switch
We had upgraded the last remaining dark and slow 100 Mbit corner of our data center from 100 Mbit Ethernet to Gigabit Ethernet the other day. We installed an HP Procurve 1800-8G which offers Gigabit for 8 ports. As usual we began to monitor this switch using our PRTG software and found quite a surprise: PRTG reported steady peaks of 2.000.000 gigabit/s (2.000 terabit/s). Obviously something went wrong here.2006-Oct-30
How to Choose the Right Bandwidth-Monitoring Solution
If you work in the networking industry, you no doubt spend more time than you'd like putting out the proverbial fire and then wondering how it started. Your network -- however well-conceived or well-engineered -- will, invariably, create problems for you and your team at some point. So for those of us in the business of preventing problems, it's essential that we lean on our bandwidth-monitoring solution and put it to work for us.2006-Oct-26
Using PRTG and IPCheck with Windows Defender
We have been informed a couple of times that Microsoft's anti-spyware software Windows Defender seems to be having issues with our software. After various tests, we are pretty certain this is not the case - if Defender is properly configured. We had Defender and our own PRTG Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitoring up and running on various test installations for a couple of days and were unable to discern any particular issues.2006-Oct-25
Admin's Toolbox: Sending large files by email
We have all seen this: You want to send a multi-megabyte file to someone, but most mail accounts and mail servers don't work with files beyond a few megabytes. But there are some website services that come to the rescue: They enable you to send large files. The solution: You upload the file to the service website and simply mail the download link to the recipient.2006-Oct-20
Admin's Toolbox: Managing Your Remote Desktop Connections
Like most busy system administrators in medium sized Windows server environments I usually connect to at least 5 to 10 servers on an average day using remote desktop. Today I found a small freeware tool called "RDP Manager" that helps to open these connections quicker - and without typing those server names over and over again.2006-Oct-12
Minimizing diskspace usage for monitoring data by using NTFS built in compression
The monitoring databases of PRTG Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitor can become quite large for installations with many sensors. E.g. we have a monitoring database of some 3 GB for one of our internal test installations. To minimize actual disk space usage it is a good idea to enable the file system compression of the Windows operating system (available only on NTFS drives). This way the monitoring data is stored as compressed data on the disk and you save about two thirds of space.2006-Oct- 9
IE7 Is Coming This Month... Paessler Products Are Ready!
IE7 will available later this month and in the coming weeks it will be installed automatically (!) on all Windows systems on the planet via the automatic update service. Are you ready? At least your installations of Paessler software products are!2006-Oct- 3
The Multi-Browser Appliance
An administrator has to make sure that all users inside his LAN as well as visitors accessing his public web servers from the outside are enjoying a good user experience. Webpages must load fast, should look nice and the web applications must work. With so many different browsers out there it can become a daunting task to keep one's websites working on all of them. Today we are looking at an impressive VMWare appliance that helps a lot in this task!2006-Sep-29
How LAN Switches Work
The "How Stuff Works" website has a neat introductory article that explains how switches work. It is obviously based on a technical document from the Cisco website which was enhanced with various networking fundamentals. The article actually goes into some serious detail, even Spanning Tree, VLAN Trunking and more are explained. Makes a good reading for lunch!2006-Sep-26
Running PRTG Traffic Grapher on a Linux computer
A new segment in the sphere of operating systems seems to build up. Somewhere between the paid-for Windows operating systems and the open-source Linux systems a new kind of offerings comes up: They are cheap or free, they are easy to install and to use (windows lookalikes) and.... They run Windows applications. One sample is Linux XP Desktop (free download, $40) which is built on Red-Hat Linux and offers a GUI that appeals to users that are familiar with Windows. And it is able to run many Windows applications out-of-the-box. Another sample is ReactOS, which is in an early alpha stage currently. Yes, it's true: Even PRTG Traffic Grapher can be run on this Linux system. The secret ingredient is called Wine.2006-Sep-25
Comparing MRTG with PRTG Traffic Grapher
The choice between MRTG and PRTG for your network bandwidth monitoring is - to some extent - a matter of how comfortable you are with configuration files, a manual installation and with adding additional software tools for special tasks. And there are some features that clearly separate both products, too. If you are an experienced Linux user then the open source software MRTG can be a great choice since it can be configured to be a powerful and reliable helper for your daily network management. But in a business environment which mainly uses the Windows plattform I believe that an integrated "out-of-the-box" solution like PRTG offers the better value - even though it is not free.2006-Sep-21
Top 5 reasons for sudden traffic peaks shown by bandwidth monitoring
Sometimes users of our network monitoring software PRTG Traffic Grapher contact our support team and report peaks in their bandwidth monitoring graphs. Most of these peaks only look like unusual high traffic, but some users have even seen spikes like 10 GBit/s for a sensor that actually monitors a 2 MBit/s connection.... Well, a gigabit peak for a data line with megabit rating clearly has to be regarded as a technical problem. But in most other cases our support team together with the customer have found out - after some investigation - that the reported peaks were correct. There were caused by a number of different reaons and here is our Top 5 list of these resons:2006-Sep-19
Changing the colors of the sensorlist of PRTG Traffic Grapher
With version 6 we introduced a less colorful look&feel for the sensor list of the web interface and Windows GUI. First let me shortly explain why we did what we did: We sat together with graphical designers and users of PRTG and looked at the whole interface. Apart from other things we found that it was too colorful: too many colors seemed to distract from the important information. The new look is intended to- to make the list easier legible and
- make it possible to emphasize and de-emphasize important and less important areas of the interface.
2006-Sep-18
Free ebook from Cisco Press: "Cisco Router Configuration"
Cisco press offers a free ebook download on their website for the book "Cisco Router Configuration, Second Edition". Even though the book is from 2001 it offers a wealth of well written information about the basics of networking, Cisco device configuration, TCP-IP configuration. It even covers IPX and Appletalk.
2006-Sep-15
A detailed look at changes in PRTG Version 6
Since the last version 5.x we have applied so many changes to PRTG when working on version 6 that I can not mention them down to the last detail. I already mentioned the most notable changes in Thursday's posting. We know that many users are interested in a more detailed list, so here we go: Here is a list of most of the smaller, but still notable changes:2006-Sep-13
PRTG Traffic Grapher Version 6 Released
PRTG has become the Windows tool of choice for bandwidth and network usage monitoring. It brings many SNMP monitoring features from MRTG - which is well known in the Linux community - to the Windows plattform and adds a packet sniffer and NetFlow Monitoring for Cisco Routers. More then 100.000 users are currently using PRTG every day. Today we have released the all new Version 6.0 of PRTG Traffic Grapher. This new version offers a number of new features and a redesigned Windows and Web user interface.
2006-Sep-11
The Monitoring Triplets: Availability, Speed, and Usage
Merely implementing a Network Monitoring solution for your network is not enough. The biggest part of the work begins right after choosing and installing a monitoring solution. Now it is time to select which aspects of your network you are going to monitor.2006-Sep- 5
10 Things About Your Company That You Should be Monitoring on the Web
In a time of bloggers and social networks the reputation of your company may be talked about on the Web all the time. You should know about that! Yesterday I published a link to the "Online Reputation Monitoring Beginners Guide", today we will look at another blog posting about this topic. In order to manage the online-reputation of your company you need to track the right things - so here's a list of 10 things that you absolutely need to be monitoring.2006-Sep- 4
Monitoring the Online Reputation of a Product or Company Name: Introduction
Today we are talking about a different kind of monitoring: This time we are not monitoring a network or systems. We are monitoring the web and the blogosphere for your product and/or company names.A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious. It can be destroyed in hours by a blogger upset with your company.Every single day, someone, somewhere is discussing something important to your business. Your brand, your executives, your competitors, your industry. Are they hyping-up your company or are they criticizing your service, complaining?
2006-Aug-31
Searching for problems on a slow Unix/Linux server
There is a nice article on IBM's developer works website that explains how to use various command line tools to analyze runtime problems on Unix systems:When your UNIX® system runs slow, it is vital that you discover what the problem is as quickly as possible so you can get your system back into the normal operating mode. There are many causes for a slow system, but actually identifying the problem can be exceedingly difficult. In this article, study examples of how to identify and diagnose the cause of your slow running UNIX system to get your machine running properly again.
2006-Aug-25
Directory Traversal Vulnerability Issue Fixed for IPCheck Server Monitor
We have published a new version of IPCheck Server Monitor that fixes a security issue in the webserver: By Using URLs with special characters a so-called "directory traversal" was possible. This fact could be exploited to gain access to files on the disk which IPCheck is installed on.2006-Aug-24
Easy to read Drawings of IP, TCP and UDP Packet Headers
This is some quite technical information, but it may help you to understand the foundations of everyday networking. Matt Baxter has some drawings that will show you how the structure of the headers for IP, TCP, UDP and ICMP looks byte-by-byte. It is just the normal information from the RFCs presented in an easy to read format.
2006-Aug-21
Top Five Reasons to use Network Monitoring in Your Network
If your company conducts business via the World Wide Web, optimum performance of your business website is not only critical for the growth of your business but also for its survival. Listed below are the five most important reasons why you should always monitor your website, and its other components.2006-Aug-17
Analyzing a Slow Exchange 2003 Server
You have been there: All servers seem to be getting slower over time. Always. But is it really the problem? Does it really hurt your business? And what can you do against it? For Windows servers there are multiple reasons for a slowdown over time:- fragmented disks
- overflowing TEMP folders
- processes that eat more and more RAM
- too many processes on a system or cpu-intensive processes
- hardware problems
- faulty software
2006-Aug-16
Monitoring System Parameters like Memory, CPU and Disks on Linux Systems via SNMP
Every other day users of our monitoring products PRTG Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitor ask us how they can monitor system parameters like CPU load, memory load, swap file size or disk usage on Linux and Unix systems. Today we have published a new step-by-step article in our knowledgebase that explains how to set up system parameter monitoring for Linux systems. This screenshot shows part of the list of available sensors for a Linux system (using IPCheck Server Monitor):
2006-Aug-16
The art of network troubleshooting
Grag Schaffer has published an article on computerworld.com about his approach to network latency hunting and troubleshooting. Makes a nice reading over lunch.While the technology has changed, the basic methods for troubleshooting networks really haven't. Sure, there are fancier sniffers, analyzers and monitors, but the real basics that demand an understanding of networking to the core level remain the same. Let me present a case history from the days of Thinnet to illustrate.
2006-Aug-15
Why Network Monitoring Is Important For Any Business
Before we begin to talk about the importance of Network Monitoring, let's see what "Network Monitoring" exactly is. The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia says:"The term Network Monitoring describes the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer network for slow or failing systems and that notifies the network administrator in case of outages via email, pager or other alarms."I would extend this definition by not only monitoring the network for outages but also monitoring the performance and usage of a network.
2006-Aug-14
Using Multiple-Host-PINGs to monitor the performance of a WAN connection
The basic idea of this new custom sensor for IPCheck Server Monitor is that in many cases sending PINGs over a WAN connection to just one device is not a very reliable means of testing the connection. Every once and a while you will see dropped packets due to network overload, server trouble or whatever. On WAN connections you never know what happens between you and the server. Thus when monitoring just one distant system a number of lost PINGs don't tell you too much about the performance of the connection inbetween.2006-Aug- 9
Interview: The Benefits of Network Monitoring (Part 2)
This is of part 2 a transcript of an interview between me and a journalist who wanted to know more about the benefits of network monitoring. We were talking about the benefits of an uptime/downtime monitoring solution like IPCheck Server Monitor as well as the benefits of bandwidth and usage monitoring products like PRTG Traffic Grapher (see Monday's post for the 1st part): The benefits we talk about in this part are:- 4. Benefit: Secures your turnover, because you will know about problems literally within one minute and you can take immediate action
- 5. Benefit: Gives you a chance to switch to your redundancy systems.
- 6. Benefit: Know about performance bottlenecks before your customers find out?
- 7. Benefit: Long term performance data gives you a chance to plan and implement upgrades (e.g. new server hardware, leased lines) without the need for hectic solutions
- 8. Benefit: Control whether your provider meets your service level agreement.
2006-Aug- 8
Installing the NET-SNMP daemon on Debian Linux
In order to monitor system parameters like memory and CPU load on Linux systems we recommend to install an SNMP daemon on the system. Then you can monitor the parameters using SNMP. Today I found a tutorial on the debianhelp website that explains in detail how you can install the NET-SNMP service on a Debian Linux system. As soon as this service is installed and configured you can monitor system information like CPU load on a Linux system using PRTG Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitor.2006-Aug- 7
Interview: The Benefits of Network Monitoring (Part 1)
This is a transcript of an interview between me and a journalist who wanted to know more about the benefits of network monitoring. We were talking about the benefits of an uptime/downtime monitoring solution like IPCheck Server Monitor as well as the benefits of bandwidth and usage monitoring products like PRTG Traffic Grapher: The benefits we talk about in this part are:- 1. Benefit: Increased profits: Avoid losses caused by undetected system failures
- 2. Benefit: Peace of mind: As long as you do not hear from IPCheck via email, sms, pager, etc. you know everything is running fine, and you have more time to take care of other important business
- 3. Benefit: Ease of use: IPCheck Server Monitor is easy to set up and easy to use.
2006-Aug- 2
PRTG Version 6 Enters Beta Test Phase
Good news for PRTG users: Today we have released the first beta of the upcoming version 6 of PRTG Traffic Grapher! Late night yesterday lead developer Jens Rupp gave his ok to make the download for "V6.0.0 build number 102" public. The new version adds many features that have been requested by users of PRTG (there are more than 100.000 out there!)2006-Jul-11
Freeware and Standard Edition of IPCheck massively upgraded
Today IPCheck's lead developer Roland has released V5.3.2 of IPCheck Server Monitor which dramatically enhances the features available for the users of the Freeware Edition and the Standard Edition. These new enhancements give the Freeware a lot more value. Until now Freeware and Standard users were limited to six basic sensor types, now they can use all sensor types that IPCheck Server Monitor offers. And we put even more on top: Instead of three sensors the Freeware users can now use up to five sensors.2006-Jun-20
New version of IPCheck changes behaviour of the sensor request scheduler
The new version 5.3.1.586 of IPCheck Server Monitor introduces some small changes to the request scheduler: now also latency timeouts are additionally used for sensor scheduling. This improves the use of latencies even more.2006-Apr- 6