CEO's Blog
Archive for 09/2006
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Friday, September 29 2006
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!
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Tuesday, September 26 2006
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.
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Monday, September 25 2006
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.
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Thursday, September 21 2006
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:
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Tuesday, September 19 2006
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.
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Monday, September 18 2006
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. -
Friday, September 15 2006
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:
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Wednesday, September 13 2006
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.
Here is a screenshot of the new interface:
(click to zoom in). -
Monday, September 11 2006
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.
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Tuesday, September 05 2006
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.
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Monday, September 04 2006
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?
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