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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!