CEO's Blog

You do not need a Windows based computer (and a Windows license) to use most of PRTG’s features. You can also run PRTG Traffic Grapher 6.x on Linux. Using the “Wine Library” (which emulates Windows system calls) you can run PRTG like most other Windows apps on Linux systems. Of course some hardware/driver-based features like Packet Sniffing do not work.

For this tutorial the following steps will

• create a virtual machine in VMWare Workstation 6,
• install Ubuntu 7.10 onto the virtual machine,
• install Wine 0.9.52 onto Ubuntu and
• install PRTG 6.x onto Ubuntu/Wine

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As of the new Apple operating system Leopard, Macintosh users are able to monitor their resources and their hardware based on SNMP. John Welch has posted an article explaining the implementation and functionality of this newly included SNMP system at The Unofficial Apple Weblog. You can find the article under http://www.tuaw.com/2007/12/05/john-welchs-guide-to-snmp-on-leopard. SNMP is one of the ways to monitor your systems with both our flagship software products, PRTG and IPCheck.

TweakUAC is a free software tool that you can use to quickly turn UAC (User Account Control of Windows Vista) on or off, or to make UAC operate in the quiet mode:

Mark Russinovich, the man behind the indispensable Sysinternals Tools (recently bought by Microsoft), published a good article about Vista’s User Account Control (UAC) on the TechNet website.

Fiddler (by Microsoft) is an interesting HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data.

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Every once and a while you come across the task to remotely control a PC across firewalls, NATs etc. We are not talking about controlling a PC or server in your LAN or VPN (where you have full control over the firewalls, NATs etc.). In such a case I still prefer Windows Remote Desktop for its speed inside your own network.

I mean fixing a client’s PC, a co-worker’s notebook in an Internet Cafe, or even Mom’s PC without the need of travelling there.
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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