CEO's Blog
Archive for the 'Admin's Toolbox' Category
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Tuesday, February 10 2009
Five Free and Quick Ways to Create Beautiful Network Maps Online
In order to make the results of your network monitoring available in your Intranet or for customers we recommend using the "Maps" feature of PRTG Network Monitor in conjunction with a map of your network. Visualized results make it much easier for your users to understand the situation of your network.
Here are a samples for (rather simple) network maps including live monitoring data (created with PRTG 7):
But how do you create a map of your network? There are paid-for options, e.g. Microsoft Visio, and other programs that you must install locally on your computer. But in many cases using one of the following free online options may serve you well for a quick map!
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Tuesday, December 30 2008
WMI Tester Tool updated
Today we have published updated version 2 of our WMI Tester Tool.
Since the release of PRTG Network Monitor 7, which can make massive use of WMI for monitoring in larger networks, we have seen quite a few customers having trouble with their WMI setups. These problems were caused by misconfigured firewalls, incorrect domain accounts, bad DCOM settings and many more. WMI Tester can be of a great help in such a situation - especially combined with our knowledgebase article "Paessler's Guide to Troubleshooting WMI Problems".
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Thursday, November 13 2008
SNMP Tester Debug Tool Updated
Today we have uploaded a new version of SNMP Tester, our simple but efficient testing tool for SNMP connections. With SNMP Tester you can run simple SNMP requests against a device in your network.
The program is based on the SNMP technologies that are also built into PRTG Network Monitor and the idea is to have a tool that enables the user to debug SNMP activities in order to find communication and/or data problems in SNMP monitoring configurations. If the SNMP connection works with this test program it will also work with PRTG.
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Wednesday, November 12 2008
Creating Artificial NetFlow Data Streams for Testing Purposes Made Simple
Our latest freeware tool Netflow Generator creates artificial NetFlow Version 5 data streams without the need for NetFlow compatible hardware. It is the perfect tool to test the NetFlow functionality of PRTG or other NetFlow compatible programs.
NetFlow Generator runs on a PC and sends NetFlow 5 Packets (via UDP) to a specific target computer which processes the data. You can create various patterns and loads of traffic. While the simulator is active it will create NetFlow packets which contain information about the selected traffic pattern. These packets contain the same information as a router/switch would send if it saw the simulated traffic pattern (the simulated traffic itself is not generated).
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Wednesday, November 12 2008
MIB Importer Tool Updated
Today we have released a new version of our MIB Importer Tool. The MIB Importer is used to convert so-called "SNMP MIB files" into a format suitable for our monitoring applications, especially PRTG Network Monitor. MIB files are usually supplied by device vendors and describe the available monitoring objects of a device.
This new version 2.0 includes support for PRTG Network Monitor 7 and includes many improvements of the MIB parser aimed at improving compatibility with MIB files that only conform loosely to the RFCs (which happens quite often actually).
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Tuesday, November 11 2008
Packet Sniffing Debug Tool Updated
Our Card Packet Counter is a small tool that shows live stats and a short term statistical history about the network data packets and streams passing a local network card. Using the Packet Sniffing Engine of PRTG Network Monitor it looks at all network packets that pass a specific network card.
It was mainly developed to debug technical issues between PCs and the packet sniffing engine which is built into PRTG Network Monitor. But it is also a very useful tool for other network problem finding situations - and it's free.
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Tuesday, November 11 2008
Netflow Tester Debug Tool Updated
Paessler NetFlow Tester is a small program that simply dumps the data of all NetFlow packets that a computer receives from a Cisco router. This can be useful when debugging bandwidth monitoring configurations based on Cisco's NetFlow protocol, e.g. in order to find out whether packets actually reach the target system.
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Tuesday, January 08 2008
Installation of PRTG Traffic Grapher on Ubuntu Linux
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
- create a virtual machine in VMWare Workstation 6,
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Monday, December 10 2007
Monitoring Macintosh Computers under Leopard using SNMP
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.
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Wednesday, June 06 2007
TweakUAC: Quickly turn Vista's UAC on or off (or operate quietly)
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:
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Monday, May 21 2007
Mark Russinovich: "Inside Windows Vista User Account Control"
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.
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Thursday, February 01 2007
Fiddler HTTP Debugging Proxy
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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Sunday, January 07 2007
Remotely fixing a PC via the Internet - Free & Instantly
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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Thursday, November 23 2006
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.
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Wednesday, November 15 2006
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.
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Wednesday, October 25 2006
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.
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Friday, October 20 2006
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.
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