We receive questions like this every few days. User of our monitoring products want to know if their ISP or hosting service is actually providing them with the available bandwidth that they are paying for. But measuring the actually available bandwidth is almost impossible.
Let me explain this:
Recently we came across the following three pretty notable pages provided by Cisco, allowing users to find Cisco MIBs and to discern OID segment almost at a glance.
Today Paessler officially announced MIB Importer, a free software tool for existing Paessler customers that seamlessly converts proprietary network device Management Information Base (MIB) data into a format that is compatible with Paessler’s PRTG Traffic Grapher and IPCheck Server Monitor applications. This enables administrators to quickly and easily configure SNMP sensors for gathering critical network diagnostic information. By providing a hassle-free solution to monitoring, Paessler allows network administrators more time to focus on strategic initiatives.
Read more in our press release.
PortForward.com offers help for setting up port forwarding on many routers or firewalls. Most users are not aware of how to configure their router or firewall in order to use IPCheck’s Remote Probes in a remote network (or to offer access to PRTG’s or IPCheck’s webinterface from outside of the network).
The same applies to Peer-to-Peer file sharing (PtoP), Internet Games, Web serving, FTP serving, WebCams, IRC DDC, and Instant Messaging such as AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and MS Messenger.
Quote:
Our Routers section offers detailed walkthroughs on how to setup port forwarding. These how to guides make it easy to setup your router or firewall for any application you may need.
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!
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!
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.
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.