CEO's Blog
Archive for the 'Networking Basics' Category
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Monday, March 08 2010
Big CDN Provider Test: Who Serves You Fastest?
Nowadays, state of the art websites use CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) to deliver static websites assets like images, CSS, and JavaScript files. In order to deliver these objects as fast as possible to the website visitor, the CDN providers run a network of so called "edge servers" in multiple locations. As soon as your browser requests a website object, its connection is directed to the nearest server (in a network topological view) which finally delivers the data.
This sounds great in theory, but in real life it can be a complex task. One aspect is running an edge server network around the world (largest provider Akamai reports more than 40,000 servers around the globe). And there is "the last mile" issue: Website visitors usually do not sit in data centers with fiber optic connections, but use cable, DSL, T1, etc. instead.
With a broadly conceived test, we want to find out:
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Tuesday, May 26 2009
Introducing Paessler Multi Server Simulator
For testing purposes Multi Server Simulator simulates a virtual network of HTTP, FTP, SMTP, or DNS servers plus any number of SNMP-based switches - all on a standard Windows PC. It is an indispensable tool for the evaluation and testing of network management and network testing tools.
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Wednesday, May 20 2009
Monitoring the Birth of a Search Engine - Wolfram|Alpha Goes Online
Over the last weekend the engineers of Wolfram Research gradually launched their new search engine Wolfram|Alpha (or should I better say "knowledge engine"). We monitored their website during this launch with PRTG Network Monitor and here are the results!
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Friday, April 03 2009
The Browser War Revisited (Part 3): Which Browsers Do People Use Around the World?
In the last weeks I have looked at the currently available web browsers from a "performance-for-PRTG" perspective and found that Chrome and Firefox are our recommendations for PRTG. Today I ran across the StatCounter Global Stats website where web analytics service Statcounter publishes its stats about browser usage worldwide.
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Monday, December 29 2008
Carrying the Virtual Load - Podcast-Radio-Interview with Dirk Paessler
Listen to this eWeek podcast hosted by Mike Vizard where Mike and I talk about the toll virtualization is starting to take on our enterprise networks.
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Monday, November 17 2008
Paessler's Guide to Troubleshooting WMI Problems
Every so often customers using our monitoring tools (e.g. PRTG Network Monitor) report issues when trying to monitor their systems using WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) sensors. In most cases, these issues stem from a malfunctioning WMI configurations/installations.
Today we have published our Guide to Troubleshooting WMI Problems that will help users of PRTG to track down most issues.
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Wednesday, August 20 2008
How can I monitor my available bandwidth 24/7?
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:
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Friday, October 19 2007
Handy SNMP resources on the Cisco website: Cisco MIB Listings, MIB Locator, and OID Translator
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.
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Thursday, May 24 2007
MIB Importer converts proprietary device MIB-SNMP files to enable management by Paessler's Network Monitoring Applications
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.
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Thursday, February 15 2007
Instructions on how to set up Port Forwarding - on almost any router
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.
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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.
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Monday, October 09 2006
IE7 Is Coming This Month... Paessler Products Are Ready!
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!
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Tuesday, October 03 2006
The Multi-Browser Appliance
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!
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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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Thursday, August 24 2006
Easy to read Drawings of IP, TCP and UDP Packet Headers
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.
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Wednesday, August 16 2006
The art of network troubleshooting
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.
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