Kudithipudi.Org

June 14, 2008

Tools of the trade : IBM Page Detailer

Filed under: Networking,Technology,Web — Vinay @ 9:59 pm

I discovered IBM Page Detailer, a tool to analyze web traffic between a client and a server in a graphical format, while listening to the brilliant Steve Sounder’s lecture on “Even Faster Web Sites” from the Google I/O 2008 conference. And credit goes to Ray for posting the list of videos from the Google I/O conference.

Am still playing around with this tool, but it looks like there is a lot of potential here. Rather than acting as a proxy, like most of the HTTP analyzers do, this tool actually places a probe in the clients network stack. And not to mention that it is free to use :) .

January 28, 2008

Internet in the air..

Filed under: Networking,Technology,Travel — Vinay @ 1:50 am

I wrote ~2 years ago, about accessing the Internet, while I was flying at 35,000 feet in the air. Since then, the company that provided this service, Connexion, has declared bankruptcy and everyone pretty much wrote off the market for in-air Internet access. Looks like enough people want it :) and several companies are reentering this market. This article at news.com claims that most of the US air-carriers will have some kind of broadband service available in the next 2 years. Say goodbye to the last “Internet free” place on earth :)

January 20, 2008

Tools of the trade : SysInternals for Windows

Filed under: Networking,Technology,Windows — Vinay @ 1:05 am

SysInternals, a company founded by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, and later acquired by Microsoft, produces some of the well known “must have” tools for a system administrator. Top on my list would be

If a sys admin (esp Windows admin) says that they don’t know these tools.. don’t hire them :) .

December 30, 2007

Tools of the trade : Site24x7.com

Filed under: Networking,Technology — Vinay @ 1:56 pm

Anyone working in IT Operations, knows that numbers are really important :) . Esp, numbers showing availability, downtime, response time etc. I have used, several tools and services during my career to capture these numbers, but have never come across a service that is cost effective and reliable at the same time. I discovered site24x7.com, while was evaluating some products from their parent company AdventNet.

Site24x7.com offers external monitoring for your key network components, at the fraction of the price charged by others in area. I wouldn’t put them on the same scale as Gomez or Keynote, but for they are very reasonable for the features they offer. Also, while they are lacking in the customer service area per se, they are very quick to add features based on feedback. I provided them (and I am sure several others) some feedback on adding a feature to have setup scheduled maintenance (so that it doesn’t skew with the availability numbers) for the services monitored and they added the feature in less than a month.

If you are looking, for a reasonably priced monitoring service, look no further..

May 13, 2007

HOW TO : Delete exchange account on a Windows Mobile device

Filed under: Networking,Technology,Windows — Vinay @ 12:55 pm

I use a T-Mobile Dash as my phone and mobile messaging platform. For those that are not aware, you pull e-mail from any Exchange 2003 server with SP2 from a Windows Mobile device over the air, using direct connect. The management features are not as robust as Blackberry for managing Windows Mobile devices, but it is a free feature :) .

I have been trying to figure out for the last few weeks, how I can switch the exchange server that my DASH has been configured for. Finally, a lot of googling revealed the following steps.

On your mobile device,

  • Go to Start -> Active Sync
  • Click  Menu – >  Options
  • Choose Microsoft Exchange
  • Click on Menu-> Delete

NOTE : This will delete all your e-mail, contacts and calendar entries that were synchronized using the old exchange server.

March 13, 2007

Blackberry : Administrator tip

Filed under: Networking,Technology — Vinay @ 10:53 pm

If you ever wanted to find out how to confirm that a message you have sent to a blackberry device has been delivered, you can send a message to the blackberry with just < confirm> in the subject. You will get a confirmation e-mail as soon as the message has been delivered to the blackberry device. We usually use it to check latency and other issues on our blackberry server.

HOW TO : Cognos Installation

Filed under: Networking,Programming,Technology,Web — Vinay @ 7:44 pm

I tried setting up Cognos (Business Intelligence tool mainly used for reporting) on a test machine for Lakshmi to play around with. After going through the install, I can say with confidence that Cognos has some of the worst documentation :) . Here are some quick tips that you won’t find in the official documentation for someone trying to configure Cognos BI 8.x on a Win2k3 server running MS SQL 2005 and IIS 6.0.

  1. After installing Cognos, run the “Cognos Configuration” tool and change the “Gateway URI” setting to “http://servername:portnumber/cognos8/cgi-bin/cognosisapi.dll” in the environment section.
  2. Edit the default.htm and index.htm file in the “< cognos install directory >\cognos\c8\webcontent” directory and replace cognos.cgi with cognosisapi.dll
  3. Open ISS manager and go to Web Service Extension. Add a new web service extension called isapi and add cognosisapi.dll as a required file. Make sure to set the extension status to Allowed.

This should enable you to launch cognos and log into the web interface.

November 14, 2006

HOW TO : Linksys SRX200 + Emule

Filed under: Networking,Technology,Web — Vinay @ 4:09 pm

Quick guide to configure your Linksys SRX200 router/switch to support emule.

  1. Assign a static IP address in the range assigned to you by the wireless router. In this case, Linksys assigns the 192.168.1.0/24 range. I will use 192.168.1.50 as an example.
  2. Open a browser window and go to http://192.168.1.1
  3. Log in with your admin credentials (it is admin/admin by default).
  4. Click on the “Application and Gaming” tab.
  5. Make sure that you are on the “Port Range Forward” page.
  6. Enter the following information

    7.    Application : Emule
       Start : 4660
       End : 4712
       Type : Both
       IP Address : 50
       Enable : Checked

  7. Click on “Save Settings”
  8. Launch Emule and you should be in business :)

November 12, 2006

Windows Command : How to get MAC address

Filed under: Networking,Technology,Windows — Vinay @ 8:15 pm

I knew that you could get the MAC address of a network interface in Windows, by using “ipconfig /all“. Just discovered, this new command (that only works in Windows XP) “getmac“.

September 7, 2006

nmap : how to scan a network

Filed under: Networking — Vinay @ 9:35 am

If you want to scan a network or range of IPs for hosts that are on a network, you can use nmap with the following option

nmap -sL NETWORK/MASK (ex: nmap -sL 192.168.1.0/24)
or
nmap -sL NETWORKRANGE (ex: nmap -sL 192.168.1.0-50)

For a complete reference of nmap capabilities, go to http://insecure.org/nmap/man/.

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