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 :).
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..
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,
NOTE : This will delete all your e-mail, contacts and calendar entries that were synchronized using the old exchange server.
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.
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.
This should enable you to launch cognos and log into the web interface.
Quick guide to configure your Linksys SRX200 router/switch to support emule.
Application : Emule
Start : 4660
End : 4712
Type : Both
IP Address : 50
Enable : Checked
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“.
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/.
On popular demand..A lot of people asked me how you can use the BB as a modem, the way I specified in this post. Here’s the link with detailed instructions on how to do this..
Note: Make sure you have an unlimited data plan from your service provider or you can get dinged with a large bill :).
Necessity is the mother of invention.. Or so goes the old saying. I was on-call this weekend for off hour IT support. We usually provide our on-call engineers a wireless broadband card in case they need to get connected to the corporate network to troubleshoot/fix issues. This week, I was not able to get the wireless card, since we had to loan it to an exec. The only method to get onto the Internet was using my new 8700 blackberry. We have the EDGE service from T-mobile, which is not as fast as the Verizon BroadbandAccess.. We typically get ~128kbps with the EDGE connection and is enough to get our work done.. The problem with using the BB as a modem is that T-mobile blocks PPTP/IPSec traffic with this plan. Not to be outdone, I came up with a way to use the BB to connect to our internal network. Most of our support work is done on Windows, so we need to remote console into one of our servers to provide support. I did the following to get this working using our corporate SSH gateway to tunnel RDP traffic.
1) Download Putty (SSH Client).
2) Create a new session on Putty to the SSH gateway. In the “Tunnels” option, add the following options
Note: Replace the REMOTE_HOST with the IP address or hostname of your Windows server.
3) Click on ADD
4) Click on Open and connect to the SSH server with your credentials
5) Log into the remote serve by running the following command “mstsc /v:127.0.01:3390”
Note: You can change the local port to any number you want. Make sure not to use 3389 as the local port, since it is already used by the remote desktop service on your windows workstation.
