I ran across this link http://www.mtit.com/resources/teamblogs.htm wihle browsing the web. It has a list of Microsoft Team blogs, where teams from certain business areas in Microsoft write on certain applications or areas. One that I visit on a regular basis is the Exchange Team Blog at http://blogs.technet.com/exchange/. Lots of good material there..
IP Address confusion and DHCP
Ran into a good case of Network troubleshooting today. We use the private 192.168.0.0/16 address range at work. All of a sudden, we had users calling us from a particular floor stating that they cannot access network resources. Here’s how the team solved the issue
1) Physical connectivity – Is the cable plugged into the workstation? Is there a green light on the NIC?
2) DNS Lookup – Open a command prompt and do a look up on a server in the network. In this case, one of our file servers. Users say that they are getting a “server inaccessible” error. Hmm.. Alright, so we have physical connectivity, but don’t have DNS resolution. Since the rest of the user population didn’t have any DNS resolution issues, the team dug deeper
3) IP Address Details – Open a command prompt and type in “ipconfig”. This showed that the affected users were getting a “172.16.0.x” address. This range does not exist in our user network segment. So looks like we have users getting an unqualified network. Since all users are configured to get their IP addresses through DHCP, the culprit might be DHCP.
4) DHCP Server : The Issue – Open a command prompt and type in “ipconfig /all”. This showed the following
Aha.. looks like there is a rouge DHCP server in our network. The team checked the LAN room on the floor and found the culprit server. Looks like the server was installed in it’s default state where it acted as a DHCP server.
Lesson learnt : DHCP broadcasts sent by the client are addressed by servers in the same broadcast (Layer 2) domain before being routed to other DHCP servers (IP Helper Addresses).
Windows : Explore running processes
One of the Windows server at work started running high on CPU for the last few days.. On checking the task manager, I could only see that “services.exe” was using ~30% of CPU. services.exe is part of the core Windows operating system and manages the starting and stopping of the services. To further investigate, what process was using the CPU, I lauched Sysinternals Process Explorer and voila!!, here’s what I see
Looks like the CPU utilization of the services that the services.exe starts show up under it. There are a bunch of other cool utilities at SysInternals that any Windows admin would find useful.
New favourite Chinese restaurant
I accidentally ended up at the “Chinese Friendship Restaurant” on 2830 N. Miwaukee after a recommendation from a friend. I was pretty impressed by the service and food. It was authentic Chinese served with a flourish. The wait staff was very attentive and the owner (at least I like to think so) was making rounds to make sure that all the guests were happy. And a added bonus was their “Tuesday Special” where all the entries were only $8.95. The prices are a bit high for Chinese food but well worth it. Highly recommend the “Spicy Peppercorn Beef” and the “Spicy Garlic Shrimp“. Think this is my new favorite Chinese restaurant :).
2006 – First Bike Ride
Here’s a shaky picture of the first ride in 2006 on my baby :). I stored the bike in an open area this winter and am now wiser by the bitter experience of having to get it cleaned up for ~$200!!.
I should say that this guy is not for the weak hearted :).
Party time..
I think it is high time I started using Flickr to post my pictures. I take a ton of pictures (yes, I am one of those crazy guys, that carry a camera on them ALL the time) and haven’t found a way to share them with friends and family without maxing out the traffic on my hosted site. I have been looking at all the photo sharing, social tagging sites such as flickr, fotki, hello for quite some time, but never got around to creating an account and using them. I don’t like sites that require you to register just to look at pictures (kodak!!). We have too many accounts as it is, without having to register on a site just to look at some photos.
Long post short :).. Here is the first attempt to start logging my pictures online. The link to my pictures on flickr is
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kudithipudi/sets/72057594092170857/
P.S: If anyone wants me to delete their photos, pls shoot me an E-mail at vinay at kudithipudi dot org. Thx.
Lotta Kannula Dana..
I rarely forward chain e-mails, because I think it is such a waste of time and energy. Not to mention that it fills up peoples inboxes :). This is an exception though.. This mp3 was sent to me by my sister and I cannot resist but put it up on the site. For those of you familiar with the Telugu language, this is a classic song in the Telangana slang :). Here is a hosted link of the song
Google in xx-hacker!!
I was doing some research on “Inter-Tel, Inc.” in Google and came across this interesting link
in the search results. Looks like this is a Google interface in H4x0R code :),