Admin’s Arsenal
Free Open Source Computer Management
Jan 30th
Hey what’s going on fellow Admins? I thought I would drop by aTa today to drop the latest Tech Chop video on you. In this episode I talk about a really great computer management solution that runs on your favorite flavor of Linux.
By computer management, I mean it’s sort of in the same category of Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, but way easier to setup. Plus since it’s open source, there are no licensing costs. It’s called FOG.
FOG can clone hard drives, and deploy the disk images in a multicast. Not only that, but you can deploy software with it, map printers and join computers to Active Directory.
Check out the video:
If you have any questions about FOG that I didn’t cover in the video. Capabilities, installation questions, etc. Let me know in the comments!
By -=El Di Pablo=-
New Favorite Packet Analyzer in The Cloud
Dec 7th
Image via Wikipedia
I have been trying to track down a network issue I’ve been having at work for the last month and a half. It’s a real pain because it only happens once a week randomly, and it only lasts for 2 to 5 minutes. Since it’s so unpredictable, it’s nearly impossible to track down how, or why it’s happening.
Anyway, I decided to setup Wireshark on a laptop, plug it into a port on my switch with mirroring enabled, and collect some network traffic. The problem I have with Wireshark is that it doesn’t display information is a way that is easy for me to read.
A buddy of mine recommended uploading my capture files to an online analyzer called CloudShark. This thing is actually pretty cool, and really easy to use. Plus it has easy graphing options so you can get a better visual idea of all the 1’s and 0’s you’re looking at.
Another cool thing about CloudShark is that once you’re capture is uploaded, you can forward the URL of your capture files to some of your Network Engineer buddies to get their take on what’s going on in your network, and they don’t need to break out any analyzers of their own. Everything is displayed right in their browser!
Here is a link to an example capture file: http://www.cloudshark.org/captures/f62e1db77ba0
One thing I did notice is that you need to use CloudShark in Internet Explorer or Firefox. It doesn’t work so well in Chrome.
Know of any other good, free and easy to use packet analyzer tools? Are they cloud based like this one? Let us know what you like to use in the comments.
-=El Di Pablo=-
Get More Out of SNMP
Dec 2nd
When I started my current day job one of the things the IT department didn’t have was a decent monitoring system. They did have an external service that monitored the company websites, but nothing internally for monitoring servers for disk space, service, or CPU issues. To remedy that problem I decided to implement a really cool open source monitoring solution called Zenoss Core.
After setting up Zenoss, I learned about a really cool application for Windows servers that lets you get more our of monitoring using SNMP. With this applications, it means less to configure, and you can simply add servers to your monitoring solution with SNMP, and pretty much get everything you need to keep your network in top top shape!
It’s called SNMP Informant. Here are some of it’s features from their website:
- Full 64 bit support – Our "all-in-one" installer automatically detects the operating system version and installs
the correct components - Access Windows Performance data – Our Performance providers allow you to connect to any "out of the box" Windows Performance counter object using industry standard SNMP Object IDs (OIDs)!
- Access Custom Performance data – Our new "Custom" provider (part of SNMP Informant-Premium) allows you to collect data from any valid Windows performance counter. If you’ve got a performance counter instrumented application, and you can see the performance counters in PerfMon, then you can monitor it using SNMP Informant Premium!
- Run Remote scripts and collect data – If you’re using custom scripts to monitor something on a remote Windows server, you can now execute that script remotely using SNMP Informant, and collect the results of that script into an OID that YOU specify!
- Use your OWN Private Enterprise ID – You can customize SNMP Informant to respond to queries made against your OWN IANA Private Enterprise number!
- Read Remote Registry information – The new "Custom" provider also lets you specify what registry value to read!
- Collect WMI information – Our WMI providers allow you to connect to the Windows Management Instrumentation sub-system using SNMP! Stop/Start/Restart services! Reboot servers! Execute programs remotely!
- Monitor Exchange, SQL, Cluster, BizTalk, ISA and more, including Forefront, WSUS, Virtual Server, Citrix, the OS, and system hardware. Supported Operating Systems include Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7, Server 2000, Server 2003 (incl. R2), AND Server 2008 (incl. R2).
- Extend your monitoring system’s ROI – If you use products like HP Network Node Manager, IpSwitch Whatsup, OpenNMS, Nagios/Cacti/MRTG/RRDttool, Zenosss, or other SNMP compliant management platforms, find out how SNMP Informant can add significant value to them in minimal time and with minimal effort!
- Stop/Start/Restart Services and Windows Server – Using SNMP, you can control your Windows server like never before!
- Can be used with SNMPv1, SNMPv2 and SNMPv3 – Many companies are starting to to take advantage of enhanced SNMPv3 security. SNMP Informant supports all 3 versions. Find out more here!
- SNMP Informant is priced attractively – We recognize that while functionality is important, value cannot be overlooked. That’s why we have priced SNMP Informant to help maximize your IT budget spending.
Their standard version is absolutely free, so you can start adding it to all of your Windows servers today, and start seeing better results with your monitoring solution.
What are you guys using for monitoring these days? Solarwinds? What’s Up? Microsoft Systems Center? OpManager? What’s your favorite and why? Let us know in the comments.
-=El Di Pablo=-
Do you know the sound of a failing hard drive? Data Cent Does and they recorded them!
Feb 7th
Check this out and then click through to hear the failing drive sound tracks by hard drive manufacturer and issue. Remember that all drives will eventually fail. It is definitely beneficial to know what a dying hard drive sounds like. I have been around dying drives for years and can typically tell you what is wrong with a drive by listening to it. So now is your chance to learn to listen to a hard drive like a pro. And this was a great idea in posting this on your website DataCent! I can only imagine the traffic it has brought you…
These are some typical sounds we hear in our data recovery lab. If your hard drive makes noises like these and you are still able to access your files – backup immediately…
To listen to the sound simply click on the play button. Click on the drive manufacturer next to the sound button to learn more about common problems these drives experience.
Click here to jump to Data Cent’s website (looks like they do data recovery) and listen to/download sounds of failing drives. There just might be an awesome practical joke in this for me…
Create Active Directory Topology Diagrams Automagically
Jul 23rd
I just got a new boss at work the day before yesterday, and like a lot of small companies there is a serious lack of documentation. We have had a lot of turnover in the IT department, and things are constantly changing. I have only been at my job for just under a year, and I am already on my third boss. With each new manager or director comes a new way of running a network, so you can imagine the hodge-podge of systems on the network. Like many of the new bosses coming in, I had my own ideas on how things should be run, but ultimately it is up to the person sitting in the manager seat right? Therefore not much has changed… Until now.
One of the first things my boss has asked me to do is to create a map of our network topology so he can get an idea of how things are setup in the various domains we manage. That got me thinking of ways to automate the process, and lucky for me I found a nice little tool that does the trick. The tool is called the Microsoft Active Directory Topology Diagrammer, or ADDT for short.
What this tool does is, using either Visio 2003, 2007 or 2010, it scours Active Directory and spits out a fairly detailed topology of your domain, sites, trusts, Exchange, etc. All in a pretty, easy to understand Visio diagram.
Here is an Overview from Microsoft:
With the Active Directory Topology Diagrammer tool, you can read your Active Directory structure through Microsoft ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO). The Active Directory Topology Diagrammer tool automates Microft Office Visio to draw a diagram of the Active Directory Domain topology, your Active Directory Site topology, your OU structure or your current Exchange 200X Server Organization. With the Active Directory Topology Diagrammer tool, you can also draw partial Information from your Active Directory, like only one Domain or one site. The objects are linked together, and arranged in a reasonable layout that you can later interactively work with the objects in Microsoft Office Visio.
Pretty cool right? Know of any other free tools that can easily, and automatically create detailed network maps of your environment? Let us know your favorite tools in the comments!
This post was written by El Di Pablo of the wildly famous Bauer-Power.Net Website!
Cant open the task manager on your Windows machine? I can help!
Jul 9th
I was dealing with some nasty infections over the last few days and the malware authors are getting better and sneakier on a daily basis. I was unable to reverse their shenanigans that blocked me from using task manager to kill the bad tasks. I was working crippled from the command line using taskkill /IM but once I found this little application that gave me back my task manager I was back in business.
It is called RRT and can be downloaded from here. Once you run it you will see a screen that looks like this:
Simply check Task Manager and hit Remove. That’s it! Happy Hunting Guys!
