Posts tagged tool
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=-
Let Me Google That For You
Feb 17th
Hey folks,
Have you ever been completely annoyed by people asking you questions that they could have totally answered on their own?
Most people don’t realize that a well formed web query is just as good as asking the right person the right question at the right time. Google, for most people, is just that person. Some of the more complicated queries actually do warrant your newb friends to ask you for a good set of query terms, even using the more advanced search modifiers.
But most of the questions I have to field during my day to day are questions that could have been easily answered, had the person asking put some thought or effort into it. Questions such as “what’s the url for ask the admin?”
We all know that’s a stupid question. Ask The Admin prides itself on being very search engine friendly, especially when looking for the site itself!
Enter Let Me Google That For You, or more easily LMGTFY.com. This nifty little service allows you to perform the search for your friend or colleague who just cant form the words together themselves. But instead of giving your dear friend a fish, so to speak, you’re actually giving your friend a fishing pole. You’re basically telling them, “You could have googled this yourself, look how simple it could have been for you. You could have completely avoided bothering me during my busy day.”
So, to answer the question above “What’s the url for Ask The Admin?”
browsing over to http://lmgtfy.com/?q=asktheadmin.com yields a search page resembling googles.
Except now, when you search , it provides you a tinyurl, which you can send back to your inquisitive friend rather than the url of the actual search result.
Click to see sample results here
Nifty right?
-enjoy
Commodore64 (the one you used to play Bruce Lee on,) ,8,1
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Exclusive Download: SaveMydata2.0. Make reformating easier on yourself.
Mar 27th
I previously wrote an AskTheAdmin article about a tool I created called SaveMyData. This tool uses several utilities to export your important data (Passwords, Serial numbers etc..) to text files. Saving you the tedious time it takes to do this stuff manually.
Well AtA… I finally made SaveMyData2.0 !! It adds some cool new features:
- Outlook AutoComplete addresses (in text file and a data file for import later on..)
- Office Templates (it is nice to save those custom letterhead word templates you’ve made..)
- Outlook Signatures
- Windows Activation Files (use it after format to bypass activation)
- Windows Network Connections (VPN, Dialups, PPPoE connections)
- Wireless preferred networks profiles (Backup and restore after format)
- After you run the tool it creates a Backup folder in the root of your drive and save all the files inside it.
Some antivirus programs report that some of the utilites in use are “password stealing tools” so it is advised to temporarily disable it for proper running of the backup process. Think about it for a minute if this worries you – wouldn’t you want to know if someone ELSE was running this on your machine? Thought so :)
For Vista users: You should run the tool as an administrator. I haven’t tested it otherwise.
download from www.yaronmaor.net or directly from here.
if you have any suggestions for extra features or find any bugs – Let me know in the comments :)
Cheers,
Yaron Maor
