Networking

Useful Tools of the Trade

A few days ago I blogged about how I was playing detective with a clients computer system, struggling with performance issues.  It has been an interesting few days since that blog, and I have discovered much, and learned along the way.

One thing that I learned about is a nifty utility offered by Microsoft which can aid in the analysis of exactly what’s going on with your Windows 2003 Server.  The utility is called Server Performance Advisor.  The utility is particularly helpful for presentation of data which is collected by the multitude of logs kept as part of normal server operations.  It also provides additional information and combines it in a much more understandable manner than just reviewing raw log data.

Starting with a system overview, it can also provide information about other common services provided by the server, like IIS, DNS, Active Directory and others.  It includes useful help!  Depending upon the selection of services the utlility collects data for either 100 or 300 seconds, and then creates analysis of the data. 

If you have a Windows Server 2003 and are not familiar with this tool I’d recommend it highly.  Follow the link to Server Performance Advisor for more information.

My search for answers this week also took me to an article on Computerworld outlining 10 Great Free Network Tools.  Since the analysis of my performance issue indicated that the issue was not network related I did not follow-up with any of these network tools, but I pass the link on for what its worth.  Hopefully it can help someone out.

Application Performance and Other Investigative Opportunities

Sometimes I feel more like I’m a detective than programmer/analyst.  Fact is, I believe, that there has to be at least a little bit of detective in every IT person who has the opportunity to evaluate software applications and their sometimes strange behaviors.

As an example of what I mean, I share with you an opportunity I’ve been presented that has surely become a mystery worthy of any good detective - or perhaps a sick mind :-).  Picture this, an application that runs flawlessly and with acceptable speed on a minimally configured server when moved to a new “high-end” server slows down to borderline acceptable performance - clearly and noticeably slower than the old one.  Both systems use RAID 5, both are running MS Server 2003 SBS.  Main difference between new and old is that new uses more powerful chips, faster drives, 4 times the RAM and gigabit network connectivity - none of which cause me to suspect that it should run slower than the old.

The issue was called to my attention after the company “network” guys had all but thrown up their hands and said basically “…it must be the application…”.  It seems very hard to believe that it would be anything other than configuration of “something” on the new server.

As yet the issue remains unsolved - but I use it to highlight one of the great challenges that we in the IT field are presented with .  One need not look beyond the next IT person you talk with to find the next “detective” story or unsolved mystery.  We are faced with them constantly.  We need software and hardware tools, knowledge bases and lots of experience to investigate and solve such issues.  Issues which cross various specialties such as security, networking, programming, application testing and design require us to be “detective” - to ask the right persons the right questions - to find the right tool to identify the cause of the problem, as well as to recognize opportunities to “check into”.

“Lots of luck” also helps!

Application Expectations

I had an opportunity to witness once again the user frustration when software doesn’t perform according to expectation - in this case - the expectation unfulfilled was intuitiveness.

The scenario involved plugging in a Windows XP laptop into a network with no DHCP. (Networks I work with are all small enough that there really is no need for DHCP - and there are advantages to using a fixed IP scheme). In this case the simplicity desired was that by creating an alternate IP configuration the laptop (whose primary configuration was expecting DHCP provided IP address) would just use the alternate since no DHCP was available. Of course, it didn’t work.

In order to get the laptop onto the network we had to change the primary connection to use the “fixed” IP that we wanted — after that there was NO alternate configuration tab. (I wouldn’t have designed it that way!) . It was late evening, we were tired, we just took the easy route to get the laptop onto the internet. However, somehow it seems that we shouldn’t have had to look at help (sometimes not exactly helpful) to find an answer.

Virtualization Revisited

With much anticipation I find myself preparing my laptop once again to be used as a tool to demonstrate capabilities of software which I developed.  This is no ordinary preparation.  I will soon start an extended road trip during which I will be doing both development and demonstrations.  Last October I wrote in this blog about how valuable virtualization has become in my environment.  Since then, it has become an even more powerful tool which I use daily.  My use of virtualization technology has become a staple component of my development environment. Continued »