TCP/IP

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 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.