troubleshooting

May 9 2008   12:51PM GMT

Did you see this? - the viral bitgirl

Posted by: Troy Tate
howto, troubleshooting, Networking, LAN, WAN, forensics, Monitoring, metrics, Performance, reporting, tools, humor, packet capture, wireshark, network analysis

I have always had an appreciation for Laura Chappel of www.packet-level.com fame and her quirky sense of … hmmmmm.. sense?? hahaha… well… she does have a great sense of humor and a heightened sense of awareness with respect to those bits and bytes flowing across our wired and wireless networks.

Laura Chappell has now gone viral after her “initial concern about being somewhat infectious”. She has launched the BitSpitters video series - fast answers to fast questions. The BitSpitters videos are hosted on YouTube right now - feel free to link to her BitSpitters page at www.wiresharktraining.com/bitspitters.html to always get the latest. After seeing the initial response from viewers, it seems more folks are interested in the humorous “How Do I Look Smarterest?” style so according to her recent Wireshark U newsletter she will be putting out some more ‘unique’ short videos for your viewing pleasure - and her newsletter has the following warning: “just wait until you see the ‘beach scene’ coming up! [Don’t even get that ‘bathing suit’ thought in your head!]“

In case you want more packet level and data networking education, I HIGHLY recommend her Master Library which you can purchase through WiresharkU. For a short time only, she is offering an dditional 50% off already discounted price. Coupon code: NLMAY Expiry: May 31, 2008.

Thanks for your time. Let’s be good network citizens together & practice safe networking!

Apr 29 2008   5:11PM GMT

I can’t get no technical (support) satisfaction

Posted by: Troy Tate
CIO, DataCenter, Linux, Microsoft Windows, troubleshooting, Networking, Security, Monitoring, tools

My apologies to the Rolling Stones for munging their classic song.

How many times have you encountered a situation in your organization where something needs to be done yet either IT is not able or willing to support your business related efforts. There are lots of reasons for this to happen in the business world.

One division of our business is electronics manufacturing solutions where we assemble parts designed by the customer. I recently encountered a situation where a customer has some onsite testing gear to measure QA data on devices we manufacture for them. The testing gear was not for our engineers but for the customer. According to the supporting engineer, his IT department was not interested in supporting these test devices. So, the engineer was asking my organization to support the test hosts.

Well, our side of the story now… these test devices run linux as the operating system. My IT organization typically does not support linux because our focus is on Microsoft Windows systems. So, here’s the conundrum… who supports this engineer and his manufacturing requirements? The test hosts are owned and designed by the customer, yet the hosts are at my organization’s facility.

Tough situation for sure! Right now our answer is to do our best effort in supporting this engineer and the engineer is going to talk to his in-house IT department to see if they will support his requirements. It seems to be a shame that this engineer cannot find support from his own organization. He really could use this when in the end, these test systems are there to support the quality of his organization’s product.

What are your thoughts on this situation? Does your IT organization have to support third-party systems within your facility? If so, what protections have you put into place for your organization?

Thanks for your time. Let’s be good network citizens together & practice safe networking!

Apr 15 2008   1:00PM GMT

VMWare Player:My ears are still ringing!

Posted by: Troy Tate
Virtualization, Linux, Security, Performance, tools, troubleshooting, vmware

Wow! I didn’t know my laptop could have such loud alerts. Yesterday, I shutdown a virtual machine in VMWare’s VMPlayer application. As soon as I clicked the shutdown button in the guest OS, my laptop let out with the most amazing shriek that seems to still be ringing in my ears several hours later.

I had to actually remove power and the battery from the laptop to get the awful racket to stop. Fortunately, the machine restarted without a glitch.

I was running the Protech ONE security ISO image (this is a nice tool for security testing and education). The VMWare Player is a great tool for running an ISO image if you want to take one for a test drive. I had tried running this same ISO image in Microsoft’s VirtualPC environment but there are issues with this particular ISO and how it handles key mapping so it was just easier to change to VMWare’s Player.

However, now my ears are ringing because of the incredibly loud beeping that my machine let loose when shutting down the guest OS. My laptop speakers are always turned to the lowest level possible so I really have no clue why shutting Protech ONE down would have created such a loud event. I guess I need to see if there is a way I can shutdown this environment without waking up my nearby neighbors in the company Tax department.

Have you ever used any application that performed odd startup or shutdown activities? What did you do to overcome those issues?

Thanks for your time. Let’s be good network citizens together & practice safe networking!