Geek Speak - All Comments

re: Greetings from New Jersey...

Josh Stephens — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:06:55 GMT

Jake,

Give me a call anytime or drop me a note at headgeek@solarwinds.com and we can setup a time to chat. I'd be glad to help.

Josh

re: SolarWinds at Cisco Networkers Live - Orlando Baby!!!

TimW — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:10:39 GMT

I stopped by and picked up the free tool kit disk and tattoos. Sat through one of Josh's presentations and went back to the hotel and installed the tools on my laptop. I was able to use them over the VPN with great results.

Thanks

Josh

Oh yeah, the women were really helpful, and since I am a dirty old man, I can say they were also great on the eyes. Sorry Josh, you weren't the only draw. ;-)

re: The U.S. Open and its effect on the network...

cmeid — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:28:14 GMT

This is quite an interesting post. One of the reasons that the 2008 European Championships (the sport would be European football, aka soccer, for those unaware) have been scheduled at 6pm & 8:45pm local was lost work time during the World Cup two years ago. The World Cup matches started around 4pm, so people were either cutting out early or watching/listening to the games at work. There were estimates at the time that the lost productivity nearly offset the economic stimulus of all the visiting fans.

Thus the Euro 2008 the matches were scheduled far out of working hours. Starting with the quarterfinals everything has been in the later, 8:45pm time slot.

A short anecdote along those lines: one of the networks I helped watch over at the time started experiencing serious issues during the games.This network belonged to an energy conglomerate, so they worked around the clock, and the issues were significantly worse on the second shift, it was like every single employee was trying to F5 fast enough to get play-by-play the old fashioned way for the late games. In contrast to the day workers, made up primarily of office drones at central locations, the evenings were dominated by repair and maintenance workers at remote sites.

That level of activity actually ended up impacting backup processes and various things across some of the thin WAN links linking the little sites to corporate. The QoS project for that network was still in the planning stages, so that solution was unavailable. Everything was proxied and cached and all that good stuff, but we didn't have proxy nodes out at the little sites, of which there were about 60. It was those transfers from the central gateway to the remote sites that were saturating the links. We also couldn't block the websites themselves, as they contained no objectionable content in-and-of-themselves, and there was an official policy in place allowing personal internet use. As the problem got more serious, we did try blocking some, but the users moved to other sites nearly instantaneously and bombarding the night service desk with reports of "problems with the internet" vaguely specified. We probably could have blocked all of them, I guess, but we were afraid of riots if we did.

Anyway, we ended up solving it with the equivalent of a sneaker net: big screen televisions in all the break rooms for the repair techs to watch the games when they weren't out on calls. Those few honest souls who were actually working got to do so in peace, the backup jobs ran fine, and I could hear the cheers when Germany scored from inside the main NOC, through the concrete walls and over the din of the climate control systems.

In hindsight, this was a valuable lesson about monitoring percent usage, not just in the "is the network running" sense, but also for changes in load patterns (through external events) reshaping peak capacity. If a backup job completes at night over a WAN link, would it also complete during the daytime? Would it complete if sustained traffic was 2x the daytime load?

re: New SolarWinds Exchange Monitor - Sneaking it to you a little early...

sotherls — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:29:58 GMT

Josh,

I like the new tool but what if you have multiple Exhange servers? It would be nice to use this to display each of our Exchange servers side by side.

Free Microsoft Exchange Monitoring Tool

subject: exchange — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:11:02 GMT

SolarWinds released recently a free Microsoft Exchange monitoring tool . " SolarWinds free Exchange

re: Greetings from New Jersey...

vandewjj — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:47:14 GMT

Josh,

I work for a startup company, and we have been working hard over the last year to build out our NOC. This is a new role for me, as Director of Network Operations. I'm very interested in hearing more about your NMS/NOC viewpoints, as well as sharing ideas with others in this type of environment.

-Jake

re: Help with Analyzing WAN Optimization

ekoteid — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:01:26 GMT

NetEqualizer is great. We’ve really had no issues at all. We literally dropped it in line and experienced the difference (over Packeteer) right away. Complaints from students dropped as well -- MMOG worked again and we have no more AIM dropouts.

re: What a load of syslog...

Josh Stephens — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:42:30 GMT

Jon,

Great suggestion!!! Keep 'em coming...

You going to Networkers this year?

Josh

re: What a load of syslog...

jtimes — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:45:25 GMT

Been doing this since "dirt was new" couldn't survive without it...

Any plans for getting the Syslog Alerts/Filter Rules to work like the Trap Viewers for Adding Rules?

I would like to find a syslog message and right click on it and have the option to build a rule. Thats a sweet option in the Trap Viewer.

New SolarWinds Exchange Monitor - Sneaking it to you a little early...

Geek Speak — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:14:54 GMT

As you may have read in a previous post , SolarWinds has been working on a new free tool for monitoring

re: Monitoring OSPF Neighbor State Changes

Spear — Sat, 31 May 2008 22:49:43 GMT

Its surprising how few tools there are for passive monitoring of OSPF when it doesn't really seem that hard to listen to LSA messages.

There are some expensive passive tools out there for example Packet Design's Route Explorer, PacketStorm's Route Analyser.

Im currently working on my own product that will both passively listen to LSA messages and also reply to Hello messages as a priority zero / DOTHER to gather the route adjacency's and to verify link state information (incase of a missed LSA multicast messages. Hope to also be able to do ISIS and BGP in the future.

re: Greetings from New Jersey...

ceclark — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:32:59 GMT

Josh,

I work for a contractor for the DoD and the security policy we must adhere to is a little crazy. Please talk to them about the security policy (DIACAP) and how network management fits in! It's something were definitely struggling with.

re: Understanding SNMP Polling and Counters

jtimes — Sat, 24 May 2008 02:55:14 GMT

Super Geek - great info!

re: Anybody reading this in the Virginia or Baltimore area?

Josh Stephens — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:25:15 GMT

I'm going to be in the D.C. area again June 5th and 6th... Time will be tight but be glad to buy you dinner :)

Josh

re: Anybody reading this in the Virginia or Baltimore area?

BryanBecker — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:09:16 GMT

Josh our office is like 15 minutes from BWI. Sorry I just saw this....would have been nice to have met you. Let me know if your in the area again.