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Network Eagle Good Monitoring Great Price
Several years ago, my
company was beginning to rapidly expand our customer base, and the need for
server monitoring became readily apparent. While a simple ping checker had
sufficed till that point, more and more we were seeing need for a multitude of
checks. We needed information on things such as NT Services, applications, and disk
space. While the need was apparent, the
budget was lacking. There are many network monitoring suits out there, but most
of them were greatly cost prohibitive. Reviewing these products was not even an
option as the cost was much more than my budget could bear.The Job
I had begun investigating
open source solutions, but the fact that many of them required a *nix install
was prohibitive, as a box dedicated to this was out of the question. Also, our
support staff is almost entirely Windows centric so the support of another O.S.
could become a support nightmare.The Tool
Then one day I came across
Network Eagle (http://network-eagle.com/).
While I was initially skeptical, this did prove to be the tool I?d been looking
for.A quick run down of it?s
features include:- Ping Check
- FTP Site Check
- HTTP Site Check
- Database Checks
- Application/Process Check
- Disk Space Checks
- Event Log Checks
- NT Service Checks
- Custom Scripts and External Commands Checks
Putting Network Eagle to the test
Click here (http://techrepublic.com.com/2300-1035-6038660.html)
to see our gallery of Network Eagle screenshots.Network Eagle comes as a
small (less than 4MB) install executable. You are given a free 30-day trial, so I
downloaded and installed it. The installation was simplicity itself, just click
the executable and follow the prompts. The slowest part is configuring all of
your checks after the application is installed. You must configure each check
manually, though you have the ability to copy checks and then modify them,
which greatly reduces the amount of time to set up. The bar on the left side of
the screen allows you to pick what type of check you want to create. Once in
the check creation screen you have several tabs on the left that guide you
through setting up the check. From within this screen you set the system the
check runs on, needed security credentials to run the check, the type of alerts
you want this alert to send, and the schedule the check runs on. Most of the
tabs are identical between checks, with only the Settings tab being check dependant.Two things from this system
really stood out to me. One is that all of the checks from the system run
agentless. That is to say there is no software installed on the target systems.
For environments that love to run there systems as textbook as possible this is
great. The other thing that impressed me was the number of different types of
alerts available. You have the standards of sending an e-mail, logging to
syslog or event viewer, or executing a command, along with restarting a
computer, changing a NT service status, playing a sound alert, or even connecting
to a MS SQL instance and running SQL commands.Right tool for the job?
I have had Network Eagle
deployed in production for nearly 3 years now, and it has stood up more than
admirably. On many occasions the database alerts have allowed us to proactively
prevent issues before users were impacted, and the process monitoring has let
our order entry applications run without the need for constant user checking. This
has been a great product for us. We now actually have two instances of it
deployed, one on our internal network and one on our external. This has been a
great application for us, and definitely the right tool for the job.Write your own review
If you’ve found the perfect tool for the job, we want to hear about it. Send us an e-mail describing the product and the job you’re using it for. If we feature the product in The Right Tool for the Job? blog, you’ll earn a little cash and be featured across the TechRepublic Web site and in our newsletters.
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Sending Mail through SQL without SQL Mail
The Job
When the decision was made at my company to move our primary
MS SQL environment to a fault tolerant cluster, we came across one thing that
was missing; SQL Mail was not supported on SQL clusters. With this began the search for a
replacement. We began looking at many
different products to fill this need. We
had determined that we needed a product that could be called and used easily
from code, that could have dynamically written syntax, was affordable, and we
could have support on.The Tool
After much testing and dismissing we came across
XP_SMTPSendMail80 from Thorpe Software. We downloaded the free trial version, and
began testing in our development environment.The installation of this software was very easy. You download a dll, and then place the dll
anywhere on your SQL Server. At this
point you create an extended stored procedure from their DLL. Once this is completed you are ready to begin
using the procedure.Putting XP_SMTPSendMail80 to the test
Being a stored procedure you have a great deal of freedom in
not just calling it, but in embedding it within pre-existing code and
jobs. Our developers and I were
instantly wowed with not just the features available, but their ease of use. Here is a link to screenshots of some syntax examples. Some of the features are:- Send multiple attachments using wildcards.
- Use any SMTP server
- Able to provide
authentication to SMTP Server - Sends mail to non-standard SMTP ports.
- Small (73k) and fast dll.
- Uses Windows sockets, so requires no
additional components on the server and can be used from any version of
Windows. - Execute queries and send results as
attachments, or in the body of the message. - Format result sets as HTML tables in the
body of the mail. - Send the results from multiple queries
from a local or a remote server. - Send mail to multiple recipients in one
call with cc or bcc.
The learning curve for this product was very mild, as
everything from sending attachments to formatting html emails only took minor
adjustments from the standard calling of the Extended Stored Procedure. Adding it to scheduled job was as easy as
adding a step, and using the programs very simple syntax to send an email for
job success or failure.Right tool for the job?
XP_SmtpSendmail80 has been our enterprise wide standard for
SQL e-mails for over 4 years now, and everyone from the developers to myself
are still in love with this little tool that could. We are constantly finding new ways to use
that we hadn?t thought of before. Every
time a new idea has been thrown around, XP_SmtpSendmail80 has always been up to
the challenge. On the few occasions we
have needed it, the support from Thorpe
Software has been top notch. With
new versions and bug fixes being released on a regular basis this appears to be
one tool that is able to stand the test of time.Write your own review
If you’ve found the perfect tool for the job, we want to hear about it. Send us an e-mail describing the product and the job you’re using it for. If we feature the product in The Right Tool for the Job? blog, you’ll earn a little cash and be featured across the TechRepublic Web site and in our newsletters.
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GFI MailSecurity provides strong e-mail anti-virus for the right price
When it was time to migrate our production Exchange environment to a fault tolerant cluster, one issue that became apparent was that our current anti-virus product was not compatible with clusters. Along with the fact that no one was really happy with our current product or its vendor we decided that this was the perfect time to look for a new solution. Check out the GFI MailSecurity gallery to see the tool in action.
The Job
The new mail anti-virus application had to meet the following criteria:
- It must either be cluster compatible, or able to run on a front end mail
- It must feature a very regularly updated virus database, or preferably multiple databases
- It must be affordable
- It must be able to block attachment types
- The configuration needs to be simple, or at least less complex than registry editing.
- It must be reliable and responsive enough to process large volumes of mail.
The Tool
After evaluating several products we finally decided on MailSecurity from GFI Software. This product featured everything we were looking for.
- It supported cluster installations as well as front end installations.
- It comes with two anti-virus engines (BitDefender and Norman) with the option of purchasing licensing for McAfee (you can now also purchase licensing for Kaspersky for a total of 4 possible engines).
- It automatically comments out html scripts in emails.
- It features fully configurable attachment blocking, including the ability to block all Microsoft Office files which includes macros.
- It has an executable scanner that tests all executable file types to see if they are potentially malicious, even if they are not identified as a virus.
- It is configurable by user, so that if a certain user need to be excluded from certain checks (such as Office documents containing macros) they can be without affecting everyone.
- You can block emails based on certain words or phrases in the subject or body of the message.
GFI also offers a free fully functional 30 day evaluation, along with support it really seemed that this was a product we really needed to test. I also must point out the fact that NASA uses GFI products. While normally I find this sort of information useless, I must admit that the NASA factor definitely scored major geek points with out I.T. staff.
Putting MailSecurity to the Test
We installed MailSecurity on a front end relay server, before we even migrated to the cluster. After working through the configuration options and setting up our main server to forward outgoing mail to it, we set back to let MailSecurity do its job. We watched it churn though large amounts of mail quickly, and we were impressed by the stability the product showed while doing it. We were also greatly impressed with GFI?s support. They have a live support option, that allows you to hold an IM session with a support tech who can easily walk you through most issues and answer any questions you have. Having the evaluation installed on the front end, made our migration much easier. After deciding to purchase MailSecurity all we had to do was add the license code to have it fully functional. This allowed us to migrate to the mail cluster while leaving MailSecurity running, and queuing all incoming mail for delivery as soon as the new cluster was up. Check out the GFI MailSecurity gallery to see the tool in action.
The Right Tool for the Job?
We have been running MailSecurity for more than 3 years at this point. It has seen us through many virus storms, but none made it through the wall of protection MailSecurity gives us. We have grown through several versions of MailSecurity. The current release features a web interface for configuration and to access your quarantine. MailSecurity has provided us with a level of assurance over our mail system that we didn?t even know was possible. We have yet to have a single virus break through our mail system. This has proved to be one of the best products in our company.
Write your own review
If you’ve found the perfect tool for the job, we want to hear about it. Send us an e-mail describing the product and the job you’re using it for. If we feature the product in The Right Tool for the Job? blog, you’ll earn a little cash and be featured across the TechRepublic Web site and in our newsletters.
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GFI MailEssentials Anti-Spam for the masses
Spam
Spam. Everyone hates it. Some have begun using it as curse word. Since the first unsolicited commercial email
in 1978 to the first time a usenet post was called spam in 1993 it has been one
of the most hated things to ever rear it?s on the internet. It is one of the few things everyone in the
office can agree on. When we began the
migration of our Exchange system to a fault tolerant cluster, we realized this
was our opportunity to do something about it.The Job
One
of our primary requirements for the new anti-spam system was that it would need
to be able to plug in directly to the new Exchange environment we were
creating. We also needed something that
would allow us the flexibility to accommodate our diverse internal clientele,
along with providing the best overall protection we could get. We also needed the product to be able to
integrate with our email anti-virus application. Did I mention cost was a factor also??The Tool
Since
we were currently in the processes of evaluating (and being impressed with)
GFI?s MailSecurity as a replacement for our current email anti-virus
application, it seemed a no brainer that we should give their anti-spam
application MailEssentials a try. Being
from the vendor of MailSecurity we knew that the interoperability would be
there, along with the fit we were looking for our new environment. The feature list for MailEssentials looked
like a compiled list of nearly every anti-spam tool on the market.?
Bayesian Filtering?
Tuning of Bayesian via public folders?
DNS Blacklist Checking?
SURBL Checking (In mail URL checking)?
Message Header checking?
Directory Harvest prevention?
Sender Policy Framework support?
User Editable White & Black lists?
Fake NDR?s for messages marked as spam?
Automatic tagging of new senders?
Phishing URI blacklist checks?
Block messages of certain languages?
User settable Anti-Spam module propertiesAlong
with those hefty anti-spam features, MailEssentials also includes several other
mail management utilities:?
POP mail downloader?
Archiving of all messages to SQL Server?
Auto-Replies?
Automatic disclaimers attached to outgoing mails?
Allow certain messages to be copied to users based
on sender or recipient email address.?
A List Server for maintaining mail lists?
Customizable reports of mail activityAll
of these combined to make MailEssentials our leading contender for our new
anti-spam solution. View images of MailEssentials configuration here.Putting MailEssentials to the Test
We
downloaded the fully functional trial of MailEssentials, and installed it on
the mail gateway we had already set up for the testing of MailSecurity. The installation went flawless, and only
required IIS services to be restarted, and not a full reboot. Immediately after installation we began
seeing messages passing through the GFI Monitor. We had set all messages tagged as Spam to be
delivered to a public folder. Once we
began monitoring this folder, we noticed that there were some false positives
being generated. Some minor tweaking of
the checks, including whitelisting certain domains, corrected these
problems. We also had issues with our
sales force, but we were able to whitelist their addresses so that all mail
sent to them would not be checked.The Right Tool for the Job?
We
went production with MailEssentials within 3 weeks of our initial testing. Since that time it has become a tool we come
to depend on. It excels not just in spam
detection (giving us a 99.999% rate of no false positives), but the many of the
other tools have been used in differing situations. The auto-reply?s have become a godsend for
orders emailed to us. The mail
monitoring tool has helped us resolve some tricky issues with vendors who were
telling multiple employees different things.
The mail monitoring tool allowed us to send all mail sent by that vendor
to not just the person addressed to, but to all people involved in the
transaction. Also, the mail archiving
tool, while not currently in production, was the impetus for us to purchase GFI
MailArchiver, but that?s another tool, for another day.Write your own review
If you’ve found the perfect tool for the job, we want to hear about it. Send us an e-mail describing the product and the job you’re using it for. If we feature the product in The Right Tool for the Job? blog, you’ll earn a little cash and be featured across the TechRepublic Web site and in our newsletters.
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MailEssentials Anti-Spam with features galore!
Spam. Everyone hates it. Some have begun using it as curse word. Since the first unsolicited commercial email in 1978 to the first time a usenet post was called spam in 1993 it has been one of the most hated things to ever rear it?s on the internet. It is one of the few things everyone in the office can agree on. When we began the migration of our Exchange system to a fault tolerant cluster, we realized this was our opportunity to do something about it.
The Job
One of our primary requirements for the new anti-spam system was that it would need to be able to plug in directly to the new Exchange environment we were creating. We also needed something that would allow us the flexibility to accommodate our diverse internal clientele, along with providing the best overall protection we could get. We also needed the product to be able to integrate with our email anti-virus application. Did I mention cost was a factor also??
The Tool
Since we were currently in the processes of evaluating (and being impressed with) GFI?s MailSecurity as a replacement for our current email anti-virus application, it seemed a no brainer that we should give their anti-spam application MailEssentials a try. Being from the vendor of MailSecurity we knew that the interoperability would be there, along with the fit we were looking for our new environment. The feature list for MailEssentials looked like a compiled list of nearly every anti-spam tool on the market.
- Bayesian Filtering
- Tuning of Bayesian via public folders
- DNS Blacklist Checking
- SURBL Checking (In mail URL checking)
- Message Header checking
- Directory Harvest prevention
- Sender Policy Framework support
- User Editable White & Black lists
- Fake NDR?s for messages marked as spam
- Automatic tagging of new senders
- Phishing URI blacklist checks
- Block messages of certain languages
- User settable Anti-Spam module properties
Along with those hefty anti-spam features, MailEssentials also includes several other mail management utilities:
- POP mail downloader
- Archiving of all messages to SQL Server
- Auto-Replies
- Automatic disclaimers attached to outgoing mails
- Allow certain messages to be copied to users based on sender or recipient email address.
- A List Server for maintaining mail lists
- Customizable reports of mail activity
All of these combined to make MailEssentials our leading contender for our new anti-spam solution. View images of MailEssentials configuration here.
Putting MailEssentials to the Test
We downloaded the fully functional trial of MailEssentials, and installed it on the mail gateway we had already set up for the testing of MailSecurity. The installation went flawless, and only required IIS services to be restarted, and not a full reboot. Immediately after installation we began seeing messages passing through the GFI Monitor. We had set all messages tagged as Spam to be delivered to a public folder. Once we began monitoring this folder, we noticed that there were some false positives being generated. Some minor tweaking of the checks, including whitelisting certain domains, corrected these problems. We also had issues with our sales force, but we were able to whitelist their addresses so that all mail sent to them would not be checked.
The Right Tool for the Job?
We went production with MailEssentials within 3 weeks of our initial testing. Since that time it has become a tool we come to depend on. It excels not just in spam detection (giving us a 99.999% rate of no false positives), but the many of the other tools have been used in differing situations. The auto-reply?s have become a godsend for orders emailed to us. The mail monitoring tool has helped us resolve some tricky issues with vendors who were telling multiple employees different things. The mail monitoring tool allowed us to send all mail sent by that vendor to not just the person addressed to, but to all people involved in the transaction. Also, the mail archiving tool, while not currently in production, was the impetus for us to purchase GFI MailArchiver, but that?s another tool, for another day.
Write your own review
If you’ve found the perfect tool for the job, we want to hear about it. Send us an e-mail
describing the product and the job you’re using it for. If we feature
the product in The Right Tool for the Job? blog, you’ll earn a little
cash and be featured across the TechRepublic Web site and in our
newsletters. -
Storage Savings through PST Compaction
People love their email. Most are so attached to it that they can’t bear to part with it. While this is not a big deal on their home pc’s, in a corporate environment this attachment can quickly become a huge issue. While most email systems allow you a great leeway in management of mailbox sizes, they don’t manage users who pull their mail out of the system and save it locally or on a network share. Microsoft Outlook makes this easier with the ease of creating PST files for mail backups, mounting them in your mailbox, and dragging and dropping mail into them to get rid of those annoying “Over Mailbox Size Limit” emails.
The Job
When analyzing our storage on our network user home drive. We found that over 25% of our total storage was dedicated to PST files. We realized that unless something was done our entire user volume would quickly be overrun by PST’s. As this was high performance SAN attached storage there is also a premium placed on this storage. We quickly began looking at efforts to work with our users to help them letter better mail management practices. Unfortunately we were met with an unwilling user base, and lack of (non-IT) management support to back it up. We then turned our attention to looking at third party tools. While many of them were full of features they were also full of price. Not only that many of them were much more intensive than what we needed. After much searching we finally found PSTCompactor from Xemplify IT.The Tool
PSTCompactor was originally overlooked due to the cost and feature set of its enterprise edition. Upon a second inspection though we saw that they also offered a Professional version that was scaled down for the enterprise edition, but still featured all of the tools we were looking for. This product would automatically compact PST’s, clear out specific folders, and most importantly zip all attachments. This is along with a goodly set of management tools, being highly configurable, totally automatic, and a wonderfully low price point of $299 per processing server. The great thing about this is that one server can scan multiple UNC locations. It also boasted an average savings of 38% of total PST size. View pictures of PST Compactor here.
Putting PSTComapctor to the Test
We installed PSTCompactor onto our test server. WE then created a configuration file to scan a certain directory on the I.T. group drive. We then placed backup copies of several PST’s into this directory. We set what we decided would most likely be our default options, then let ‘er rip. The run time was greater than expected, but the results were right in line with what was expected. We had a 35% reduction in the size of our test PST’s. After confirming that there were no issues with the PST’s, we decided to schedule a roll it into production the following weekend. Our initial run took much longer than expected. Scanning our full group and user drives took slightly over 20 hours. We also encountered one slight issue with certain directories reporting errors. This was due to these folders being named exclusively with Chinese characters which would be translated as illegal folder names. After reporting this issue to Xemplify’s support and sending them some log files, they quickly turned around a patch for the software to correct this. I was greatly impressed with their professionalism and quick response.
Right tool for the job?
The entire I.T. staff eagerly awaited the report on Monday morning of the first running of PSTCompactor. I quickly exported the report to PDF, and printed out several copies. Our initial running of PSTCompactor had resulted in a reduction of more than 48% of our total PST size. Our SAN Administrator wept openly. The initial euphoria was quickly tempered as we awaited a potential onslaught of user issues. The hours crept by and none were noted.PSTComapctor has proved to be an invaluable addition to our repertoire of I.T. tools. While we have not seen the continued mass growth reduction we saw over the first one, we continually see reductions (mostly due to new mail and PST’s). Also, we have noted that the growth rate of storage on our user home drive has been reduced dramatically. The amount of storage initially saved was valued at 4 times as much as the cost of PSTCompactor itself. This has been a great tool for us, that has saved I.T. a lot of headaches and our users many hours of forced mail management.
Write your own review
If you’ve found the perfect tool for the job, we want to hear about it. Send us an e-mail
describing the product and the job you’re using it for. If we feature
the product in The Right Tool for the Job? blog, you’ll earn a little
cash and be featured across the TechRepublic Web site and in our
newsletters. -
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Mail Archival and Retention on the cheap and easy
“I deleted an email I needed; can you get it back for me?” What email admin has not heard those words? If you use Exchange deleted item retention, you have a few days (or weeks depending) on your settings, but what if the email is 2 months old, or 6 months, or 2 years? You can always restore your old email stores, but this can be time consuming and have sketchy availability due to your backup retention periods.
The Job
Having had one to many restores and one to many important mails lost due to user mistakes, a search was begun to find a solution that could help us prevent both of these from happening. We began a long search for a quality mail archival solution that wouldn’t break the bank. We quickly realized we had a couple of issue that quickly caused our search to become extremely narrowed. Corporate policy states that if all possible we cannot add anything that will add hooks directly into any mission critical application (such as SQL or Exchange), and our budget for this was small, which was fine if not for the fact that most of the solutions we found were more than 5 digits (not counting decimals)!
The Tool
We eventually found a product, which was in beta at the time, which would seemingly fit our needs. MailArchiver from GFI seemed exactly like the solution we were looking for. It used exchange journaling to collect all mail, and then polled from a MS SQL database to pull the all of the mail journaled into a database archive. MailArchiver then creates a web interface for users to view their email. They can go the website, and using NT integrated authentication go directly to a customized page showing all of their mail (by conversation). If you enable full text search in your SQL Server users can also search through all of their messages using fields such as sender, date received, subject, or words within the body of the message. The only issue we had was with the amount of storage the database would consume (the journaled mailbox is cleaned out when messages are archived to the database). Luckily GFI announced even before the beta was finished that the next version of MailArchiver (due in only a few months) would ship with multiple database support. This would allow your storage to be spread among multiple storage areas or even multiple database servers. Also added was better printing ability for emails, along with the ability to save the mails as .eml files, and to forward a whole conversation thread (or individual messages) back to their mailbox. View pictures of MailArchiver in action here.
Putting MailArchiver to the Test
We rolled MailArchiver as soon as it was released from beta. The only issue we had was that we used an older server (2 X Xeon 550 MHz), and we found that as the user load increased these processors were not up to the challenge. After upgrading to a more modern server things went much smoother. While there was a good deal of user training needed, this was due not due to the MailArchiver interface (which is very intuitive), but in re-educating users in the use of their email. With MailArchiver in place users no longer needed to have long term storage of their email in either their mailbox or in personal folders. While the re-education was difficult the simplicity of the tool made it much easier. Along with the fact that users could now access their mails from any workstation with no additions to Outlook (like adding PST’s) the conversion began gaining acceptance and became the defacto standard at our company.
Right tool for the job?
While already having a large MS SQL database infrastructure made our implementation easier, GFI MailArchiver is relatively painless even for those with a previous infrastructure. It has greatly reduced the storage in use in both our mail system and in our file storage for PST’s. Also, we no longer hear the “I deleted an email I needed, can you get it back for me?” question. Now people through out the company know that can just point their browser to the website do a quick search and have full access to their entire email history.
Write your own review
If you’ve found the perfect tool for the job, we want to hear about it. Send us an e-mail
describing the product and the job you’re using it for. If we feature
the product in The Right Tool for the Job? blog, you’ll earn a little
cash and be featured across the TechRepublic Web site and in our
newsletters. -
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The Best Tools are Often the Simplest
*nix
admins love cron jobs. The power to schedule tasks you would
normally have to run manually is great indeed. Unfortunately, many
Windows admins don’t do the same, even though the tools to do this
are included in Windows. This is perhaps due to the fact that the
tool to do this included in the older N.T. versions of Windows server
(the A.T. scheduler) was difficult to use and often were not
reliable. Beginning with Windows 2000 though a new scheduling tool
was included.The
JobOur mail gateway is an I.I.S. 6 SMTP
relay, running on Windows 2003 standard edition. While this server
has proven to be fairly reliable, there are several things I have
found that I must do manually on it. I have had to empty the bad
mail folder sporadically, as it would not automatically empty and
could take up a large amount of disk space. The server would also be
up for long periods of time without a reboot, but occasionally I
would have an issue with mail delivery due to I.P. address changes,
and I would either have to reboot the server, or just clear the
D.N.S. cache. Also on occasion there were reasons to either restart
the SMTP service or even reboot the whole server. While individually
none of these were major efforts to do, they would usually get put
off until there was a problem due to the fact that it was very easy
to forget to do something when there is so much else going on.The
ToolAfter rushing to clean out the bad
mail folder when the hard drive filled up again, I decided something
needed to be done. It was time to become proactive instead of
reactive to these issues. While going over the tasks needed to be
done, it occurred to me that I could do all of these tasks from the
command prompt. While Windows has long pushed their G.U.I. Tools,
those of us who remember using D.O.S. as their primary operating
system can bring our old skills back to the forefront to do many
things from the command prompt (Microsoft is listening though to
those of us who prefer command line. Currently Windows Power Shell
is in beta, and promises most of the functionality of *nix command
shells. You can download it here.). I also knew that you can create a simple batch file by
taking the commands you wish to run, copying them to notepad, and
saving the file with the .BAT extension. This would create an
executable file that you could then run. The thought of teaming
batch files with the Task Scheduler utility seemed to be a match made
in heaven. While I had some misgivings about the Task Scheduler, I
figured it was well worth a shot as it would not only be free, but if
it worked there would be a wealth of other issues on other systems I
could use it for. You can view an image gallery of sample batch files and the Task Scheduler here.Putting
Batch Files and Task Scheduler to the TestInitially I wrote the batch files to
clear the bad mail directory, restart the SMTP service, and clear the
D.N.S. cache. While none of these needed to be done on a daily
basis, the Task Scheduler utility made it quite easy to schedule a
separate weekly instances of each of these. The only difficult
process was determining the necessary switches to use to fully
automate the scripts. Luckily using the /? parameter on most
commands in the command prompt will return a help file that will show
all of the available switches. After the verifying that the initial
runnings were successful, it was very easy to ?set it and forget
it?.Right
Tool for the Job?After seeing that everything was
running smoothly, it was easy to find new uses to this tool set. One
of the first was the ending of the third shift reboots. Windows
Server 2003 contains the shutdown command which allows you to
shutdown and reboot the system from the command prompt. This command
is also available in Windows XP, and it allows to shut down a remote
system. This allows you to reboot systems from a script contained on
your workstation, without even adding anything to the server. There
is also a version of this tool in the Windows 2000 resource kit for
older systems. The use of Batch Files and the Task Scheduler has now
become a standard practice at my company. This has proven to most
definitely be The Right Tool for the Job. You can download several of the scripts we use here.Write your own review
If you’ve found the perfect tool for the job, we want to hear about it. Send us an e-mail
describing the product and the job you’re using it for. If we feature
the product in The Right Tool for the Job? blog, you’ll earn a little
cash and be featured across the TechRepublic Web site and in our
newsletters. -
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Talkin? ’bout Virtualization
“We have to many servers”, one of my admins grumbled to me. It was true. Our server room was overflowing. We had an individual server dedicated to nearly every function that was performed within our company. Not only that, but we had a number of older 7U servers, that were low powered by today?s standards, but were still being used for many critical functions.
The Job
After much discussion, it was decided that a server consolidation effort was going to be required. While there were many functions that could be moved from slower individual servers, to a few newer, more powerful servers that would not be enough. Due to the fact that many people through out our company were used to having “their own” server resistance was high for change. We needed a way to allow people to continue to have “their server” while drastically reducing our server count. The best way to accomplish this it seemed was with server virtualization.
The Tool
There are several server virtualization packages available. QEMU, VMWare, XEN, and Microsoft Virtual Server R2 seemed to be the leading players. While looking at available packages VMWare was ruled out to the excessive cost. This has since changed with the beta release of VMWare server, but this was not available at the time. QEMU was ruled out due to many in our IT staff having heard of it being slower than the other virtualization engines, so it came down to XEN and Microsoft Virtual Server R2. Cost was negligible between the open source XEN and the Microsoft product, as Microsoft Virtual Server Enterprise edition was only priced at a couple of hundred dollars, well within our range of affordability (it has since become free). We decided to use the Microsoft solution owing largely to the fact that the R2 release of Virtual Server supported fault tolerant clustering using Microsoft clustering. Microsoft clustering is something our IT staff has a large amount of experience with, and our user base has come to expect the high levels of availability it affords us.
Putting Virtual Server R2 to the Test
The initial install of Microsoft Virtual Server R2 was extremely simple. Installing a virtual server was almost as easy as that. Microsoft has done a good job in making this process as painless as possible. We ran up several test servers in our development environment, and began to play with the product. We were impressed by the speed of the virtual servers, the ease of ?upgrading? components such as adding RAM or network adapters to the virtualized system, and the ease of migrating virtualized systems from one virtual server host server to another. Unfortunately, not all was smooth sailing. The fail over clustering support, while functional, is rather cumbersome and time consuming to configure (you can download the clustering document here). Also, the P2V (physical to virtual) migration tools were also very difficult to use, and required the use of another Microsoft Automated Deployment Services; a product that we did not have deployed. You can view an image gallery of virtual server here.
Right Tool for the Job?
We have been very happy with Microsoft Virtual Server R2. While the road has not always been the easiest, due to the current state of clustering and P2V migration, we have been extremely happy with the product. Currently we have 15 virtual system deployed into production among 2 virtual server hosts. We run a variety of services from these boxes, including our Exchange Front End server, our accounting and payroll servers, and our SharePoint Services environment. Users for the most part have not even noticed the changeover from physical to virtual, though there have been some complements about faster performance on some of the servers. This is due to the hard drives of the virtual systems being on high performance SAN storage, and the host servers being much faster than their previous physical servers. This consolidation has reduced a total of 42U worth of rack space down into 8U, this is a huge saving in our cramped data center. Microsoft Virtual Server R2 has definitely been the Right Tool for the Job!
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Harnessing big power for small solutions
Our homebrew
helpdesk system had been up for a long time, but as the company grew it was
beginning to show its age. While using
a Microsoft Access database as the backend had been fine for 50 users, it was
not really working out for 300 users. A
solution needed to be found to remedy the speed and usability issues we were
having, and fast!The Job
Our
initial thought was to look for a more mature helpdesk package to
implement. Unfortunately, budgetary
constraints took the wind out of those sails.
While a search began on looking at open source tools, we also began
looking at our current helpdesk to see what could be done to help remedy the
situation. Our helpdesk is a fairly
simple web based design, using active server pages, back ended to a M.S. Access
database. After looking into how the
system operated, we realized that the A.S.P. pages all used a D.S.N. connection
to communicate with the database. Since
it used a D.S.N. we realized that we could point the D.S.N. to another data
source, and as long as the data structures were the same, we shouldn?t experience
any major problems.The Tool
We decided that we could migrate the
Access database to another system. Our
choices were fairly limited however; by the fact our budget for this product
was $0. Luckily the obvious solution for
this problem became quickly apparent. We
already had a large MS SQL backend structure in place. While we could not (for procedural reasons)
create a new SQL database in any of our production environments, we could use
the Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE) to house our database. We already had licenses for the MS SQL tool
set due to our backend, so we decided to use Microsoft Data Transformation
Services to migrate our Access database to MSDE.Putting DTS to the Test
There was initially some fear among
our I.T. department, who had never used D.T.S., that it would be a very
complicated procedure. Luckily, nothing
was further from the truth. The wizards
Microsoft provided (accessed through SQL Enterprise Manager) made the job of
moving our Access database to MSDE a snap.
The whole procedure took less than 30 minutes to complete. View screenshots of the conversion process here. Once the database was moved and the D.S.N.
changed, we fired up the helpdesk website to test for any problems. There were of course a few (we had expected
this), and the developer we had with us
was able to straighten them out quickly.Right Tool for the Job?
One of the first things we noticed was that the
helpdesk pages loaded MUCH faster with the MSDE backend. Not only was it faster than the speeds we
had become accustomed to under our current load, but it was faster than the
helpdesk had been even originally. Also,
the search though our knowledge base was extremely fast. Searches that took greater than 10 minutes
before were now taking seconds. We did
have a rash of calls over the next several days from users who thought the
system was not accepting their tickets it was responding so fast (on ticket
acceptance it redirects them to the main page).
Everyone was very happy with this system. Currently we have been on our MSDE system for
2 years. In that time the database size
has grown, but we are nowhere near the 2 GB limit of MSDE. Since seeing how easy was to do this, many
members of our I.T. staff have been using a combination of MSDE and Microsoft
D.T.S. to migrate many different applications.
We have migrated everything from other Access databases to Excel
spreadsheets to MSDE. Our users have
generally loved the speed increases, and our developers have become exceptionally
quick at coming up with front ends for these solutions. A combination of MSDE and D.T.S. has definitely
proved to be the Right Tool for the Job.Write your own review
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Powerful Scheduling for Windows Admins
A while back I put up a post detailing how I regularly used
batch files and the Windows Task Scheduler to automate jobs. Not long after posting this another member of
TechRepublic sent me an e-mail letting me know about another tool that was
available that added a lot of power to what I was doing. In the spirit of adventure, I went and
grabbed a download of VisualCron by neteject.com to give it a go around the block.The Job
Using batch files and Windows Task Scheduler we already have
a fairly comfortable and reliable task scheduling system in place. Not really knowing where we were going with
VisualCron made determining where to test it a bit more difficult, as we did
not want to disturb any of the processes we already had in place. Finally after looking at what was available
in VisualCron, we found once place it could make a huge difference. We have several files that must be manually downloaded
from suppliers. These files are then
placed in individual sub-directories where they are scooped up by a database
server and from there moved to several databases. We have had a problem recently of certain
files not getting downloaded
in a timely manner. This is difficult to
monitor due to the irregularity of the files being generated. Many files are generated daily, but some of
them are monthly or bi-monthly. We
needed to find a way to easily monitor the download of files.The Tool
The tools available in VisualCron gave us a lot of leeway in
the manner in which we wanted to do this.
We decided to set up separate monitors in VisualCron to watch for each
specific file creation. On file creation
VisualCron then ran a T-SQL command to add a line to a monitoring database we
created. This database would daily
calculate which files should have been downloaded versus which files were
downloaded. It will then generate a
reminder email (using xp_smtpsendmail80)
to the person(s) responsible for downloading specific files if these files were
not downloaded on their due date. The
file trigger and SQL task within VisualCron seemed to be perfect for this. View some of the available options in
VisualCron here.Putting VisualCron to
the TestThe setup of the VisualCron monitors was slightly more difficult
that expected. This was understandable
though due to the massive power difference I was using. It was very quickly apparent that this tool
was magnitude of power greater than the solution I was currently using. That being said we were looking to do
something very specific. After locating
and setting up the exact monitors I would be using it was simply a matter of repeating
the steps for each individual subdirectory and modifying run times and T-SQL
commands to match each alert. The setup
went smoothly (the SQL backend work already being completed), and we were ready
to test.Right Tool for the
Job?The testing went nearly perfect. The only glitch we had, was the test server
VisualCron was running on failed after 2 weeks, and we all realized the need of
backing up jobs. After setting
VisualCron back up in a production environment and recreating our jobs it has
been flawless. We have been using
VisualCron for a little while now, and have added several more monitors with
it, and are continually amazed by the power this little tool offers. Every time we think we have tapped this tool
for all it?s worth, it is constantly proving itself up for even more. While it has not replaced the old stand by of
batch files and Task Scheduler (if it ain?t broke ? and free ? don?t fix it),
it is taking on the brunt of new work coming down the pike. VisualCron is constantly proving to us, that it
is the Right Tool for the Job.Write your own review
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Data Recorvery for those special times
Are you sure you backed up your data? It seems like an easy enough question, but
how many times have you asked a user this only to have them come back, and ask
for a critically important file a few days later? It?s happened quite a few times where I work.
Unfortunately, we have generally have a
very quick turnaround time on systems, so by the time the question is asked,
the system generally has been reformatted and returned to a different user.The Job
We had a definite need for a data recoverability strategy. While user education can account for a lot of
improvement in this area, we still had a need for additional data recovery. While we initially implemented a moratorium
before a system could be re-imaged, this was not effective as the quick turnaround
time insures that we are not constantly in need of purchasing new systems. We looked into data recovery services, but
they were price prohibitive. Finally we
found a software package that seemed like it would fit our needs.The Tool
At first glance the tool Zero Assumption Recovery (ZAR) really
seemed to be exactly what we needed.
This tool will allow you to recover deleted data from within Windows (NT,
2000, XP, 2003). Windows will need to be
able see the disk in Disk Management, but it does not need to be mounted as a
drive. ZAR can work off of raw volumes,
so even if windows insists that it needs to format the disk to read it ZAR can
still recover data from the device. It
can read data from disks that are (or were) formatted FAT16, FAT32, or NTFS. It can also recover data from ext2 partitions
and digital cameras, though this is limited.
You can find a list of supported cameras here. Also, it can read from and even repair RAID 0
and RAID 5 arrays.Putting Zero
Assumption Recovery to the TestOur first chance to use ZAR was on a PC that had been re-formatted
but had not yet been re-imaged. A user
came to us in tears saying that a spreadsheet she had been working on for 3
weeks was saved on her local box, and she had forgotten to back it up. We told her we would attempt to recover it,
but we could not promise anything. We
took the hard drive and placed it in another working PC. Windows 2000 Pro booted up, and saw the hard
drive, but could not mount it due to the lack of formatting. We installed and started ZAR, and pointed it
to the drive. It had no problem seeing
the drive, and immediately began working on scanning it. As this was a 60 GB drive it took quite a
while for the scan to complete, but when it was finished it presented the
entire drive in a typical Windows Explorer fashion. Placing a check next to a file or folder
marked it for recovery. We recovered
this users My Documents folder to her U: drive.
Not only was the spreadsheet was looking for on their, but several other
documents she had forgotten to back up. See ZAR in action here.Right Tool for the
Job?ZAR is not a tool we use everyday. Luckily whenever we have needed it, it has
never failed to step up and perform like a champ. On a few occasions we have even used it on
servers with failed RAID arrays to reconstruct the data contained on them, and
it has never let us down. ZAR will
become a wonderful tool in your network toolbox, and it most assuredly is the
Right Tool for the Job.Write your own review
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Virtualization Pains
Virtualization
is rapidly becoming a major force in I.T. With Microsoft’s release
of Virtual Server R2 Enterprise Edition for free (available
here) and VMWare releasing VMWare Server (formally GSX Server)
for free (available here)
actualization has been a hot topic in many shops. It came as no
surprise that virtualization wave hit my own company. When the
choice to use Microsoft’s product was made, we found the
virtulization process itself was fairly simple (see Right Tool
article here).
The next step was to look at migrating our real server to our new
virtualzied environment.The
JobWe needed to find a way to migrate
our real servers to virtual. Some of these were simple, as it was as
simple as installing a new server and migrating the function. A few
back end DNS changes and users were none the wiser. Unfortunately,
we could not do this with all of our servers. We wanted a way to
move our current environments to virtual’s with only a minimum of
user downtime. The best way to do this was with imaging software.The
ToolWe decided to use the Virtual
Server Migration Toolkit from Microsoft (available here).
This tool managed to make it high on our list due mainly to the
price (free). This tool makes use of another Microsoft tool,
Automated Deployment Services, to take an image of a physical server,
create the new virtual server, and then deploy the image to the
virtual server. From the initial information we read this did not
seem to be the best of the imaging tools, but it did meet our main
requirement, price. Using the V.S.M.T. was not an easy intuitive
process. This mostly command line tool required a good deal of
effort to set up, and make work. It also required us to create
another server to run the Automated Deployment Services and the
V.S.M.T. Itself. While these could have been run from one of our
Virtual Server servers, company policy prevents us from installing
un-needed services on production servers.Putting
the Virtual Server Migration Toolkit to the TestUsing the V.S.M.T. consists of
several steps. The first step (after properly preparing your
physical server) is to gather your hardware information with the
gatherhw tool. This is a simple command line tool that generates an
XML file containing pertinent information regarding the physical
system. You will then use the hwvalidate switch of the vmscript to
validate the XML file created in the previous step. This will tell
you if there are any needed patches are incompatibilities in your
physical system. After correcting any issues, you will then use the
vmscript command again to create a series of scripts to perform the
final parts of the migration. One of the great powers of the
V.S.M.T. lies in this. The scripts created are simple batch files,
so you are free to edit them as you wish. This gives a LOT of power
to you as the administrator in creating and customizing your virtual
machines, though you must be careful as you can also cause yourself
many problems if you edit settings you are unsure about. The next
step you will perform is the capture of the virtual machine. You
will have already created a script to do this
(%sourcemachinename%_createvm.cmd). Running this step will create
all of the necessary jobs in A.D.S. to take the image of the physical
computer. Once this is done, you will need to reboot your physical
server, and set it up for PXE boot. Once you have taken your image,
you will then create your virtual machine with another script
(%sourcemachinename%_createvm.cmd). This will create your virtual
machine on the target Virtual Server, and place the proper boot
floppy image in the systems floppy drive. You will then run the
%sourcemachinename%_deployvm.cmd script to push your image to the
newly created virtual machine. As with the image capture step, this
script creates all the necessary jobs within ADS to do this. After
this you will need to install the Virtual Machine Additions to your
newly virtualized server, along with installing any necessary drivers
for the new hardware. Your new system will be identical to your old
system. You can even set the system to clone the MAC address of your
old system if that is needed. You can view a walkthrough of the process here.Right
Tool for the Job?Without a doubt the Virtual Server
Migration Toolkit is a difficult tool to work with, but after a few
uses though the difficulty of the tool really seemed to fade away.
Also, this tool does give you a lot of power in the migration
processes. With the use of ADS and the created scripts you are in
full control of the migration from. By the time we had migrated our
first 10 servers using this tool seemed as easy as copying a file,
and it never failed to the job we set it out to do. After the
initial learning curve was reached, the Virtual Server Migration
Toolkit really proved itself to be the Right Tool for the Job.Write your own review
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All purpose network scanner for free.
The Job
Do you know what is going on on your network? Do you really know? Are you sure?
Well if you are anything like us, you like to think you fairly good idea
of what’s going on, but you could always know more. Unfortunately, budget constraints (a sad sad
factor of my life) limited the tools I could use. Initial searching came up somewhat lacking as
most of the tools available were for *Nix operation systems. Luckily once again diligent searching (and
Google) led me to another freeware tool, NetBrute by rawlogic software. NetBrute is an all purpose scanner that runs
on Windows based systems.The Tool
NetBrute is an all purpose security scanner. It contains three different scanners. The first scanner is named NetBrute. It is a Windows share scanner. It will scan an individual computer or a
range of IP address for shares. You can
specify whether it will scan for disk shares, print shares, or both. Once the scan is run, the right pane will
display results by IP address (it will only show systems that have shares, it
will not display systems with no results).
You can the drill down on each IP address to see what is shared. The
second tool is a port scanner. One of
the nicer features of this port scanner is that it comes with a list of commonly
used ports. You can use this list to
scan a computer (or a range of IP?s) for this list of ports, a specific port,
or all IP ports. You can also create a separate
text file with specific ports in it. You
can then use this list as the ports it will scan. On a side note, I will recommend convincing
your firewall guy to turn on verbose logging, and then scan all ports of the
firewall, multiple times. The resulting
panic is hilarious. The last of the
tools is called WebBrute. This is a
brute force password attack designed to be run against web sites. While this tool can be used for many
nefarious purposes, it is highly useful in testing the security of your
password secured websites. You can
easily download username and password files from the internet, run them through
WebBrute, and see if any of your accounts are found. This is a great way of testing if your
security policies are sufficient, and to see where you are lacking. See NetBrute in action here.Putting NetBrute to
the TestWe began using to NetBrute to look for open shares on our
network. After running the check on our
DHCP range we found several users who were sharing music, and one who had an
open share containing nothing but pirated software. We took care of this issue immediately. After this we were all impressed with how
easy NetBrute had been to use and how effective it had been. We
then began an attack (during 3rd shift) against our web mail system,
looking for easily cracked username and password combinations. This revealed some holes in our password policy
that were not aware of. The Port Scan
utility quickly became a favorite, as we used it immediately on finding a rouge
IP address on our network. This has been
able to assist in not only tracking down the rouge box, but also quickly determining
the threat level of the box.Right Tool for the
Job?Most of the I.T. department in my company has been using
NetBrute for several years now. It has
proven itself over and over again. While
it is possible to find other tools that may perform the individual functions
better, the overall package of NetBrute cannot be beat. Also, most of its competitors run on *nix
based operating systems, so for those of us in Windows world this is a great
package to have available. It really is
the Right Tool for the Job.Write your own review
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describing the product and the job you’re using it for. If we feature
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