Do more with less

It has been a while since I have blathered about technology. That is not because there is a shortage of things to blather about but rather I have been very busy as of late. I guess you could say that I am a one man circus where I work juggling this and that.

Right before Christmas at work our network latency went through the roof. When I say network latency I mean that our connectivity to the Internet was very slow. It was as if someone had poured peanut butter into the ethernet cables and gummed up the network so badly that everything ground to a halt. This happened the last two weeks of December of 2008 and by the time I got around to hollering for help the folks at the NOC in Florida were already headed out the door for Christmas vacation.

Sometime between the week before Christmas and January 5th our network nodes all went back to green and now we are surfing the Net at speeds we are accustomed to. We have a Data T1 and a Voice T1 that handles all of our needs. We have 60 people who share the T1 at two remote sites and the main office. What that means is that there is not a lot of wiggle room for chattering network devices. During the two weeks while everyone else were on Christmas vacation I wandered around spot checking workstations and running a port checker on them. The port checker runs and identifies what TCP ports are either being listened to or transmitting through. In other words the applications on your computer communicate to other hosts through the Internet through these ports.

How do Denial of Service attacks happen? Zombie computers which have been hacked send out a flood of data packets to a target network and computer(s) with such frequency that it makes the network so busy it can no longer keep up with the data requests and therefore becomes unable to communicate. The general consensus was that this might have been happening on the network at the office except that something on my network was plugging up communications to the outside world by hammering the network with a constant stream of data. When I spot checked different machines in different buildings on the main complex I was unable to find a machine that the port monitoring software was able to identify as the offender.

We still have sporadic network latency so sometime next week after normal business hours I am going to work with the network engineers and systematically remove all the workstations from the picture as well as switches in each building until we find the offending device.

In the mean time I am working with computers purchased four or five years ago that only had 256 to 384 mb of ram installed with XP Pro. I am assuming the thought process was this. The main application that is used to book reservations runs on the server so there was no need to load up the workstations with lots of ram so lets just put the minimal amount to run Windows. I have spent the last 8 weeks ordering ram upgrades for as many machines as I was allowed to order for so that I can upgrade them to a minimum of 512 mb of ram. The more RAM you give Windows the faster it will run.