How many times have we heard of end users stories? Silly stories about the folks that we support making silly mistakes. Well, this time the joke is on me. I decided to go for a walk around 2:15 pm and clear my head and get some exercise. I had not had lunch break yet so this was my opportunity to get out of my office for a spell. I walked down to a different building to clock out for lunch because I forgot to use the web based client on my pc before I left. I get to the building that I am going to and noticed the time clock pc was off due to power blinking on and off earlier. I am booting the pc back on when I hear the noise of a ups going off. I decided to kill two birds with one stone so I walk to the cubicle where the noise was coming from and I stop the noise which in turn killed the power to the phone and pc. DOH
It never occurred to me that I had just turned off the power to the UPS and that this person would come back to her desk and have no phone or LAN connection. I go on my walk and I had not been sitting down for more than 45 seconds when this ladies supervisor calls me and asks me if I had been around this ladies cubicle. We all hada good chuckle when I discovered what I had done. I ran down there with a batrery relpalcement for the UPS and popped it in and got the user back online within 5 minutes.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Saturday, January 17, 2009
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.
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.
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