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.

Vista Problems

Microsoft responds to Vista network performance issue by ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes -- I have received a response to the Vista network performance issue from Microsoft.

I subscribe to the ItsVista newsletter/blog and when I saw this I could relate to the PAIN that some of these problems have caused all of us. I have been using Vista every since the first beta release and I must say that the OS is different and takes some getting used to. I am currently using Vista Ultimate in a networking environment at work. There are two things I dont like specificially about Vista in a LAN environment.

A. you cant launch a program with the RUN AS option

B. Copying data to and from a network share takes forever

In XP Pro you can launch an application by right clicking on the icon and selecting Run As which allows you to select a domain admin account or system account with administrative rights higher than the current credentials that you are logged on to the domain with. The only way I can do network administration from my Vista box is to use a program called Hyena which allows me to sign on to a server individually with whatever credentials that I want.

As for copying data this is just rediculous. I have a friend who has experienced a laptop crash which is partly hardware and partly software related. I plan on disecting the laptop so that I can visually inspect the motherboard and other things attached to it to see if I can find out why it is overheating. In the interim I decided that I would bring the hard drive to work with me and get the data off of it.

I utilized a nifty little USB hard drive adapter that I used to plug the laptop hard drive into and copied all the data from the hard drive to my XP workstation. My Vista workstation did not know what to do with the new device. Welcome to the wonderful world of driver hell. I moved the device over to the XP machine and XP recongized that I have a external usb hard drive attached to the system. I copied the 7.3 gb of data over to my XP machine hard drive and then I copied it over to my user share on the network.

This is where the fun begins folks. I started this mess around 10 am this morning and figured I would just work on this inbetween my other work tasks today. I figured I would have it done pretty quickly. Never assume that a computer related task will happen quickly and without any problems. I always find myself assuming that and then wind up spending way more time than expected. I tried to copy the data from my network share to a folder on my Vista machine and after Vista estimated the time it would take it came up with 5 days and 2 hours to move 7 gb of data. I looked at the bit rate the data was moving and it was fluctuating around 25 to 30 kb per second. My Vista box is a Dell with dual core processor at 3.2 ghz and 2 gb of ram. I have a 160 gb hard drive plus network storage. I have a race horse under the hood folks and that does not matter. My nic is a gb ethernet and I have a GB ethernet connection to the switch. There is no way this connection should grind to a hault like this.

The downside to this nightmare is that the DVD writer is on the Vista machine and the XP machine is my dual boot windoze/linux box that does not even have a cdr writer on it. That means that I have to burn the DVD on the Vista machine. I finally got smart and totally bypassed the gui interface and went to the command line interface. I used xcopy to copy from the network share to my backup directory on the hard drive. I started the process , locked down the workstation and went to lunch. Once I came back from lunc the data had been transferred. I have tried several times to burn the data from the windoze explorer to a dvd ram disk with little to no luck. My next and final attempt at this is to use a DVD burning program called BurnFree which is ad driven freeware for copying dvd movies on Vista OS. If that does not work I will be forced to cart the data on an external USB hard disk to my friend.

During my research on the Net I did find some TCP settings to muck with as well as some system services that could supposedly be turned off and give me some more network speed. I tried all of the suggestions but none of them did the trick thus far. Due to time constraints in writing this I dont have time to give you all the gory details but if you do a Google search you will see lots of conversation going on about this problem.

BAD VISTA. You dont play well on the LAN... LOL