Windows IT Pro Magazine’s latest issue, the section “CTRL+ALT+DEL” – a section reserved for funny and odd message boxes that occasionally appear in software – features “Top 10 IT Admin Fears”.  Number 1 is “Fear of silence in the server room”.  Yes that is quite scary.  Number 5 is “Fear that the server running your […]

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So you are monitoring your web application, but are you really covering the 3 basic levels that will fully ensure it is available and responsive?  Monitoring of a web application can be as simple as testing a single web page; however, going deeper and covering your bases is better.
 
Level 1: Monitor web server availability - […]

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In my last post, I discussed an issue where a connection to a database, via ODBC, is dropped when a network connection is intermittent.
This led me to search the Internet for similar situations and circumstances that other may have encountered. Nothing significant turned up, so I went to the source: Microsoft. Posting on […]

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Sounds like a commercial from a drug company “Network Problems Can Cause Adverse Side Effects…sleeplessness, chest pain…”, but, I digress.
Let me set the stage of my testbed configuration: On Windows XP SP2, my default connection to the Internet is via wireless express card modem using EV-DO via Verizon Wireless. Let’s call this connection A. […]

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Recently was working on a production instance of Windows Server 2003 that hosts one of our key installations of WebWatchBot to monitor our servers.  This instance is on a virtual machine, using Microsoft’s Virtual Server 2005 R2, that was initially created with 16GB of disk space.  For anyone not familiar with Virtual Server, once you allocate […]

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A good resource for finding network / website / server monitoring software is the one located at the Stanford University SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) website.  Since 1996, Les Cottrell has been cataloging an ever increasing and enormous list of tools for the network and systems admin.  As the list has grown, the design of the […]

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Bill Karagounis, Group Program Manager with the Windows Server Performance Team, has started a new blog to cover how and why things were done on Windows Server that affect performance…in a good way.
One of the juiciest things mentioned in his first post is a reference to the new Windows Performance Tuning Whitepaper for Windows Server […]

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Monitoring Software is prolific in the IT world; however, to the newly initiated sys admin, figuring out what you need for your servers is not nearly as hard as finding out what all of the terminology means.  The problem is that there is no standard terminology that we (the IT world) can use to effectively […]

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