A Nifty Trick to Backing-up AD Integrated DNS Zones Purpose                 A few years ago I had a customer that lost their DNS databases that were stored in AD. They asked me if there was any way to recover this data without performing an authoritative restore. That got me thinking of what we could use native to DNS that could provide backups and restores that would be affected by Active Directory as little as pos... [More]

Network Bandwidth vs. Network Latency Purpose                 It has always been curious to me that we accept a statement of bandwidth only from our ISPs, when latency is just as important. I may be able to send you an elephants weight (~8 tons) in gold over the next year, but wouldn't you rather have a mouse's weight every second until then (~700 tons)? Network latency is big deal. Too much network latency and we c... [More]

Network Ports and Sockets Purpose                 To begin to understand how a computer communicates on the modern network you need to understand network ports and sockets in TCP/IP. This is probably the most basic concept to networking. In Windows, and in other platforms, there are some tools that will also help us in reviewing our ports and connections on any given machine. I have no plan to rewrite was has alread... [More]

Setting up a Solid NLB Cluster Purpose                 I often run across failing NLB clusters, and administrator with many questions. Like with many technologies, I find NLB to best be kept simple, it does not require some grand configuration, and whitepapers only intending to explain all you options, often mislead you into configuring things wrong, or more detailed than is needed. In this article, I intend to shar... [More]

Tackling IPSEC Purpose                 IPSEC is one of the most useful and sometimes most confusing protocols in modern technology. It seems that to understand IPSEC and its appliance you have to teach you mind to think in a different way than it is used to. Where normally we just look at making a network connection as a ping, with IPSEC we really have to delve into Winsocks and the direction of network packets with... [More]

                Many times I have found it needful to be able to find what adapters are loaded on a server, whether they are not showing up in device manager, I wanted to validate whether network teaming was enabled, I wanted to see if some firewall miniport driver was installed, I wanted to see if the local Antivirus added anything, or any other reason. Here are some steps I have found helpful when validating what Networ... [More]

FtBP: End-to-End, B-to-A Part 8/8                   Last time we talked about how a network packet changes through a NAT device, and we finished off the transit of our network packet to Computer B. Today we will follow a network packet from Computer B back to Computer A. Here is the Diagram we will work with:                   ... [More]