!!! WARNING:  IT Systems Administrator blasphemy ahead !!!  Actually, here it is right here:  I know that NetDiag is a staple tool for systems administrators but I’ve never been a big consumer of the tool and that’s mostly because I just don’t care for it.  There is some great functionality in the tool but a lot of it can be found in other tools without all of the excess effort and output.  The other thing is that there are some limitations and known issues which often m... [More]

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]

                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]

FtBP: Switching Part 3/8                   In our last discussion we covered the formation of a network packet in preparation to send that packet on the wire. Today we will cover the packet's travel through its local VLAN from Client to Server. Let's start by reviewing what we had in our network packet from last time. Here is where we left off:           &nb... [More]

FtBP: Packet Formation Part 2/8 Packets on the wire (purposely repeated)                 As we go through this series we will go over some examples to help understand the progression of a network packet throughout a network segment. We will start off simple and grow to more and more complicated packet transfers, but before we get to the wire we will need to look at how the data is packaged, and so how the packet fo... [More]

  FtBP: Prerequisites Part 1/8                   One understanding that I think has helped me a great deal in troubleshooting problems, and designing networks and services is the evolution of a network packet as it transverses different pieces of network hardware. Today I will try to cover at a high level, the packet creation process, switching to the local Vlan, packet routing, NATing and firewalls, a... [More]