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]

Don’t you hate when you have large distribution groups in your environment with enabled and disabled accounts as members and when you send email messages to the account NDRs are sent throughout the environment. As may or may not know, there are options in Exchange on how to handle NDRs for distribution groups. My issue is with the options provided by Exchange, for example enabling certain features against a DG could remove valid NDRs or create a lot of false positives. To combat this probl... [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]

                It is often needful to take a long and persistent network capture to collect data from a server or set of servers. Often you are looking for a problem and cannot predict its occurrence. In these cases it can sometime be difficult to find the right methods to capture this data without over whelming you servers. I will attempt to give suggestions on how to best do this to get the data needed. My preferred me... [More]

Using and Installing the Telnet Client                 Telnet is one of the greatest network troubleshooting tools available to us. Unfortunately the telnet client is not installed inherently anymore in Server 2008, Vista, or windows 7. You can however still install and enable this feature. (See "Telnet Client Not Included")   What is the Telnet Client?          &... [More]