Archive for category troubleshooting
Changing Networks Tips
Posted by Bloggylife in technology, troubleshooting on April 9, 2009
It can get a bit tedious when changing the design of your network, if you have an existing configured network, it’s harder to change it then implement a new one all together.
If you look at a company’s network, it’s focal point is its firewall. Behind each interface is a network or a group of networks.
On the 3-layer switch level, you’ll have the VLANs configured and on that switching level, there are routing capabilities, all is routed to the gateway. ex. users private network will be routed to a single firewall interface (172.17.1.1), where as your DMZ private network, has it’s own interface on the firewall.
When changing the network, do it one step at a time, have your design layout and let it make sense, if you have VLANs, name your VLANs correlated with the network IP settings, ex. VLAN 3 is configured for network 10.3.x.x, something to make your life easier for future troubleshooting.
Change one thing a day (VLAN/switch) and start with the least network usage department/users. Which locations, uses the network resources less, they don’t depend on the email system, Internet, etc. Most of their tasks are local to their PCs. Preferable, if it has the less users mixture, what we call direct users who are configure on another level, firewall, to use services other than the normal ones, like direct access to application servers.
Adding a new VLAN, doesn’t mean you delete the old one, keep it still, the same VLAN maybe configured somewhere else you aren’t aware of and needs to be routed.
Don’t forget to go beyond the switch level, your firewall needs to be aware of the new settings. Route the new network to the proper interface and don’t forget to add the network group on the firewall application, it has to know that this is a valid network residing behind that specific interface, ex. network 10.x.x.x is behind interface 172.17.1.1, or else the firewall will drop the packets presuming it some kind of spoofing attack. These settings are needed for users with public IPs natted to their private ones.
Check everything after each configuration, even if you think it won’t effect what you are checking, believe me with IT crazy things that don’t make sense happen all the time!
Write everything down, day and what tasks were done and build up your documentation through that.
Leave the servers network last, this is a huge headache, you can have both old and new server network, working side by side, routing between each other and gradually shift them and don’t forget to PRAY throughout the whole process 
Guest Networks
Posted by Bloggylife in troubleshooting on April 6, 2009
When configuring a guest network in your organization, you limit the access. Most probably you’ll only allow certain popular services such as (http, https) to the outside world and block all incoming traffic into your network.
That is guest network can not access private internal network.
One thing to keep in mind when assigning the network details, IP, gateway, DNS, etc. Is assign an external DNS to guest network clients.
They won’t have a problem as long as they are accessing sites and services outside your network but once they try to access anything within your network, there might be a problem.
If they are using your internal DNS to resolve names, they’ll have a problem when accessing for example your homepage, email page, since the internal DNS will resolve it to the internal IP and your firewall settings doesn’t allow guest users access to the internal network.
Where as, if you assign an external DNS, it’ll resolve to the public IP, so they’ll access your published sites and services, like all other outside users, then you won’t have a problem. And that will save you the headache of configuring the firewall to allow guest users access to published sites and services via internal IP.
Each network has their own setup and configuration, but the outcome is the same.
Simple IT
Posted by Bloggylife in troubleshooting, work on March 9, 2009
How gmail notifier is helping me at work?
Whenever the exclamation mark (!) comes on, something is wrong.
So as you can see, this is a snapshot, from my work PC, our ISP disconnected us again Internationally. wAllah, I don’t know if they’re doing it on purpose or not, at home my KEMs 1Mb account, is slow, I’m not sure if they are throttling traffic or not, but when I go to testing sites, it shows 800Kb/sec, but the browsing is slow and no downloads at all. Are they prioritizing these sites, maybe …
What’s with these International fiber cuts?? It’s reported 6 STM-1 lines are down, the data rate of each one is 155Mb/sec, so that’s about near 1Gb … How long has this been going, I believe since three weeks …
These are simple utilities that might be taken for granted but are useful for on the spot detection and troubleshooting. Sij ena once, I got the (!) mark and it turned out that the application itself got corrupted and I had to uninstall it … ya3nee salfa … but it’s a nice way to keep your eyes on things in a simple way.
G-Wireless Clients & N-Wireless Routers
Posted by Bloggylife in technology, troubleshooting on March 7, 2009
After renewing our Internet subscription, I went for shopping in Hawali and got a Belkin N Wireless Router. True, our household has no devices with n-wireless cards, I just wanted it for wider coverage. To reach downstairs for the extender to work, which I didn’t try yet!
I configured it and plugged it in. I noticed that my wireless speed is 5.5 Mbps and if it reached the maximum, it’ll be around 11 Mbps. To double check, I dragged and dropped files from my laptop on our network storage and the speeds were lower than 300 KB/sec!
I know, I couldn’t expect the speed to increase over the max. 54 Mbps supported by b/g wireless network, but to improve a little because I can get a stronger signal thus increasing the speed a bit. But the opposite happened, my speed degraded.
I double checked my wireless configuration and driver updates. Then my router configuration and I configured my channel width as 40 MHz, thinking it’ll offer me more throughput, since I thought it’ll allow more data to be carried. Anyhow, this wasn’t the case.
The Channel-bonding trick can provide a 10 to 20 Mbps throughput increase, but usually works best under strong signal conditions. As signal levels drop, using channel bonding becomes much less effective in providing a throughput boost.
I configured the “bandwidth” back to the default 20 MHz and my wireless connection shows at times (48 – 54) Mbps, my file exchange is at 1.17 MB/sec.
See more details about “5 Ways To Fix Slow 802.11n Speed“
Microsoft Log Parser
Posted by Bloggylife in technology, troubleshooting, windows on March 6, 2009
I had to give up my log monitoring server, truth to be told, I had it up and running before I went on vacation and so I haven’t been using it much. Anway, gave up the powerful server for some application.
I needed to go over some audit logs that I enabled over specific folders, tens of thousands of entries, I tried filtering them in excel and it took me as far as it could and decided a small code will do the trick, then today I came across this.
Log parser is a powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Windows operating system such as the Event Log, the Registry, the file system, and Active Directory. You tell Log Parser what information you need and how you want it processed. The results of your query can be custom-formatted in text based output, or they can be persisted to more specialty targets like SQL, SYSLOG, or a chart. Most software is designed to accomplish a limited number of specific tasks. Log Parser is different… the number of ways it can be used is limited only by the needs and imagination of the user.
You can run queries which are similar to SQL, I run -h with any command or go through the help file, to come up with the right query. You can specify the input files example (csv, textfile, event logs) and the output, as far as I’ve discovered, can be in textfile, csv, charts, etc.
I had problems, figuring out the correct field names, which can be retried by a simple query or added at the top of your csv file and within the query retrieve the header. I got a bit mixed up whether to use (like, not like, =, ==, <>, !=) and if to include (‘, “). Ya3nee, my memory just needed refreshing.
All is left is to produce a report with my logs analysis and I’m done.
Who wants to bet, that the logs report next week won’t be needed 
Download Microsoft Log Parser here
Exchange 2003: Manage Distribution Group
Posted by Bloggylife in troubleshooting, windows on March 1, 2009
How to restrict modifications to group members?
Distribution groups contain members with common purposes, same department, same functionality.
If security setting is not configured properly, users within the domain can modify the members by add/delete members and changes will be reflected in the Global Address List (GAL), that will be propagated to all users.
The user doesn’t do that necessarily on purpose, they might edit a distribution group thinking it’s only on their outlook address book.
To limit permissions:
- Open Active Directory Users and Computers console
- Go to View -> Advanced features
- Double click the group you want to configure
- Click on security tab
- Locate and select the user/group and check permission in the second window below. Authenticated Users group, are all the domain users, make sure of its permissions
- Remove write permission from the specific user/group to prevent them from modifying group members
Gmail and Blog
Posted by Bloggylife in technology, troubleshooting on February 6, 2009
After going through Bashar’s post about Gmail, I went through my gmail features and found that I can configure my domain email account (@bloggylife.com) ;P (well upto 5 accounts), kind of centralizing everything into one place ;D
Settings -> Accounts -> Add a mail account you own
It is straight forward, but if you’re not sure, usually you can get the mail setting configuration from your domain help page. The thing I liked, there is an option to automatically label your emails that are retrieved from your domain account to single them out.
In hotmail, which I use for personal and business, because these accounts go way back and all my contacts know them. Though I don’t frequently use messenger, but it’s a tool to stay in touch. I have rules set to sort out my incoming mails into folders based on sender, domain, etc. I haven’t used labels/folders in gmail yet, because there isn’t much to go through. My gmail is just used to stay in touch with the blogsphere .. for now ;D
One question is roaming through my mind and not quite sure of it, is there a possibility that this way, my blog emails are also filtered through gmail spam filters ;D The obvious answer should be no, the emails are just retrieved and whatever filtering that is supposed to happen, should be done at the original account servers. I’ll have to search for a definite answer.
Retrieve Deleted Items from Public Folders
Posted by Bloggylife in troubleshooting, windows on December 24, 2008
Public folders in Exchange 2003 are shared by several users each with set of permissions. So this user calls and requests to restore emails that have been deleted by “unknown”.
I thought I had to pull it out of our backups and a long process but luckily all went smoothly.
In the exchange server -> run Exchange System Manager -> navigate to your Public Folder Store -> Right click -> Properties, you should be able to see the below configuration under the limits tab.
You should have proper permission to retrieve items, and since I’m the owner I had no trouble ;P
In your outlook, select the public folder -> go to tools ->recover deleted items -> select the items from the list and retrieve.
Good thing we keep deleted items, that really made the job a hell lot easier. Talk about anticipating ahead
Source: Link
eMule Server List
Posted by Bloggylife in troubleshooting on December 11, 2008
I’ve been having problems with my server list, they keep disappearing. After sometime, my downloads reaches 0.0 and when checking my servers, the window is empty!
I update the server list by clicking on help, it opens the eMule project website, The Server Window, and you’ll find a link that’ll direct you to websites to find eMule servers, or you can Google it, but this is a better way to ensure you are connecting to legitimate eMule servers and not some spammers. Click on any of the websites and then search for the link that’ll add servers to your eMule.
That solved my problem temporarily, because after a couple of days the servers disappear!
You can configure your eMule to update the server list automatically.
Go to Options -> Server, in the update section increase the number of retries before removing the dead server, mine was set to 1 so I increased it to 9. Click on the list button and add these two links which I got from the server list website and save it:
http://www.gruk.org/server.met.gz
http://peerates.net/servers.php
You can see other options that you can set according to your needs.
Rania: Isn’t this illegal … the downloads
Me: I’d like to think of it as it’s the Cyper world’s way to pay me back for being such a dedicated …
Rania: oh, shut up!
Happy eMuling! 
Exchange 2003: Message Auto-Reply
Posted by Bloggylife in technology, troubleshooting, windows on October 16, 2008
How do I set up an email auto-reply message?
If you have a distribution group like “customer service” and when someone sends to this group, a reply is sent “Thank you for contacting us, we’ll look into this matter soon”, how is this done??
Sounds simple enough … NO … I looked it up and since we setup a distribution group, there was something about associating the group with a public folder (see link), when following the procedure some weird error kept popping up when trying to save the auto-reply template:
“Changes to the Rule could not be saved.”
From the error, you automatically think “permission problem”, but that didn’t solve the problem and even the procedures to solve this problem didn’t work!
I had to find another way. So this is what we did
1. Create an email account (sales@company.com), because we want to associate rules and with distribution group you can’t because it doesn’t have an email box in exchange
2. Login using that account and configure office outlook as exchange mail
3. Go to tools -> rules and alerts
4. Under “Start from a blank rule” select “Check messages when they arrive” -> next –you can’t do it through OWA-
5. Click Next again and you will get a message “This rule will be applied to every message ….”, click Yes
6. In the next window choose the following actions
a. Have server reply using a specific message
b. Redirect it to people or distribution
c. delete
7. In (a), you’ll get an email message box, write the subject and email body
8. In (b), instead of adding individual users to receive a copy of all emails sent to sales account. Create a distribution group (salesGroup@company.com), add the group in the redirect field. Then add users to the distribution group. This way it is easier to modify the recipients’ list instead of logging everytime and adding or deleting users
9. In (c), I think step (b) automatically deletes the emails in sales account after redirecting them. Nevertheless, this rule to ensure all emails goes to the delete box. This is emptied after specific days. This ensures sales email account size never fills
10. Click Finish
And that’s that If anyone has a better solution, PLEEEAZZZEEE share …
Don’t make the alternative solution too easy, because it took me whole day to get this ;P
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