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from Josh Stephens, Head Geek, SolarWinds

Welcome to the blog. This is a place where we're going to post thoughts of technical topics in the areas of network management, network engineering, systems management, security, and etc. The blog will evolve over time, based upon your feedback. Let us know your thoughts and if there are specific topics that you'd like to see discussed in the future please send your ideas to headgeek@solarwinds.com.

Undocumented features and why we love them...

I was in a meeting yesterday where we were discussing some of the things that get geeks like us (network engineers, system administrators, security folks, etc) excited about apps and tools. In thinking about this, I kept coming back to my favorite apps...

Posted 12-03-2008 1:02 PM by Josh Stephens
Tech Preview for the new SolarWinds Dashboard...

The dev team here at SolarWinds has just finished a new tech preview of the SolarWinds Dashboard and as of yesterday it's available to the public for download . This is a cool new application and sort of a new concept in network monitoring and diagnostics...

Posted 11-25-2008 2:16 PM by Josh Stephens
The headache of managing overlapping IP address space...

If you've never had to deal with networks with overlapping or duplicated IP ranges this you may also be the kind of person that's prone to winning at slot machines and always seems to be able to catch a cab in the rain - i.e. you're one lucky...

Posted 11-21-2008 10:36 AM by Josh Stephens
Heading out to Arizona for a quick Orion install and setup...

This afternoon I'm heading out to Tucson to visit with Joel Snyder and geek out a little on network management best practices, SolarWinds software , and industry trends. While there, we're going to be installing Orion NPM and all of the Orion...

Posted 11-18-2008 11:27 AM by Josh Stephens
TechTalk on DNS wth DNS Experts...

For those of us that have been in this industry for a while we know that DNS can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. My first experience with DNS involved setting up DNS on an AT&T Unix server, reading and studying the O'Reily book DNS...

Posted 11-10-2008 10:11 PM by Josh Stephens
Password Safe

I've been using a pretty nifty open source tool for a while now and so I thought I'd share. The tool is called Password Safe and is a great little application for storing user accounts and passwords. Yeah, I know, I know - you're not supposed...

Posted 11-06-2008 2:20 PM by Josh Stephens
Updating and Maintaining ACLs

For those of us that maintain device configurations that include Access Control Lists (ACLs), we know what a huge chore this can be and how bad things can go if you make even one simple mistake. I myself have had to put someone on a plane to fly out to...

Posted 11-05-2008 3:50 PM by Josh Stephens
What really fuels this industry...

I was chatting with a good friend and sometimes fitness/nutrition coach of mine this morning and she pretty much told me that I should quit drinking sodas as they're "bad for me". Maybe it's just because it's Monday and quite honestly...

Posted 11-03-2008 11:39 AM by Josh Stephens
Podcast on SolarWinds Toolsets, Orion, NetFlow, IP SLA, and more...

Network World just published a podcast that Jimmy Ray Pursor (geek guru over at Cisco ) and I did a few days ago on the Engineer's Toolset , Orion , NetFlow , and IP SLA . Give it a listen. Flame on... Josh Follow me on Twitter

Posted 10-31-2008 12:58 PM by Josh Stephens
Happy Halloween!!!

Be careful out there tonight!!! Josh

Posted 10-31-2008 12:12 PM by Josh Stephens
How to enable SNMP on a VMWare ESX Server

Since we recently released a new free tool for monitoring ESX server health and performance and since Orion NPM now does a great job of natively monitoring ESX servers, a lot of people are asking how to configure SNMP on their ESX servers so that they...

Posted 10-30-2008 12:38 PM by Josh Stephens
Root cause analysis, alert suppression, and dependencies.

Among those of us that implement and maintain network management systems the topic of root cause analysis is one of much angst and frustration. Of course we'd all like our monitoring systems to be smart enough to correlate hundreds of seemingly unrelated...

Posted 10-21-2008 11:47 AM by Josh Stephens
New tools for monitoring virtual server environments...

Nowadays it seems that we're all using virtual server technologies and in my opinion, it's some pretty darn good stuff. We use virtual servers for everything from mission critical enterprise applications to software development platforms to lab...

Posted 10-15-2008 9:44 PM by Josh Stephens
Raising awareness of poverty in our communities - and how we can help...

Today we're joining many others in a blog & social networking movement to raise awareness of poverty within our communities . It's too easy sometimes to let the drone of the cooling fans, the subtle gray of the subfloors, and the fluorescent lighting...

Posted 10-15-2008 10:29 AM by Josh Stephens
Interesting blog post on effective use of Virtual Teams

Our buddy RedPineApple wrote a new post on making virtual teams more effective and the more I thought about it the more I liked the topic and the content. I know that many of us struggle with making our virtual teams more effective and there are some...

Posted 10-13-2008 11:09 AM by Josh Stephens

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