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December 2008 - Geek Speak

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  • Cool tool, free for a limited time - SolarWinds Lan Surveyor Express for Microsoft Visio

    I normally try to keep sales and marketing type stuff out of my blog but this information is pretty cool. The marketing team is giving away free copies of our LAN Surveyor Express (LSE) for the rest of the year (the next 2 days). You can get it here or go to the website to read more about it. LSE is a really nifty tool. Basically, you run it and LSE will do a complete layer 3 and layer 2 discovery of your network and will build a detailed topology map of all of discovered devices. The information is then exported direclty into Microsoft Visio so that you can view, edit, and save the drawings. Keeping...

  • Happy Holidays from the Geek at SolarWinds

    As I sit at my desk, having enjoyed a traffic-free commute this morning, I find myself rather enjoying the holiday feel around the office. You see, one of the perks of being Head Geek (HG) is that they remove the traditional door to your office and replace it with a high-velocity revolving door. This way people that need technical assistance and/or information can whip in and out of your office without really slowing down. It's quite efficient and enables you to help countless people every day that would've otherwise had to stand in queue. While this is a great system, working around the...

  • New video on Top 5 SolarWinds Free Tools

    Last week I got the chance to chat with Chris Pirillo ( the Lockergnome ) about some of our free tools. Check it out on YouTube . Flame on... Josh Follow me on Twitter

  • Super Hero Debate

    As many of you know, I'm a HUGE fan of super heroes. Love the movies, comics, TV shows, costumes, toys, gadgets - you name it. Well, there's a great debate going on right now as to what actually qualifies someone as a super hero. It started with an argument about whether or not Spock is a super hero and has developed into much, much more... If you're as big a fan of super heroes as I am, you really can't afford not to chime in and make your opinion known on this debate. http://thwack.com/forums/p/12805/52718.aspx#52718 Flame on... Josh Follow me on Twitter

  • Have I mentioned how much I love our MIB Browser lately?

    For the last week or so I've been neck deep in a project where I've had to investigate the capabiltiies and performance of the SNMP MIBs and SNMP agents of a couple of different types of devices from a handful of different vendors. Let me tell ya, this got complicated in a hurry. In some cases the MIBs were being written and I was literally testing them the same day and in some cases the SNMP agents were open source derivatives and had all kinds of weirdness going on. The sickest part is probably that this was more fun for me than the last vacation I went on. Yeah, I'm that geeky.....

  • Combining EMSs into your NMS and generally getting rid of some BS you never really wanted anyway...

    If you've been managing networks and/or systems for long you've probably noticed that Element Management Systems or EMSs sometimes seem to multiply like rabbits. Let's talk first about why this happens and then we'll discuss how to fix it. The reaons that most companies end up with a bunch of EMSs that they don't need and/or use are pretty straight forward. First, pretty much everyone has at least a couple of different hardware vendors represented on their network. There are lots of reasons why this happens but for the sake of brevity let's just concede that this is a fact...

  • Traffic generators and load testing...

    There was a discussion last week on one of the forums that I participate in on load testing WANs that got me to pondering the subject so I thought I'd write about it a little. If you've never been tasked with a load testing or WAN performance benchmarking project you're really missing out. These can be fun projects and in my experience offer some of the best learning experiences out there. Additionally, this is a vital part of any network assessment or application readiness project. So, even if you haven't been asked to do one - maybe it's time. As you prepare to dive into the...

  • 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 over the years and some of my most memorable moments using them. To me, the coolest things about applications are those "undocumented features" and use cases. For example, I remember when I found the flight simulator in Microsoft Excel years ago. Dude was that cool! Or what about the first time that you figured out to use CTRL-T to open...

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