One of the tools that every windows administrator should learn to us is TCPView. This tool is one of the many Sysinternals programs. It shows all of the TCP and UDP endpoints on your system along with their current state. One of the main things this program has helped me with is identifying what IP addresses servers are talking to when nobody else can give you that information. With knowing what endpoints you are talking to will help identify other network devices. In turn this will help you troubleshoot the system quicker and hopefully make you look like a hero. Please visit the Sysinternals web site for more information.
Latest Version – v2.53
Sysinternals Web Site
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897437.aspx
One of the latest issues I ran accross was recieving an error while copying large files on Windows Server 2003. I was trying to migrate a server that had several large files that were greater then 75 GB. When I performed the file copy on the first large file I would recieve an error saying insuficent memory to perform the operation. At the time I was using a strait forward windows copy. I thought that might be causing the issue so I also tried to copy the file using robocopy and recieved the same error. The kicker was that the error would happen at the 80% mark. So it was very time consuming to recreate the error. In troubleshooting the error I ran accross KB article 312362 that describe system paged pool memory. After backing up the registry I performed the resolution step by step and set the PoolUsageMaximum to 60. After rebooting the server I was in buisness and could copy files larger then 75 GB.
On the VMTN blog there is a post outlining the details of the VI toolkit contest. The VI toolkit will give VMWare administrators additional scripting control over their environment. The contest has a first place prize of a trip to VMWorld 2008 in Vegas. The deadline for the contest is August 30. So there is plenty of time to enter. Stop by and check out the additional details at the VMTN Blog.
http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/07/vi-toolkit-the.html
