I have been working lately on trying to round out my skill set again instead of being primarily focused just on the operating system.  One of the areas that I have started to look at again is Internet Information Server 7.  One of the best sites out there for free training material is http://learn.iis.net.   The site has a great overview that gets you up to speed on what IIS is capable of doing.  The site also has a download section, community section, forums section, and a blogs section.  The people that provide content are experts with IIS 7.  The videos that I have watched so far are spot on.  Check out the links below to learn more about the site.

Overview of The site –  learn.iis.net
http://www.iis.net/overview

 Download Section –  learn.iis.net
 http://www.iis.net/download

Forums Section – learn.iis.net
http://forums.iis.net/

Sysinternals continue to be a great set of tools.  It seems like I can learn something new about the suite on a daily basis.  I really wish I had additional time to learn all of the tools better.  Mark Russinovich has created another great post over on his blog.  He steps through how he solved a case involving his Mom’s computer.  She was trying to install Security Essentials and was getting a random error that Mark fixes.  Check out the blog post to hear more about it.

Marks Blog - The Case of My Mom’s Broken Microsoft Security Essentials Installation
http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2012/01/05/3473797.aspx

Mark’s Latest Case Of The Unexplained From TechEd
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/WCL304

IT professionals have allot of resources to choose from to get there information.  One of the better sites that I like to check out is talkingaboutwindows.com.  The great part about the site is that it covers a wide range of topics that we deal with on a daily basis.  I also enjoy hearing from IT pros who are my peers to see how they are solving real world business problems.  I strongly encourage you to head on over to talkingaboutwindows.com.  I guarantee that you will learn something new.

Talking About Windows
http://talkingaboutwindows.com/

The latest version of the Case Of The Unexplained by Mark Russinovich has been released on the Microsoft Tech Ed website.  The case of the unexplained allows you to see how Mark walks through issues step by step to resolve them.   Mark uses Microsoft Debugging Tools along with his own tools from Sysinternals.  This sessions continues to be one of the most popular sessions at Tech Ed.

Case Of The Unexplained 2010
http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/WCL315

Windows 7 adds a great new security feature called UAC.  There are certain situations where you have to disable UAC which you can do by following the below steps.

1. Open control panel by going to the start menu -> Control Panel

2. From the control panel select User Accounts And Family Safety

3. Select User Accounts

4.  Select Change User Account Control Settings

5. Move slider bar to the bottom so it is at never notify.  Then click OK.

When I run across a site that makes my life easier I try to share it with everyone else.  The site gpoguy.com is a great site if you need help figuring out windows group policy.  The part of the site that stand out the most for me is the free training videos.  The videos cover everything from the basic introduction all the way up to doing things at a forest level.  There is also a list of free tools for windows group policy that can be very useful.  Bookmark this site as I am sure you will fine a need for it during your IT career.

Main Site
http://www.gpoguy.com/

GPOGUY Video Training
http://www.gpoguy.com/Group-Policy-Video-Training.aspx

Performance Monitor is an essential tool in a server administrators life.  This tool allows us to see deep down into the operating system to see what is actually going on.  I am going to cover the performance counters I use the most over the next few weeks.  This by far does not mean that these are the only counters you should look at.  These are just the ones I have found to be very important.

One of the biggest areas we can look at is processor utilization to figure out how our server is performing.  Below are the three main counters that we will be looking at today.  The definitions are taken strait out of performance monitor.

• %Processor Time – The percentage of elapsed time that the processor spends to execute a non-Idle thread. It is calculated by measuring the percentage of time that the processor spends executing the idle thread and then subtracting that value from 100%. (Each processor has an idle thread that consumes cycles when no other threads are ready to run). This counter is the primary indicator of processor activity, and displays the average percentage of busy time observed during the sample interval. It should be noted that the accounting calculation of whether the processor is idle is performed at an internal sampling interval of the system clock (10ms). On todays fast processors, % Processor Time can therefore underestimate the processor utilization as the processor may be spending a lot of time servicing threads between the system clock sampling interval. Workload based timer applications are one example  of applications  which are more likely to be measured inaccurately as timers are signaled just after the sample is taken.
• %User Time – The percentage of elapsed time the processor spends in the user mode. User mode is a restricted processing mode designed for applications, environment subsystems, and integral subsystems.  The alternative, privileged mode, is designed for operating system components and allows direct access to hardware and all memory.  The operating system switches application threads to privileged mode to access operating system services. This counter displays the average busy time as a percentage of the sample time.
• %Privileged Time – The percentage of elapsed time that the process threads spent executing code in privileged mode.  When a Windows system service in called, the service will often run in privileged mode to gain access to system-private data. Such data is protected from access by threads executing in user mode. Calls to the system can be explicit or implicit, such as page faults or interrupts. Unlike some early operating systems, Windows uses process boundaries for subsystem protection in addition to the traditional protection of user and privileged modes. Some work done by Windows on behalf of the application might appear in other subsystem processes in addition to the privileged time in the process.

Now that you have the Microsoft definition of these counters lets take a quick look at whats important.  The first thing you want to look at is %Processor Time for all instances.  If this counter stays below sixty percent the majority of the time the system is pretty healthy.  If this counter is consistently between sixty and ninety percent you are going to want to look at the server closer.  When this counter consistently stays above ninety percent you should be alarmed and look into what is consuming most of the CPU.

This is where the other two counters come into play.  If most of the processor is being consumed in %User Time then you know it is an application like SQL or IIS that are consuming most of the resources.  If the most of the process is being consumed by %Privileged Time then you know that your bottleneck is some where else like disk IO, memory, or network.  When you are having a %Privileged Time issues it takes a little bit more investigation work to look at all the OS subsystems.

Hopefully you now know what some of the basic processor counters you should be looking at and why.  In the next part of the series we will be looking at network interface counters.

If you are looking for some great videos on how to repair laptops you don’t have to look any farther.  The guys over at podnutz have created a great set of videos on how to repair laptops.  After reading through the description and watching a couple of the samples from the site I was really impressed.  Then came the next biggest shock, the price.  If you have been around IT you know that excellent training does not come at a cheap price.  So I was really shocked to see the price at only $54.95.  You also have instant access to the videos and can download them right away.  So please stop by and check them out.  Stop back and let me know what you think!

Podnutz Laptop Repair Videos
http://www.laptoprepairvideos.com

I had a great video forwarded onto me by another IT Pro.  Microsoft has a presentation by Mark Russinovich on Windows Security Boundaries.  This is a great resource to learn how Microsoft approaches security boundaries in their operating systems.  Some of the security boundaries that are covered include physical machines, system virtual machines, and user sessions.  Mark also goes in to processes, patch guard, and kernel-mode signing.  As always Mark does a great job of breaking down security using some of his System Internals Tools.  The presentation is about an hour and fifteen minutes long.  Personally I think it is well worth your time if you want understand operating system security better.

Windows Security Boundaries On Tech Net
http://www.microsoft.com/emea/spotlight/sessionh.aspx?videoid=993

One of the things I think everybody struggles with is learning how to use a program.  Microsoft has great office products like excel, word, power point, and onenote.  The thing is that as end users we usually are not using them to their fullest capacity.  Personally I find that it is hard to remember shortcuts or how to complete certain tasks.  I usually end up having to spend time looking them up on Google to figure out how to do that task again.  This is where having a nice cheat sheet would come in handy.  The people over at custom guide have spent the time to create amazing office cheat sheets that help you with the wide range of office products.  So I strongly encourage you to stop by and check them out.  I guarantee  having these close at hand will save you time.  You just might also learn a few tricks to make that document look just a little bit better.

Custom Guide Quick Reference Guides
http://www.customguide.com/quick_references.htm