technology, networking and IP telephony
Posts tagged TROUBLESHOOTING
Is troubleshooting a dwindling skillset?
3December 9, 2010
As an Information Technology professional I’ve noticed a growing trend lately around a specific skillset, troubleshooting. I’m not just talking about vendors and Customer Support personnel but all professionals working in the Information Technology field. I’ve seen system administrators that just throw up their hands if setup.exe doesn’t finish completely. Likewise I’ve seen network engineers throw up their hands if the configuration guide their following doesn’t match up 100% with the CLI output.
It might be that I’m being too critical… I’ll let you guys tell me if you think so.
I’ve also personally noticed an increased level of reliance on support and maintenance contracts. I personally don’t call a vendor until I’ve thoroughly researched the topic and have educated myself if necessary. Now obviously in a network down or similar critical situation that basic rule goes out the window, but I would hope that myself or the person responsible would have the basic knowledge and training to support the product or system.
Looking at the poll I’ve ran in the past it would seem that there are a large number of folks agreeing with me.
[poll id="11"]
Cheers!
Update: Here’s a great video from YouTube – Thank Carl!
Remote Packet Capture with WireShark and WinPCAP
2September 5, 2010
by Michael McNamara in NetworkMgmt
I’m just continually impressed with the quality of so many open source products available today. One such product that should be extremely high on any network engineer’s list is WireShark. WireShark has become the de-facto standard for packet capture software and is almost unrivaled in features and functionality.
Last week I had the task of diagnosing some very intermittent desktop/application performance issues at a remote site. I had installed WireShark locally on a few desktops but I wanted the ability to remotely monitor a few specific desktops without obstructing the users workflow to get a baseline for later comparison. I was excited to learn that WireShark and WinPCAP had (experimental) remote packet capture functionality built into each product. I followed the instructions on the WireShark website by installing WinPCAP v4.1.2 on the remote machine and then starting the “Remote Packet Capture Protocol v.0 (experimental)” service. With that done I then proceeded to 
launch WireShark on my local desktop and configure the remote packet capture settings. From within WireShark I chose Options -> Capture, changed the Interface from Local to Remote. Then enter the IP address of the remote machine along with the TCP port (the default TCP port is 2002). I initially tried to use “Null authentication” but was unsuccessful. I eventually ended up choosing “Password authentication” and used the local Administrator account and password of the remote desktop that had WinPCAP installed on it. If the remote desktop had multiple interfaces I could have selected which interface I wanted to perform the remote packet capture on. In this case the desktop in question only had an integrated Intel(R) 82567LM-3 network adapter. I clicked ‘Start’ and to my sheer amazement the packet trace was off and running collecting packets from the remote desktop. There will still be the occasional need to place the Dolch (portable sniffer) onsite when the situation demands it but this is a great tool to have available.
Cheers!
Updated: Sunday September 5, 2010
The images appear to be missing above because the URL paths are wrong, not sure how WordPress messed up that. I don’t have time right now to fix it but I will fix it a little later.
