Daily Cup of Tech

Even though Windows is extremely GUI friendly, I find that if you really want to do some fine tune high end geeky things on your Windows computer, you pretty much need to do it from a command line.

For those of you who know the power of the command line, you also know that it is really useful to be able to run some of these command line tools remotely. There are a number of different ways to do this. I would like to share with you a couple of my favorites.

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When you have a significant system failure like we did, things have a tendency to get a bit crazy rather quickly. There are several reasons for this, some of which include:

• You are under a lot of pressure to get things done as quickly as possible
• People outside of the IT department may have little or nothing to do
• Many tasks have only one person in the company with the skills to perform the tasks at hand
• Everyone’s individual need, in their opinion, is the most important task that needs to be completed first

Because this is such a stressful time, it is important to keep a clear head and manage the situation as quickly as possible. I have put together a few key action items that you can do when this happens to you so that you can keep things on track.

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In the past, I have run into all kinds of problems with using auto-configuration on network devices. I have been a stickler when it comes to hard coding speed and duplex settings on pretty much anything that is plugged in to my network simply because I have run into so many problems with different hardware manufacturers implementing the auto-configuration in different ways.

Plus, there are several people out there who misunderstand how speed and duplex matching works (of which I was one). Speed and duplex matching means that the speed (10/100/1000/10000 Mbps) and the duplex (half or full duplex) on both ends of the patch cable. Where many people go awry is in the implementation of auto-configuration.

I (wrongly) believed that if I did not know what the speed and duplex was at the other end of the patch cable, all I needed to do was set my system to auto-configure and it would detect what the speed and duplex on the other end was and then set my system accordingly.

Unfortunately, what actually ended up happening was the system got confused and ended up running at a very slow speed and created a large number of collisions on the network. Nothing but trouble.

So, I figured that I would avoid the whole problem by hard coding everything and being certain.

Well, this whole plan went up in smoke when I went to my new replacement server and went to manually set the network adapters to 1000/full. There was no option for this! I had never needed to do this in the past because our old switches only went to 100/full. What is going on?

The IEEE organization decided that the 1000BASE-T standard would require auto-negotiation for all of its connections. This is why it is not available for the NIC card. So I can now forget about all of those speed/duplex mismatches.

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In my mind, redundancy is one of those “Well, duh!” ideas that you just do. How great is it to have two of something when one breaks?

But, the problem with redundancy is that it can be very expensive, especially when you are talking about hardware. Redundant drives, redundant power supplies, redundant network connections…it all adds up.

I have a very interesting conversation with our company’s CEO immediately after we lost our systems. He asked me how much a new server costs. I know most of you right now are rolling your eyes because this can be the equivalent of asking how long is a piece of string. But, to avoid the obvious “it all depends” conversation I said, “About $16,000″. He took one look at me and said, “We’ve lost more than that in productivity today alone! We need to look at having a redundant system in place.”

So, this is what I came up with.

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Imagine my surprise when I went to add my new Windows 2003 server to the domain as a domain controller only to be told that the version of Active Directory that I was running in the network was the wrong type and that Active Directory needed to be upgraded to support Windows 2003.

Now, those of you who are Active Directory savvy are probably thinking to yourself right about now, “I’ll bet he has a Windows 2000 version of the Active Directory running in his environment and he needs to run ADprep to get it upgraded.”

And you would be correct except for one thing. I added two Windows 2003 servers as domain controllers to the network a couple of years ago and I upgraded Active Directory at that time! There should be no need to upgrade Active Directory again!

And believe it or not, things started to get ever stranger after that!

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