Introduction

I previously did a write up on a personal virtual machine I like to keep at hand for performing network analysis and discovery. I’ve since added a few tools to the VM and documented how they were installed so I figured I’d share on how it was done. Even if you don’t setup everything in this post it may be worthwhile to glance through it for some network engineering tools which are free to setup and use but not highly publicized. Anyone who cares to read this post has likely heard of Solarwinds but I highly doubt you have heard of all the tools in this list (let alone how to set them up). Regardless, I’ll start with a tool anyone worth their salt has heard of though, Cacti…

Exchange – The State Of External Client Access

2012-11-22 12 min read Active Directory Active Directory Exchange Exchange 2010 IIS Lync Microsoft Networking System Administration Unified Access Gateway Zachary Loeber

Introduction

Most within the messaging and collaboration industry are hyped up about the next wave of Microsoft collaboration and messaging products which are soon to be released. Among these products is Exchange 2013 RTM. This type of release typically precedes yet another wave of architecture upgrades across the corporate landscape. Some of these (beta testers) will be will undoubtedly upgrade to Exchange 2013.

Other corporations will start to feel the burn to upgrade as well. These will be organizations which realize that their Exchange 2003/2007 infrastructure is nearing a decade old existence and cannot meet the demands of their ever growing mobile workforce. Realizing they are behind the curve, they may feel hastened to upgrade as well, possibly just to Exchange 2010. Regardless the reason in choosing to upgrade their messaging infrastructure, there are critical design decisions which need to be made in how clients access this infrastructure both internally and externally. This article focuses solely on the external access aspect of the infrastructure.

Create Your Own Network Assessment Appliance

2012-04-09 10 min read Active Directory Active Directory Linux Microsoft Networking Security System Administration Virtualization VMware Zachary Loeber

In this write-up I setup several network assessment tools which can be used in the discovery process of a new environment. This can be useful for a newly hired sysadmin or a consultant in rapidly gathering information to assess the health and/or state of a network. Introduction I often find myself assessing a foreign network infrastructure for performance or other issues. Depending on the size of the environment, digesting everything can be daunting without the help of some third party tools. Continue reading

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