Create Your Own Network Assessment Appliance: Additional Tools

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 2010: Poor Man’s Monitoring

I quietly released a new script into the wild the other day, Troubleshoot-MailboxServer.ps1. This script is meant for monitoring, fixing, and reporting on Exchange 2010 database servers. It pretty much just wraps around and reports on troubleshooting scripts found in %ExchangeInstallPath%Scripts. I also set it so you can have an email sent including warning/error color coded report upon completion.