Random Command Line Nugget

Ok, so on most Thursdays (ok, some), I spend my time studying for my 70-649 MCSE upgrade exam which will allow me to teach the 2008 cirriculum, if and when we ever get around to upgrading to it.  Today, I’m studying DHCP, and came across a great command-line time-saver.

When you want DHCP to configure the same IP address every time for a specific machine, you have to configure a Reservation, in which you tell the DHCP server the MAC address of the specific computer that you wnat to have the specific IP address.  I’ve always just either consulted an Excel spreadsheet, or physically gone to the machine myself, and pulled up the MAC address.  And then, physically typed it in.  I never thought of it as this huge ordeal really, but more of a minor pain.

Apparently, you can save a bunch of time with this little nugget:

getmac /s 192.168.1.104 | clip

That simple command harvests the MAC address from the node with whatever IP address you designate and then — get this — pipes it over to the clipboard.  At that point, you simply paste inside of Notepad, and then copy the MAC out.  No awkward typing and checking and rechecking.  This of course assumes that the target machine in question already has the IP address you want it to have.

It’s truly the little things that make you happy.

Powerpoint – 7/29/2009

Today we covered the next chapter in our book — chapter 5, covering advanced graphic and sound capabilities of Powerpoint.

Just as a reminder, you have scheduled for you next week the midterm exam, which will cover the first five chapters we’ve covered so far.  Make sure you’re ready!

Homework:

• Chapter Five: Matching
• Chapter Five: Fill-in-the-blank
• Chapter Five: Project 5C
• Chapter Five: Project 5D

Designing a NI – 7/28/2009

Today was quite simply the midterm exam, covering Chapters 1-4.  Come back next week and we’ll discuss designing our domains and forests correctly.

Homework:

• No Homework!

Planning a NI – 7/28/2009

We got into a topic today that we’ve talked about little, if at all.  It’s clustering.

Clustering isn’t necessariliy the easiest topic we’ve ever covered.  I did my best in class to describe it, and hopefully I’ll do ok here describing it as well.

When we say clustering, of course, we are referring to hooking up multiple servers to act as a single server on the network.  The reasons for this are two-fold: fault-tolerance and load balancing.  There are two main ways of setting up your cluster.  You can use either Server Clustering or you can use Network Load Balancing.  They seem the same on the surface, but they are in fact different.

Network Load Balancing is generally easier to set up than Server Clustering, but each server expects to have its own data set — there’s no central storage repository (like a NAS).  The good news is that extra storage hardware and/or software is not required.  Server Clustering on the other hand requires a centralized storage solution connected usually by Fibre Channel (although SCSI can be used if the nodes in the cluster are located in close geographic proximity.

Just a reminder, next week you will be having your midterm over Chapters 1-6, so make sure you’re ready!!!

Homework:

• Take Home Test #5 – download it here.
• Study for your midterm!  Chapters 1-6

Server+ – 7/27/2009

Server upgrades was on the agenda for today, and we talked about several pertinant issues dealing with upgrading our servers.  For that discussion, we discussed the preparation for upgrades along with upgrading the various components inside the server.

Rarely will you just decide one day that — hey, this server seems slow, it’s time to upgrade it!  Instead, you’ll run into a couple of upgrading scenarios: a) your servers are on a 3 year (or 4 year or 5 year or whatever) refresh rate, meaning every 3 years the equipment is replaced, so that at any given time there is no equipment over 3 years old.  This is a good policy, and I’d recommend it where budgets allow — this ensures that you always have the latest technology and lessens (although certainly doesn’t entirely remove) the risk of having hardware go bad.  The other scenario (b) is that servers are allowed to work until they become too slow.  Unfortunately this oftentimes is decided by some bean-counters’ intuition, but hopefully you’ll be able to perform some actual benchmarking to prove this.  A good one to look at on the Windows Server systems is good old Performance Monitor.

As a reminder, your mid-term is next week, and it will be over the five chapters we’ve covered so far (there won’t be a quiz on Chapter 5, don’t you think a mid-term is bad enough?  Jeez.)

Homework:

• Chapter 5 Review Questions
• Study for your Midterm (Chapters 1 -5)

Preparation is one of this most important things you can do re: upgrades — nothing is more frustrating than having an entire server torn down only to find out that used non-returnable part you bought on ebay was the wrong part and you have to put the server back together, go hat in hand and explain your mistake and ask for more money.  Never fun.  Some things to watch out for: RAM type and speed, processor type and slot type requirement, expansion slots, software

Pro/Server – 7/27/2009

Today we finished up the XP Pro book (can you even believe it?), by covering the last three chapters — 14, 15 and 16.

Chapter 14 was over the security settings inside of Windows XP.  It’s important to know that there are security settings that are applied to the domain, and filter down onto our domain-joined machine (assuming we’re working in a corporate environment).  There are also security settings that can just be configured on the local machine.  We’ll learn in NSA 263 that security settings (or any policy settings in general) that are applied to the local machine will get overriden by any policy applied to a site, domain or organizational unit (OU) that might exist in the server infrastructure.

ANYWAY.

We talked about those security settings that are applied locally.  We access these settings by opening the Local Security Setting applet in Control Panel.  Once open, we have dozens and dozens of possible settings that we can configure, finely tuning our Windows XP machine.

Now, this is all well and good, but I ask you to return to the same scenario I keep bringing you to: imagine that you have a couple hundred machiens to configure instead of just one.  And let’s say you had 50 changes to the local policy you had to make on each machine.  All of a sudden, the amount of administrative time you’ll be spending configuring these machines goes up and the amount of time you’ll spend on the golf course goes down.  Not good.  Luckily for us, we have security templates which allow us to create presets to flash-configure our computers.

Windows comes with a few of these templates.  It’ll be important to know (roughly) what each of these templates do and why they exist.  Most are obvious, although some (setupsec) aren’t necessarily clear.

The next chapter we covered dealt with a topic we’ve already covered somewhat, and will continue to cover over the next several classes — it’s that important: backup.  Arguably the most important piece of your network is it’s data, and having your data backed up is crucial in the event of your hard drive crashing.  There are three basic backup vehicles included with Windows XP:

1. NTBACKUP
2. Volume Shadow Copy
3. Automated System Recovery (ASR)

NTBACKUP is the utility we use to copy our data.  We launch it by typing in NTBACKUP into the run command under the Start button and have the option of running Normal, Copy, Daily, Incremental or Differential-style backups.  Since we hammer in the differences in other classes, I’m not going to do that here.

Volume SHadow Copy was a feature new to Windows XP.  It’s interesting, becuase it addresses a couple of problems that traditional backup scenarios presented us with: users restoring their own data and data that was currently in use not getting backed up.  Volume Shadow Copy solves both of those problems.  When enabled, users are able to restore one of a few “old” versions of a file they may have deleted or otherwise corrupted.  Secondly, if data was being used while the backup utility was being run (or maybe it was simply left open by a user — how annoying is that?), backup programs would simply skip the unavailable file.  Now, the backup utility makes what’s called a “best effort” backup by backing up the second-to-most-recent file.  It’s not a 100% fix, but it’s definitely better than skipping the file altogether.

Last but not least, we covered Chapter 16 — dealing with Performance Management with Windows XP.  The main tool we looked at today was Performance Monitor, which allowed us to create performance logs, configure alerts and watch just about any aspect of our computers performance in real time — by histograph or simply by hard numbers.  It’s actually a cool tool for the price (free!)

And that does it.  I do want to remind you that next week, we have a midterm exam scheduled, which will effectively be a “final” exam, over the sixteen chapters we’ve covered so.  Make sure that any concepts which are confusing to y0u get cleared up in your mind before next week!

Homework:

• Take Home Exam #5 – download it here.
• Study for the midterm (chapters 1-16) — it’s next week!!!

Powerpoint – 7/22/2009

Today we went over chapter four, which dealt with adding more advanced things to our slides, like tables, etc.

Homework:

• Chapter 4: Matching
• Chapter 4: Fill-in-the-blank
• Chapter 4: Project 4C
• Chapter 4: Project 4D

Designing a NI – 7/21/2009

Today we took the occaision to go over again the ideas of subnetting and supernetting, this time from the angle of designing a network.  The meat of the matter is stuff we have covered in the past, but I can’t emphasize enough the importance of mastering this skill, which is why I don’t just gloss over this.

Also, just as a reminder, you guys have a midterm exam (yes, it’s that time ALREADY!) next week over the first four chapters of the book.  It is actually a little early to be having a midterm, but I didn’t want to give you two midterms to study for the same week (you’ll be having your NSA285 midterm in two weeks).

Homework:

• Study for your midterm!
• Take Home Test Four – download it here.

Planning a NI – 7/21/2009

Today’s topic was Chapter 5 — which covered the all-important IT requirement of hooking up the organization with Internet access.  In today’s world, the Internet is more than simply a nice convenience, it’s expected in order to our jobs.  So, as a good IT professional, you’ll need to know how to provide your users with Internet access without installing phone lines and AOL accounts for each of them (a GREAT way to get fired).

We first looked at what device separates individual networks from one another, and that device is a router (the two networks we want to separate are our own internal networks and the ginormous network we call the Internet).  Our organizations could purchase a separate hardware router from a company such as Cisco, or we could simply set up a Windows Server to act as a router using RRAS.  (I personally wouldn’t recommend it, but it can be done fairly easily).

Now, one thing about our routers is they have to be able to interface with both networks.  The networks on our private side (huh huh) probably use the standard Ethernet connectors (RJ-45), but the interfaces for the public side could be ISDN, demand-dial (I hope not!), ISDN, DS1, DS3, etc.  Our router needs to be able to handle that, and most routers either come with connectors for those interfaces or have expansion cards available to provide that.  These interfaces connect with companies out there who specialize in getting other companies or entities on the internet.  We call these special companies Internet Service Providers, or ISPs.  Very often, the ISP will do the connections for us.  If, for example, you lease a T1 line, you would call your local TelCo and order the service.  They would install all the lines from their poles to your building.  You would hook it up to your router and configure your router.  Everything after the router into the public Internet would be the TelCo’s responsibility.  Everything ont he private side of the router would be your responsibility.

Most of the time, ISPs charge big companies for the amount of bandwidth they use — it’s not an “unlimited” type of thing we’re used to as consumers.  So, it’s very important that we choose the appropriate amount of bandwidth for our use and budget.  It’s sometimes a difficult balance game, if you don’t purchase enough bandwidth, you pay prohibitively expensive rates for each MB you go over, but if you buy too much, you’ve just wasted money too.  We went over some guidelines that should help you determine how much bandwidth you use.

On a side-note, it’s this very thing that often triggers IT-lockdown, when a company’s IT department will go in and block an array of websites for seemingly no reason.  It’s not that the IT department is mean (although they may very well be), but it’s more likely they’re just trying to keep bandwidth under control.  For example, viewing a streaming video using YouTube can be extremely taxing on bandwidth allocations, so many administrators will block it at the firewall, router or even ISP level.

The last topic we talked about was Microsoft’s Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA).  This is Microsoft’s integrated firewall and proxy server and can enforce an authentication scheme for Internet access, if so desired.  More information about the ISA server (currently up to version 2006) can be found here.

Homework:

• Take Home Test Four – download it here.

Server+ – 7/20/2009

Tonight’s class was all about power and rack installation.  Without either, managing the server hardware would be a pain in the butt.  Kinda like running into this guy in a dark alley:

Anyway, we first discussed the different types of power supplies.  Specifically, we talked about these five:

• Standby/Offline – Power goes first to a transformer, and then to the UPS battery.  Not for server use (home, maybe)
• Line Interactive – Like standby, but uses voltage regulators to keep spikes from hitting the hardware.  Used in smaller servers.
• Online/Double Conversion – Cleans the power source, and is used for mission critical servers.
• Software – connects to serial or USB port and can do a bunch of predetermined activities if the battery is kicked on (like backup, etc.)
• Failover – batteries in UPS can fail, so have multiple ones in order that you can swap out the bad ones.

Afterwards we went over the server rack. Therer are different types of racks — open racks and closed racks, each offering their own benefits in terms of cost-effectiveness and security (respectively) but they all conform (or should anyway) to a set of standards that allows us to install components from different manufacturers in them.  Server racks base their sizes on the “U” system, where a U=1.75″.  We have various sizes of server racks out there, ranging from 22U up to a 42U.

As a reminder, we will be having a midterm exam on August 3 (two weeks from now), which will include chapters 1-5 (we’ll talk about chapter five next week, July 27.  We’ve been doing a good job of staying on course, so your syllabus is still spot-on.

Homework:

• Chapter Four Review Questions