Create Your Own Network Assessment Appliance

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. I’ve been using a custom Linux VM on my workstation that has all kinds of tools specifically for gathering information about a network’s performance, layout, and statistics. I’ve decided to retool the VM I currently use and take better notes on what I install so others may do the same if they so desire.

Sysadmin Task: Migrate DNS

I’ve migrated DNS servers more than a few times and find that I’m doing the same tasks or using the same custom scripts over and over again. Here is my quick and dirty task list with some powershell scripts you too might find of use. As there are a hundred ways to skin this cat I don’t claim my methods to be the best but they sure are fast and far easier than manually changing a dns address on hundreds of servers, workstations, and network devices.

Linux: Headless Ubuntu Torrent Home Server

So it got to that time of the year where I feel the itch to upgrade my aging home server. I assessed the situation and realized that, for what it does, my current server does not need any kind of hardware upgrade. So I just decided to rebuild it with Ubuntu 11.04 64 bit and change up the server software a bit to be more accessible to my wife as well as to be a bit more modern (torrentflux and derivatives have been dead for a while now).

Big-IP: Custom IIS SOAP Monitor

In working on a production issue with my company’s flagship SaaS product I worked with some of the brilliant F5 engineers to isolate one web server in the load balanced pool which was intermittently failing. The F5 engineer recommended a health monitor that does more than just poll for a static page. He suggested we implement some kind of soap call to make the application pool do some work and return a result (I guess in case the IIS application pool is misbehaving but not down). So I worked with one of our developers to do just that but ran into some caveats which required yet another custom health monitor.

Big-IP: Sharepoint 2010 Monitor

While specing out a Sharepoint 2007 to 2010 migration I discovered that the default monitor created by the application template on our big-ip LTM load balancers does not work. In seeking a solution I ran across this gentleman’s blog with a custom external monitor but found that it didn’t really work. The solution to make it work was simple (as I explained on his blog in a comment). I went ahead and extended it to be more environment generic.