Curtis LaMasters - Page 2 of 15

16Jan 2017 by Curtis No Comments

Quick Fix: Exchange 2010 Back Pressure workaround

We are now in the year 2017 and any exchange admin will know this by the back of their hand but as little as I touch Exchange now (either because it's rock solid or we've moved to Office 365), I always have to Google it. So this is just a reminder for me in the future. A customer had a backup issue over the past weekend due to an unfortunate set of circumstances. As a result, their D: was getting full. They had 15 Gb left of 600 Gb total but the probably well known feature of Exchange called Backpressure prevents your hard drives from filling up due to email transport and their mail stopped flowing. I needed to get their email working ASAP while a backup completed in the background. An…

10Jan 2017 by Curtis 2 Comments

2017 Goals

blog, Uncategorized

You are under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago. This quote hit a cord with me late in the year. I knew something had to change. Politics, Facebook, job, hobbies, kids, wife, family, were all fighting each other for a time slot. My sleep schedule oddly wasn't very picky and for quite some time my wife considered me to be on the the sleepless elite but from around November to now, I'm just tired. My body needs to rest and reset. Like most people, I suppose, I set some goals for myself this year. Some of them I had and failed in 2016 but want to dedicate some time to them nonetheless. Here they are (in no particular order): Read 1 book a month…

08Oct 2016 by Curtis No Comments

Quickly Change Network Interface IP’s

Microsoft, Windows

I change my network card IP's all the time to connect directly to hardware for initial configuration. I've been manually doing this for 15 years now. I finally sat down and learned netsh, put it into stupidly simple batch files and now have a folder on my desktop with all the common IP ranges. Here's an exerpt of the script to change the interface from it's current state to 192.168.10.22. @echo off netsh interface ip set address "Ethernet" static 192.168.10.22 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.1 1 goto end :end end of script To set the interface back to DHCP use this one. @echo off netsh interface ip set address "Ethernet" dhcp netsh interface ip set dns "Ethernet" dhcp goto end :end end of script Note "Ethernet" in this case is the name of…

04Apr 2016 by Curtis No Comments

Troubleshooting Network Performance Issues

Cisco, Microsoft, Uncategorized, Windows

This won't be a tutorial, however, the purpose of this post is to highlight some common TCP/IP issues that degrade network performance. Network Congestion - If your firewall/router graphs your network usage, use that or obtain your current throughput (up/down) to your ISP. Use the current usage and then run a few speed tests in order to determine if your hardware is capable of hitting your maximum download/upload speeds you currently pay for. So if you have a 100 meg fiber circuit and your firewall is showing you are currently using about 60 megs at any given time, you should be able to get somewhere close to 40 megs on a download test from speedtest.net. If not, either your provider is not giving you the bandwidth you are paying for…

18Mar 2016 by Curtis No Comments

Faster XenServer VM Exports

Uncategorized

I am migrating a few XenServer VM's between AMD and Intel pools for a customer and stumbled across a faster way to do the export than through XenCenter. From the Windows host where XenCenter is installed, run the following command: C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\XenCenter\xe.exe -s x.x.x.x -u root -pw xxx vm-export vm=SERVERNAME filename=C:\users\user\folder\SERVERNAME.xva --nossl The trick here is that part of the slowness of the export is SSL encoding/decoding happening within XenCenter. By using the --nossl option, you are bypassing that abstraction? application layer. Also making it less secure but let's not dwell on the facts.