ryoko

Just to clarify, when you say: "If I bring up a DOS prompt, I can ping www.yahoo.com or any web sites." Did you mean to say you can or did you mean to say you can't ping those sites. It looks like a typo, but if not then it is a whole new ballgame. -RY

Most likely on a database server, your performance will not be over the wire. Stored procedures, or whatever they are called in the database you are using, will dramatically reduce the amount of data that must go over the wire. I hope you are using a switched network. That will improve performance without having to worry about load ballancing or routing. I know for my MS SQL server it just wants memory, as much as you can give it. Look at your paging to see if that will help. -RY

NT4 still is a great OS, but remember that you can't do what you want (legaly) with only 4 licenses. you will have to purchase extra CALs to use your machines. Just look at all the places running anchient Novell 3 and 4 servers. Just because something is old does not mean it is useless. If you have to invest in purchasing additional Client Access Licenses, then perhaps you should look into 2000 server. Get all your purchases out of the way and you will be set for some time.

Are they also using novell? I have seen problems like this fixed by changing the network access order.

I'd have to check it out some more, as I have not worked with win9x profiles in a long time. Thinking back on it, I might have had to set it up on each machine. I know with nt workstation, you can create a policy and place it in the netlogon folder to handle those systems. I'm not sure if it would work with win9x as they store hardware info in the user.dat file.

It is certainly possible, and many have used wireless for their networks in a similar method. If it only is temporary, you could go with a lower cost solution and just kep it ready in case it is needed. Test it out so that you know what to do if that cable snaps. Also plan for possibly having one or more of the existing switches damaged from whatever might break the cable. There used to be a company called Aironet, but I think they were bought out by Cisco. Give their website a try. -RY

Sorry Clutch but I must disagree, Perhaps a differance in opinion, but when I was restoring from a brick level backup the executive VP's files I was quite happy to have it. Also at month end, and accounting needed a mail from the past month again the brick level was quite usefull. I found an extra hour and a half for the backups at night when no one was using the system was quite acceptable.

I was just thinking about mail headers, and was wondering if anyone was familiar with stripping the header information off at the gateway, router, or firewall. Typically you will see the sending mail server, type of server, and its version. Now if an exploit exists for your particular mail server, and it is either unknown to you or you are lazy and haven't patched it, you are telling the world about the problem. For example it you ever see an exchange server with a version indicating it has not yet been patched at least to sp2, then you can use it as a mail relay. What I'm looking for is a way to strip off info like the server type and version. I'm not familiar with how to do it directly through exchange 5.5 Any thoughts on this? Please understand that my thoughts are for legitimate purposes, and not intended for mail spoofing. I hope those who read this use the info for security reasons, and not malicious intent. -RY

Also, I do not know if NAV for the servers has a separate exchange 'plug in' or if it is bundled, but you definately need to get an exchange antivirus program that will scan at either the MTA or IMC. I think 98% of the viruses sent to my company were caught by the exchange agent. Of cource that also assumes you do not have another scanner at the firewall. -RY

Ok, these only are opinions: 1 Buy some books and read every night. Start with a general networking one to get the concepts. 2 Although you can install all that stuff on one machine, I agree with your method of setting up mutiple servers. Keep SQL and exchange separate. Make sure you set up some type of fault tollerance. Mirroring would probably be your best bet. 3 BACKUPS!!!!! Make sure you set that up, and test atleast monthly. 4 I personally would get a good firewall that also performs NAT. There are many to choose from, however I like Symantec's (Formerly Axent Raptor) There is so much more to say, but it all is subjective and depends on your situation. You really need to get a networking essentials book, and see if your employer will pay for some classroom instruction. -RY

A policy set on the server will override a policy set on the PC. Place the policy on the PDC in c:\winnt\system32\repl\import\scripts That also is shared as \\servername\netlogon If you have any BDCs, and you do not have replication active, put the file on them in the same location. This only will work for win9x machines. For an NT workstation, create a policy using the winNT policy editor on the PDC. Make the setting changes and then save that file in the directory above, but name it NTconfig.pol or NTconfig.man -RY

Some Cable providers require a specific MAC address on the nic. If you connnected to the wrong card, you will be blocked by the cable company. Try enabling everything using the other nic on the WAN side, and for your LAN use the nic you have the cable plugged into. -RY

Actually it is easy to do with 2000 pro. The only limitation is number of connections. I set up in a call center 4 machines to access a printer on a 2000 pro workstation. There is one issue, and that is number of concurrant connections to the 2000 pro workstation. I think it is 15, but I'm not sure. Also a connection will stay active for a specific amount of time. Hence if user A prints, then User B prints ... eventually you will run out of connections. A connection will remain active for a default amount of time, which is about 15 minutes but configurable through the registry on the "serving" win2000 pro station. So long story short, keep the users connecting low enough and you can do it. -RY

Did you turn on "show all files?" User.dat is a hidden/readonly file in the windows directory.

I have seen hardware solutions to do this. Basically you dial into it, authenticate, then you can power up or power down your machines. They may have other features, but a basic hardware solution is what you are asking for. Some motherboards have things like wake on ring and wake on lan that can accomplish this, however I don't recommend it based on what you described. -RY

Does anyone know of some nice web resources that detail subnetting? I understand the basics, however there is a lot more that I would like to brush up on. Any advice would be appreciated. The hollidays have me tapped out for a bit, so I'm avoiding buying any books on the subject. Ry

Thats really a great site. Thanks clutch. -Ry

Did I miss something? Your nic will always broadcast traffic. Take a look at a hub or switch. You can see when a broadcast occurs as every light goes off almost at once. Grab an old clunker, install just the OS and the nic. Basically just enough to get on the cable network. You will see the same happen. It is normal behavior. Every packet has info in it for what computer to send the data to. Your PC must read that to see if data is meant for you. Also there is a ton of communications between your pc and the other network devices, like the cable modem. Don't worry about the blinking light.

Look for the lastdrive statement. It is from the novell client, however I think it is placed in the autoexec or config.sys . Clutch, The virus hoax you are refering to is sulfnbk.exe I know people who fell for it just hours after I sent a warning not to delete that file. Oh well, I tried. Happy new year everyone! -RY

I would guess a port scan. Look at how high the origin port number is. Typically a PC will increment the port number for nonstandard tcp/ip proceesses. For example, if I ran a particular network app 4 times, the first use may use an outgoing port of say 4010, the second 4011, the third 4012 ... get the idea. Now that is just the origin port on my PC. If I were using a generic service, like FTP, then the destination port would be 21 in all the above examples. There are many exceptions to this, as a lot of software is made to use a specific port even for outgoing transmittions. Well, I hope this helped a little. -RY

Hi, My NT4 servers are set to logoff a user if no activity exists for 30 minutes. I did this in the modem properties section. The problem is some users have apps that always send data, like auto checking for e-mail at regular and short intervals. Anyone know how to force a disconnect after X minutes regardless of activity? Thanks, RY

I installed win2000 on a system with nt4 to create a dual boot, and that worked fine. Now I need to install NT4 on a win2k pc to make a dual boot system. Since nt4 is older, will it still work or do I have to manually modify the win2000 boot.ini file? Win2000 is on the master HD, and NT4 will be installed onto a slave drive. Thanks in advance, -RY

Thank you for the ideas, I completely forgot about the sp4 disk, my disk is sp1. I think I will try out partition magic and their multi boot program. I'm just looking to get a quick install of nt4 up for a few programs that still are not win2k compliant. If I find something works out well, I'll let you all know. Thanks again, RY

I just had a thought, Remembering another server I worked on, it would take forever to access its resources from a worekstation by browsing through 'entire network' or 'network neighborhood'. If I mapped the same share to a drive letter, I did not have any issues. Could you try that out. I would be quite interested in what you find out, and if thats the case I'll go into what I found to cause that problem. Also could you please let us know if you are running win2k server or nt4. -RY

Also 80MB is rather low for a PDC. Ram is so cheap, perhaps you can invest in an upgrade. -RY