Troubleshooter Extraordinaire :)

A close friend of mine works as the IT manager for a construction company. He mentioned an interesting incident that happened at his office. He was facing problems with a few systems at his office. When users try to send emails, most of the time the mail would get stuck in outbox and not finish sending. It will finish only after he re-opened and sent it again or if he restarted outlook. He tried a lot of things to get it fixed like re-installing and even changing his internet router! Changing the router solved a lot of other problems but not this one! he did notice something odd. While trying to send , outlook would show Sending 1/800 or some huge number, but the number of items in Outbox was not more than 10. After a little bit of googling, he found a article which talked abt read receipts. it also talked abt a tool to check the number of pending read receipts, and cancel them manually. When he ran the tool on one system he found 600+ read receipts pending. After a boring few hours of...

A very interesting thing happened recently. A server running on centos , was setup as a base OS for 3 windows virtual machines - a domain controller, a database server, and an antivirus server. Last week the database server stopped responding. A restart didn't solve the problem. Even pinging didn't work. So the admin decided to restart the physical server itself. After the restart all the virtual machines stopped responding! A few more restarts , and checks on the network settings of the physical server, vm and there was no change. The admin disabled the physical network card and restarted the vms and servers. After re enabling the card suddenly the dc started responding and the physical server stopped responding! That's when the admin decided to take a break and re-assess the situation. He had one physical server, and 3 vms. One of the vms was responding on the LAN. The physical server and the other two vms were not responding to any requests. But he had done restarts bef...

A good friend of mine, Hussain, brought up an issue at one of his sites. The users were using up all the bandwidth, and he wanted an option where could control bandwidth and traffic. He basically listed a few requirements : 1. Bandwidth control 2. Content Filtering 3. Central user control Having worked with Microsoft technologies for sometime, I was tempted to suggest Forefront 2010. But he had mentioned that this was just an internet-sharing, non-domain enviroment. So I started looking elsewhere,and after a bit of googling, I came across Untangle (www.untangle.com). It's an open-source firewall/router with a few nice plugins that come for free, and some awesome plugins that you have to pay for. I downloaded the ISO (450Megs for the 32-bit version) , and burnt a CD. Once we setup a PC for use, I popped in the CD and started the install. Untangle comes in a few versions ,(1.Standalone OS - based on Debian, 2. Windows based.,etc). Since this PC was not going to be used for any...

4+ years of being a system admin takes its toll on the mind. It's always been in the back of my mind to put down atleast some of the experiences I've had, with regards to IT that is. Bahrain, being a small island in the Arabian Gulf, and my home for the most of my life, doesn't really provide a HUGE amount of opportunities to experience IT in it's entirety. You could pin it on the laid-back attitude of people in embracing new forms of technology, or just the lack of resources for support and encouragement. This is just my opinion btw. I'm definitely interested in hearing an argument on this subject. So as of now, I'm going to start penning down my IT experiences , and maybe I'll look back at it after a few years and smile! To infinity and beyond!!!....