Articles

A quick guide to troubleshooting telephone faults with a break down of the systematic approach required as well as cable testing and telephone testing equipment that would prove useful.

An introduction to ethernet thermometers giving an overview of their uses as well as their advantages and disadvantages.

The creation of "server farms" comprising hundreds of individual file servers has become quite commonplace in the new e-commerce economy, while other businesses spawn farms by moving equipment previously in closets or under desktops into a centralized data center environment. However, many of these farms are hastily planned and implemented as the needed equipment must be quickly installed on a rush schedule. The typical result is a somewhat haphazard layout on the raised floor that can have disastrous consequences due to environment temperature disparities. Unfortunatley, this lack of floor-layout planning is not apparent until after serious reliability problems have already occurred.

CAT5, short for Category 5, is a twisted pair cable standard developed by the TIA & EIA.

CAT6, short for Category 6, is a twisted pair cable standard developed by the TIA & EIA.

Testing new cabling is an important consideration. During the installation process cables can become damaged or kinked, insulation can be broken, some connections may be poorly crimped, and so on. Electrical interference and other environmental factors may affect network performance. You will probably need to produce a report for your customer validating that everything conforms to the required standards.

As soon as a device on your network sends a packet to another device, it is the network manager’s job to ensure the packet arrives at the destination(s) in a timely manner.

Network Managers need to be alerted to problems on the network at all times. But how to achieve this? Sending emails is the most common method used, but what if the user isn’t at their machine, or it’s not switched on? In certain circumstances alarm bells or lights work well. Third party monitoring companies are excellent, give 24/7 coverage but are very expensive. Is there an alternative, cheap, reliable method of receiving alerts?

Big Brother is a network monitor that uses a client-server architecture combined with methods which both push and pull data to monitor System and Network-delivered services for availability in real time. It gathers information from agents on your system and performs tests against the system being monitored. This data is then passed upstream to a central location where your current network status is displayed on a color-coded web page in near-real time, red for failure, green for fine. When problems are detected, you can be notified by e-mail, pager, or text messaging.

Whether working in health, pharmaceuticals, financial or any other organisation, facilities managers are increasingly required to have strategies in place for business continuity. And it’s no surprise that IT and telecommunications failure, as the blood flow and nerves of a business, remain the top cause of disruption to business continuity, according to a survey of UK business managers by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI).

An introduction to material emissivity and how it affects measurement using an infrared thermometer or radiation thermometer.

The Intellipool Network Monitor (INM) is an easy to use and feature rich web based network monitor that enables you to monitor, report, and alert errors on your servers, routers and workstations 24/7.

IPSentry is an Internet tool, first developed in 1996 that will continually monitor all your Internet and intranet TCP/IP network servers 24/7, ensuring your email servers, Web sites, FTP servers, news servers, and any other TCP/IP-based services are active and responding.

Nagios is a free, open-source web-based network monitor developed by Ethan Galstead. Nagios is designed to run on Linux, but can be also be used on Unix variants. Nagios monitors the status of host systems and network services and notifies the user of problems.

An investigation into the broad types of network security attacks that network managers need to be aware of.

Network Cable Testing, the physical and electrical testing of Network cabling, is a very specialist area. As a Network Manager you have to deal with cable faults, broken wires, incompatibilities and a host of other cable related issues. What can you do? What do you need to test for?

A roundup of the network manager’s options for the implementation of alarming & alerting solutions for their monitoring applications.

Outlines the properties of on demand tools and why they are important.

A roundup of the types of network security attacks that any network manager faces out in the wild. It’s a jungle out there, and you need to be mindful of the types of threats you are likely to face.

A simple strategy for troubleshooting common network problems.

Vulnerability scanners are useful tools for identifying potential vulnerabilities and security breaches and suggesting tips on how to correct any problems found. Retina is an award winning network scanner developed by California based Eye Digital Security that scans all types of operating systems, hosts, servers, routers and firewalls and reports on more than 1500 vulnerabilities. Retina, like Nessus, has NMap, the open source vulnerability and network discovery tool, at its core.

A paper discussing software value and who reaps the benefit of that value.

Ticket Management software allows you to log problems, allocate them to engineers and track the progress. Ticket Management tools are essential for the smooth running of all but the smallest networks. Which is the best Ticket Management solution for you?

An exploration of the security weaknesses of the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP).

The Environmental Monitor EM1 addresses wetness monitoring in a more sophisticated way than most wetness monitoring products. The Sensatronics range of probes do not just alarm on wet or not wet conditions, rather there is a wetness scale from 1 to 100, representing different levels of ’wetness’. The scale is an arbitrary one and may vary slightly from one probe to another but it is none the less useful as a guide to the degree of wetness. Setting a level too high may result in false alarms if humidity is high, so typically a value of around 40 would be used to trigger an alert.

A common misconception of the hacker is that they are amateurs sitting at home night after night writing open source software for fun. Whilst I am sure that this is indeed true in some instances, I doubt that it is true for the majority. The open source software I have seen is too good to be done by people who aren’t very talented, experienced engineers.

Planning a WiFi (wireless) network is similar in many respects to planning a wired network. You have to consider all the basics, how many users do you need to accommodate, where are you going to deploy the solution and so on. But wireless also brings with its own set issues, chief amongst these is the common perception that WiFi is insecure.

A discussion of why 802.11i (WPA2) provides stronger wireless security than WiFi Protected Access (WPA) and WEP, why there is a need for a new standard and why you should use it.

How come the buyer has to accept all the risks when it comes to software? This document describes how it doesn’t have to be like this.