James Moore's questions

I am troubleshooting a wireless internet connection that is continuously dropping. The isp says the radio signal is good so it must by my cisco asa 5505. I don't believe them...

For discussion assume the following:

Remote site public ip is 10.1.1.50 and its default gateway is 10.1.1.1

When i am doing a tracert from a remote location to 10.1.1.50, should the second to last hop of the tracert always be 10.1.1.1?

When the connection is down, the second to last hop isn't 10.1.1.1 however 10.1.1.1 is pingable and I can do a tracert to it.

I am thinking this is a routing issue by the isp.
Is my logic valid? If 10.1.1.1 is reachable shouldn't it be the second to last hop on a tracert before I get timeouts?

I am trying to install postfix on a newly build Ubuntu 8.04 on a Dell R200. When I start the install process

sudo apt-get install postfix

I get stuck at the following screen

The session becomes non-responsive, enter / ctrl-c ... no response

Any ideas how to get past this hangup?

I need to scan about 50 desktop computers and check to see if any *.doc, *.xls, *.ppt etc... files are being stored locally. I am wondering what tools might be available for this. A quick Google didn't find any great solutions so I am thinking I may need to write a script to do this.

CD/DVD oddness... I put in a dvd or cd and vista thinks it is a blank dvd/cd and asks me to label it. Oddly enough if I right click on the drive and select eject then reinsert the disk vista recognizes the content. This happens to me on 3 different vista machines (all dells).

A local vendor is proposing a wireless bridge solution using MikroTik. I had never heard of MikroTik before but it seems they have a following. My usual first choice is Cisco, however the price difference between the two is significant > 8X. Am I crazy to be considering MikroTik? Anyone ever heard of it? How well do they compare? MikroTik RB433 with wireless card vs Aironet 1410

I am familiar with archiving messages on the client side to .pst's... Are there good methods of archiving messages from multiple mailboxes on the server side?

I have heard/read different performance stories on the various raid flavors. I am curious what the agreed upon best answer is.

What are some of the better tools/utilities for testing real bandwidth across a link? In my case I am testing the real throughput across a wifi bridge.

What are the best tools and processes for periodically monitoring and troubleshooting sql server performance issues?

When I try and open a help file (.chm) that resides on a unc path I get the following error: "Navigation to the webpage was canceled".
If I copy the file locally I am able to open it.
I imagine there is a security tweak to make this work.

What are the significant considerations when designing and setting up a dmz for a relatively small office (15-20users) with a limited budget? The network traffic across the dmz will be inbound smtp (ms exchange), inbound http/s (owa), outbound internet traffic.