Mike McClelland's questions

How hard can this be? I want to get the current CPU performance from a remote Win 2k3 machine. I need to use SNMP because the machine is behind a firewall.

Assumptions:

• I understand networking/can configure any kind of IP address/port forwarding/firewall/stuff.
• I understand SNMP - I know how to use my tool to get a value from an OID on a target machine.
• I know what I want to do with the result from my SNMP request.
• I have enabled SNMP on the Windows Server, configured the relevant IP security/community stuff.
• I can already ask the Windows server standard stuff using SNMP about how many disks/network interfaces it has etc.

Question: - What OID do I used to simply ask current performance usage.

I have spent many hours asking Google - clearly asking the wrong question :S .... How hard can this be?

We have a number of webservers, application servers and database servers that we want to keep in sync. Some of these servers are not connected to the Internet so accessing external time sources is not an option.

So, what we'd like to do is configure one server to be the primary time source - it will stay in touch with time.windows.com using the Windows Time service. Which is 'out-of-the-box' default, so fine. We'd then like to configure the other servers to get their time from it.

Should be simple I know, but for some reason we can't get it to work.

Anybody had success doing this?

Mike

Has anybody out there actually moved an ASP.NET application from a traditional hosting environment/situation - i.e. where you own the kit, or use Rackspace - to using a cloud service/provider?

Does this even exist? Is that what Azure is all about? Do you have any lessons/advice to share?

Does anybody have experience or running Asterisk on VMware(?) - specifically the latest ESX...?

I've got a proof of concept working but am reticent to roll it out without a bit more reassurance! I keep hearing about problems with timing...?

Anybody done it?

Mike

I want to be able to query whether the currently logged in user is idle at their PC - i.e. their PC believes they are 'inactive'... The problem is there are so many ways this could be done. Is there a universal: "THIS COMPUTER IS IDLE/INACTIVE" - I'm thinking about using whatever measure the power subsystem uses...

My thought is to use WMI/Powershell but I could also use a .NET call in C# - I'd just rather not!

Sorry to be a bit vague on this and I'm more than happy for anybody to edit my question into something more meaningful!

Mike

I'm looking for a generic way to query a network of Windows PCs (XP/Vista/7/Server 2k3) for their current power consumption - ideally in Watts! I'm sure this kind of thing is built into WMI, but it might just be available through the manufacturers proprietary WMI-add-on - which I'd like to avoid. I just can't find anything.

I'm not stuck on WMI, just some mechanism of querying a box for it's current power usage.

If somebody finds a way to query this, I'll write an app to do some nice monitoring and post it back here for the community.

Mike

OK, we all know the obvious ones here, but what always surprises me is the number of people that don't know all of them...

Simple ones:

• Alt-Tab - switch between applications (Shift+Alt+Tab - go through in reverse order)
• Ctrl-Tab - switch between documents in an application (doesn't work in MS Word though - grr)
• Ctrl+P - print this document
• Ctrl+S - Save
• Ctrl+Z - Undo
• Ctrl+Y - Redo
• Windows+M - Minimise everything (Shift+Windows+M - put everything back!)
• Windows+F - File search (as opposed to Ctrl+F - local find in document)
• Alt+space - get the control box (the one with minimise/maximise) - esp. useful if you lose a window on a multi-monitor desktop...

New ones in Windows 7:

• Windows-Tab - application switching (like alt-tab) + preview
• Windows+ either up or down arrow - maximise/restore window position

Did you also know ones like - scrolling the mouse wheel and holding CTRL changes font-size/zoom options in most (MS) applications...

What are your favourites?

Mike

I want to query lots of HP servers to determine their overall health. I don't want to use any packages, or even SNMP - I want to query the server health from WMI and understand if a box is Green/Amber/Red - just like the HP Management Home Page.

This MUST be possible - but I can't find any documentation...

Oh yes, and the servers are running Windows Server 2003/8.

Help!!

Mike

We have a bunch of large HDTVs in our monitoring office keeping an eye on all of our production equipment.

We are monitoring:

Cisco routers

• HP switches
• HP proliant servers
• Windows 2003
• IIS
• SQL server

At the moment we use

• Nagios for uptime/availability and alert sending
• Cacti for bandwidth usage
• Perfmon running on Vista for server performance
• A combination of other tools and our own custom code to monitor our actual application performance.

All of this is fine apart from the Perfmon part - it gives us what we want - i.e. real time charts on the screen, logging certain performance counters, etc - the only problem is setting it up is a real chore. If the Vista PC running Perfmon is rebooted (normally due to Windows Update) then setting all the counters up again takes ages - literally an hour or two's worth of work for somebody in the office...

Anybody know of a way to either: 1. Script adding Perfmon counters 2. Another tool with graphical output and WMI/windows counter access.

Thanks

• Mike