Month: August 2017

Installing Windows Features using PowerShell

by Samuel Mitchell, posted in Microsoft, Windows server

I was on a drive to enable SNMP feature on all our Windows 2012 R2 servers in order to monitor the CPU, Memory and Disk utilization through WMI.

Trying to do this manually using the Windows Roles and Features for over 40 servers was not practical as it was time consuming. As a result, I venture out to seek a way to do this on a widescale in the shortest possible time.

Now here comes Powershell, it has save the day with it’s easy-to-use cmdlets and remote execution from any Windows machine.

I am now going take this opportunity to show what I have done to complete this task.

The following cmdlet is what you will use to install any windows features from the server roles:

This cmdlet is used to get the Windows features that are currently installed on the server:

Get-WindowsFeature [FeatureName] -computerName [NameOfComputer]

You can include the Features name in the command in order to get the status of the particular feature.

This cmdlet is used to install the windows features:

Install-WindowsFeature [FeatureName] -computerName [NameOfComputer]

Using the cmdlets above, the following commands were executed to install the SNMP-Service feature:

PS C:\> Get-WindowsFeature SNMP-Service -ComputerName TestWinServer

results:

SNMP-GetFeature

Installing Windows features SNMP-Service for the 2012 R2 server TestWinServer

PS C:\> Install-WindowsFeature SNMP-Service -ComputerName TestWinServer

Results:

SNMP-InstallFeature

After installing this feature, I was able to configure the SNMP services and set my monitoring tool to pull the information from WMI using snmp.

I hope this article was helpful.

Avoid using Fiber Transceivers for Switch Connection

by Samuel Mitchell, posted in Routing & Switching, Uncategorized

I am dedicating this article to an experience I had with connecting switches using 10/100 Base-T 100Base-FX fiber converters (Transceivers).

It is a pain when the transceivers goes bad especially if it is not identified as causing packet loss or slow link connection on the switched network.

I had an experience were a location was complaining of having slow connection to the server resources and the IP phones were having poor call quality. When the user is on a call, the caller will hear the person very clearly but the other user would constantly hear drop in the conversation.

When a ping test was done, for every 5 or 10 ping response, the packet will drop, even to the uplink switch. When a ping test is done to the same switch, it was successful with no packet loss.

Looking at the interfaces status, there was no indication of any CRC errors or other parameters such as runts or interface reset indicating no problem with cable.

I connected my laptop directly to the transceiver and did a ping test and the same result. This is where I concluded that the problem was with the transceiver; low and behold when I swap out the transceiver for the direct fiber connection to the switches, all connection issues just disappear.

Conclusion:  Avoid using transceivers to connect switches over fiber links, as much as possible use SFP modules because when the transceivers goes bad, they cause latency to the connected location. Also I have noticed that the devices are very unreliable and are fragile hence they are high maintenance and a waste of time, effort and money which most of us Engineers don’t have time to waste.