Some Notes on the Machines

This works in PowerShell. Some off-the-charts numbers will be reported for virtual NICs. The speed you want is in megabytes, so a gigabit NIC will read as 1000:

Get-CIMInstance -Class Win32_NetworkAdapter | Where-Object { $_.Speed -ne $null -and $_.MACAddress -ne $null } | foreach-object { ($_.Speed / 1000000) }

and this works in CMD. Reports speed in bytes per second, so gigabit is reported as “1000000000” and 100-megabit is “100000000”.

wmic NIC where NetEnabled=true get Name, Speed

Here are a number of relevant tools:

Network packet studies, including TCP window scaling and much more

• Microsoft Netmon
• WireShark
• TCPDump
• Microsoft Message Analyzer

Round-trip performance and path tracing

• PSPING on Windows, paping on Linux
• TraceTCP on Windows, tcptraceroute on Linux
• tracert on Windows, traceroute on Linux

Application-level data study

• HTTPWatch
• Fiddler
• Outlook Connection Status

Try this!

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/hpsupportassistant/pc-diags.html?jumpid=va_r602_us/en/any/pps/pl_ot_ob_ds_pd/HP_PC_Hardware_Diagnostics_cc/dt

1. On the server, browse to: http://www.hp.com/bizsupport
2. Using your browser’s search, search for the word Proliant. That will give you the link to the page you need:
   http://www8.hp.com/us/en/support.html
3. Search for the server model you are working on, and open the relevant page.
4. If the server is SBS, at least at this writing, you will not find the files you need under the SBS page. If your SBS version is 2011, you will find the files you need under Server 2008 R2. With this in mind, open the relevant page for your server.
5. Under Driver – System Management, download and install the Management Controller Driver. Best to save it to hard drive and run the installer as administrator.
6. Under Software – System Management, download and install the System Management Homepage. Must save it to hard drive and run the installer as administrator, because it has to start a service.
7. Under Software – System Management, download the Insight Management Agents, and also the Insight Management WBEM Providers. You only need one of these, but it has been seen that sometimes only one of the two will successfully install. Must save to hard drive and run the installer as administrator, because one or more services will have to be started.
8. Attempt install of one of the items downloaded in #7. There may be a small tendency for the WBEM item to work more often, but this is not clear. If the install halts but does not fail, restart the HP System Management Homepage service and (if present) the HP WMI Storage Providers service, and the install may complete cleanly.
9. Open the HP System Management Homepage. Your hardware readouts should be complete.

Here is some interesting info about SQL:

http://www.sqlteam.com/article/benchmarking-disk-io-performance-size-matters

and a tool:

http://thesz.diecru.eu/content/parkdale.php

and another tool, non-free but very good:

http://www.passmark.com/download/pt_download.htm

Ever need to know what \Device\Harddisk2\DR5 is in Windows? Here’s a great tool to help:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896657.aspx

PassMark Software:

http://www.passmark.com/

makes a very good tool for burn-in testing of all standard components (motherboard, CPU, hard drive, DVD/CD-ROM, etc.) of a PC or laptop, called BurnInTest. Recommended.

This works in recent Windows versions, but not in XP Home:

tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq myapp.exe" 2 > NUL | find /I /N "myapp.exe" > NUL
if "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" echo Program is running

This was copied shamelessly from here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/162291/how-to-check-if-a-process-is-running-via-a-batch-script

To create an uber-super-duper control panel in Windows 7, which contains icons for a huge variety of configuration and tweaking, create a folder with this name:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

and then look inside!

The Microsoft Windows SBS 2003 Best Practices Analyzer checks out SBS and gives lots of good info:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3874527A-DE19-49BB-800F-352F3B6F2922&displaylang=en