Gerod Serafin's WebLog

Helping to keep large organizations' e-mail running

December, 2005

  • Making Perfmon (System Monitor or Performance Monitor) Easier to Read

    If you use Perfmon, it can get really old looking at all of the vertical lines in the graphs.  Here is a tip that will revert back to the old view we had in the NT4 days.

    283110 Vertical lines are displayed in the Sysmon tool that obscure the graph view
    http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;283110

    Also, if you would rather see that you have 2,000,000 MB of RAM instead of 2000000, you can add another registry key that adds the commas.

    300884 HOW TO: Display Comma Separators in the Windows Performance Tool in Windows XP
    http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;300884

     

  • New EXBPA Config XML available

    So, its been a while since I have posted.  I've been on ICL and this time I actually took the whole month off to spend time with my new son instead of working...

    The Exchange Group has released a new Config XML file for EXBPA (2.9.0.1).  When you fire up EXBPA you will see a message that it is available.  Paul Bowden sent out a list of some of the new rules that we check for.  I have extracted some that I most excited about:

    • Detection of servers that exhibit kernel memory problems because of hot-add memory pre-allocation.
    • Enhanced support for Exchange 2003 SP2 (including IMF and OAB v4 changes).
    • HP Storage Enhancements - Checks to make sure you have the newest version of SecurePath and makes other recommendations.
    • Updated firmware enhancements - Checks the BIOS versions on HP and Dell servers.
    • Checks for manual registry changes - including MinUserDC and others.
    • ACL Upgrade failures - notifies you if this is excessive as this can affect server performance.
    • And much more...