I've been working a lot with file sharing performance, and I'm trying to write a few essays on those experiences. The first, on SMB Performance , is up now. When I have some more time, I'm going to write a bit on the impact of packet loss on SMB connections...

I often have customers who ask me to wrestle with the performance of SMB (otherwise known as CIFS) across a WAN link. Their experience is usually that file transfers from Windows Explorer or from the command prompt don't meet their expectations of their...

There generally isn't a single correct way to figure out the optimal TCP window for an interface since you're probably connecting to different hosts across different links at different latencies; however, you can roughly guess what the optimal window...

My favorite cartoonist wrote something that started me thinking... “All products are conversations.” I suppose that, in terms of product support, this is self-evident. Every product we ship results in a conversation with support....

With the full version of Netmon, it's relatively easy to find retransmitted packets with the expert; however, in Ethereal, it's not quite as clear... Ethereal supports analysis of TCP sequence numbers to find retransmits & do other neat things;...

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Posted on my favorite network sniffing tools .

Intro Network sniffing is a major part of my life -- I've probably pored over, on average, a trace a day every day for the past seven years. This is an area where having the right tool is of the upmost importance as a good tool can cut hours (or even...

I've quite frequently run into situations where I've been asked to diagnose packet loss based only on a network trace. While it is almost impossible to find an exact answer, a network trace can provide some valuable clues about the cause of the packet...

I recently realized that I spend a lot of time writing about things that I know only a little about (like politics) and very little time writing about the things that I do know something about. This blog is an attempt to balance that, and to let my geeky...