Hey Admins! Let's explore Vista together. (Part 1)
Okay so let's look at some things in Vista from a sys-admin perspective that are good to know when your troubleshooting issues on your client's machines. Your client could be your user base, your family, or yourself.
Guided Help
You're Dad calls, he wants all the icons on the desktop to go away. You could either waste your time trying to talk him through it or teach him how to fish... If you haven't seen guided help, it's one of the WOW moments of Vista. More and more guided help will be showing up which will help you fend off the masses with the easy questions, like finding a printer, etc.
1) Open Help and Support
2) Click Options|Settings and select "Include Windows Online Help and Support when you search for help"
3) Type in "icons guided help"
4) Click show me step-by-step and say "WOW"
Reliability Monitor
Start here when your Mom say's "I didn't do anything it just stopped working". Just type perfmon in the start menu and click
"Reliability Monitor".
Mom, you didn't do anything? Why must you lie to me, you know you're not qualified to run leakdiag.exe...
Slow bootup or shutdown issues?
Not to worry, we have that built in too now. Just open eventvwr and browse to this event collection: Applications and Services Log -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Diagnostics-Performance -> Operational. Here you'll find some diagnostic logging that can help determine why you're system is taking a long time to boot or shutdown. it also shows general performance issues that can help you speed up your system.
Log Name: Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance/Operational
Source: Microsoft-Windows-Diagnostics-Performance
Date: 4/9/2007 1:09:52 PM
Event ID: 101
Task Category: Boot Performance Monitoring
Level: Warning
Keywords: Event Log
User: LOCAL SERVICE
Computer: Brad-DC-01
Description:
This application took longer than usual to start up, resulting in a performance degradation in the system startup process:
File Name : Start++.exe
Friendly Name : Start++
Version : 0.0.4.6
Total Time : 21494ms
Degradation Time : 16494ms
Incident Time (UTC) : 4/9/2007 8:06:00 PM
Data Collection Sets
You know how jazzed I am about SPA for Windows 2003, yes it is a wonderful thing and has saved me a lot of pain tracking down the user(s) that is slamming my server. Well in Vista/LH we now have that functionality built in. It also lives under perfmon. Say you have a users system that is acting sluggish well click on the "system performance" setting under "data collection sets" and click the play button. Repro. Click stop. Now you'll have a report with all your performance data during that period. This is good for any type of resource issue from the CPU to the network.
The new Task Scheduler
Last topic for today. The new beefed up task scheduler is quite handy now. Gone are the days of AT jobs, hello robust functionality! This is an area you'll want to explore on your own but I thought I'd give an example of how to attach a task to an event.
What if we wanted to take an action when this event came in?
Log Name: System
Source: Tcpip
Date: 4/13/2007 1:44:41 PM
Event ID: 4226
Task Category: None
Level: Warning
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: brad-dc-01
Description:
TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts.
Just alt-click that event and select "Attach task to this event". Fill in the details, point to your script that has the task you want to be performed (netstat, netmon, netstat, etc) and you're done!
