Tools for the business front line

Instead of hitting another management-oriented topic for enterprise Windows networking this week, let’s get a little grittier and help the front-line systems administrator. Like real world firemen, the front-line administrator is a heroic figure who responds to emergencies and angry calls from users but otherwise remains largely unknown and unsung.

To make his or her life a little easier, I thought I’d share three little-known administration utilities that Microsoft has thoughtfully included in Windows 2000 Server and Windows XP Professional.

Ever get calls from users complaining that they can’t connect to a remote server, or that if they do, the connection is painfully slow? Normally, you’d simply ping the server to establish connectivity and then resort to some third-party router monitoring software to start polling the routers and switches between the user and the server hoping to find the culprit. Needless to say, this can be time-consuming.

Fortunately, Microsoft now includes with Windows XP Professional a new utility called Pathping that combines the functionality of ping and tracert. It puts together a targeted series of traffic statistics designed specifically for network troubleshooting. Syntax is simple: just enter “pathping” then “-n” or one of the other seven switch letters and finally “targetname,” this being the name of the server. If this is a mite confusing, you can get complete Pathping syntax help from Microsoft’s Technet site.

Once you’ve pointed Pathping at a target server, the utility not only establishes basic connectivity with the target device but also lists all the IP addresses of every router between you and the target server. It further fleshes this out with latency and lost packet statistics for every hop in the sequence.

Another new utility in Windows XP Professional is TaskKill, which, as the name implies, allows you to stop any task that’s running, be it on a local machine or a remote one. You’ll need to know either the name of the task, referred to as the ImageName or the PID (process ID) for the task in order to user TaskKill, but this information is easy to get using the related TaskList utility. Once you’ve gotten the target information for TaskKill, stopping a task is simply a matter of opening a command prompt and typing in “taskkill” followed by “/IM imagename” or “/PID processed.”

But that’s not the end of TaskKill. The utility also has a surprisingly large number of additional switches to choose from. These include the ability to enter passwords required to access certain tasks, enter filters to include or exclude specific tasks, and forcefully terminate both primary as well as child tasks.  I don’t have space to describe the syntax here, but you can check it out yourself here.

My last nifty utility comes from the Windows 2000 Resource Kit and is aimed at monitoring network directory usage statistics. Say you’ve got a few hundred network users each with a personal directory. User guidelines might clearly state that users shouldn’t put unnecessary files on the network, but there are always a few jokers out there who ignore such edicts.

Finding these culprits, however, can be a real waste of system administration time if it’s done inside something like Windows Explorer. Enter diruse.exe. Running diruse will give you not only the location of the directory, but its overall size and the size of all its sub-directories, and it can also help determine the actual size of files being compressed via NTFS compression.

Even better, you can easily make diruse part of a Windows management script, basically allowing a periodic polling of your entire directory structure. This information can be dumped into a log file and then manipulated with something like Excel allowing administrators to easily shape their data in order to find trouble spots on the network. You can find out more about diruse and download the utility without the Windows 2000 Resource Kit here.

The combination of Windows XP Professional and Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003 is much more powerful and intricate than Windows NT Server and the older Windows client operating systems. Exploring the details of each new operating system and that operating system’s resource kit can often bring a lot more convenience to a harried system administrator’s life. If you’ve got a favorite Windows XP/2000/2003 utility of your own you’d like to share, please let me know and I’ll profile it in an upcoming column.