Both Windows and Linux operating systems are capable of acting as an NFS (Network File System) server, but which performs better? Here we are going to run various benchmarks on the two to see which performs better.
NFS has been around for a long time in UNIX based variants, and more recently Microsoft has added support within the Windows operating system, let’s find out how they compare.
Microsoft have announced that Windows 10 will be officially released on the 29th of July 2015. In preparation for this you can now reserve your free upgrade if you are currently running Windows 7 SP1 or 8.1 right within the OS with these simple steps.
I had a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine running on XenServer 6.2 SP1 with all updates and patches applied, however it was still running an older version of XenServer tools. The tools were version 6.0.2, and this was causing problems with backups from Arcserve freezing and not completing. To fix the problem I needed to upgrade XenServer tools to the latest version of 6.2, easy right? Think again.
By default the telnet client in Microsoft’s Windows operating systems is disabled, this is unfortunate as it is an extremely useful tool which can be used for testing TCP connectivity to external hosts on a specified port.
This is great when you’re trying to troubleshoot network connectivity problems, for example, say we have a web server which should be listening on port 80 to serve HTTP traffic but we are not able to load a web page, by using telnet to connect to the web server on port 80 we can verify the connectivity.
It may be that the connectivity is fine but there is a problem with the web server, or that the web server is stopped and the port is not listening at all, for instance. With telnet we can get a better understanding of what’s going on.
There is a lot of free virtualization software available for your to download and install, here we cover some of the best free options available for you to use in Windows.
These options can be installed within your existing Windows operating system installation, allowing you to run a virtual machine (VM) running an entirely separate operating system within. For example this will allow you to run multiple instances of Linux and Windows desktop clients or servers.
When Microsoft first made the Windows 10 Technical Preview available I downloaded the free ISO straight away and booted it up into a virtual machine as soon as possible as I was excited to see what was new. My initial reaction at the time was “finally, something better than Windows 8” and I couldn’t wait to get the final version.
Windows 10 has since gone through many changes through the various new builds that have been released, so I have downloaded and started using the most recent build (10049) to review and share some of the best new features of Windows 10 that I have found so far.
The hosts file is stored on a computer or device to provide local entries for DNS lookup. Normally when you try to resolve a hostname or domain, your computer will consult your specified DNS server to discover the IP address that it points to. This requires that there is an existing DNS server out there with the record that you require, with the hosts file you can fake DNS entries that will resolve only on the local machine.
Why would you want to do this? It’s great for testing or troubleshooting. You may want to use a specific hostname that no DNS exists for, though ideally you should create DNS records where possible as they can be centrally managed. It can help you get around DNS propagation issues, for example if a DNS record has been updated but had a TTL of 24 hours you may have to wait up to this long (assuming the cache cannot be cleared) before the record will resolve to the new IP address. By adding a temporary host file entry you can resolve to the new IP address straight away as the hosts file takes precedence over external DNS.
Most of us would be familiar with the simple ICMP based ‘ping’ command which allows us to test for a basic response from some network connected device. While great for basic troubleshooting it does not allow us to confirm if the particular host at the other end is responding on TCP or UDP ports where the majority of services are likely to be provided.
Ping isn’t the be all and end all of network troubleshooting, if a firewall blocks inbound ICMP traffic then a ping will not succeed which can produce a false perception that the host is down as it is not responding to the ping, however other services could still be responding fine.
Alternatively while ping may come back fine with a response it doesn’t indicate if a web server is responding on port 80 for HTTP requests, the web server may have failed and no longer be responding.
So if ping is ICMP based, can we hit a TCP or UDP port for response instead? The answer is yes, let’s take a look.
Today I received a virtual machine OVA file exported from VMware, I needed to import this into Apache CloudStack where XenServer was the hypervisor.
To do this I first needed to convert the OVA/OVF to VHD, this post covers how it’s done.
This post is a follow on from my post last week regarding how to install the telnet client. The telnet client is simple yet extremely powerful in helping us gain a quick idea of where a problem may lie with TCP connectivity, it’s one of my first go to tools to use when testing a network connection to a server.