Chapter 8 “Maintaining and Updating Windows Server 2008”

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Monitoring a Windows Server 2008 network can be accomplished with the use of three tools that give you the ability to proactively troubleshoot network problems, the Reliability and Performance Monitor, Windows Server 2008 Event Viewer, and Network Monitor.  The Reliability and Performance Monitor allows you to collect real time information on your local computer or from a specific computer that you have the proper permissions to access.  There are three types of information that can be monitored to judge the performance of a Windows Server 2008 computer.  Performance counters, specific processes or events that you want to track, event trace data, data that is collected over time to provide a real-time view into the behavior and performance of the server operating systems and applications running on it, and configuration information, using the Reliability and Performance monitor to query the Windows Registry for specific configuration data to determine how a server is configured and whether changes to that configuration are affecting performance.  The Event Viewer shows logs for informational messages as well as error messages.  Some of the logs that can be viewed in Event Viewer are Windows logs which include application logs, security logs, setup logs, system logs, and forwarded events.  It is important to monitor for events that can give you information about the overall health of the system.  The Network Monitor is not included with Windows Server 2008 but you can download and install the latest version from the Microsoft Web site.  Network monitor can isolate and view the network traffic that is being sent to or from the server. It can tell you if a client application is failing or if a malicious user or virus is attempting to access the computer over the network.  Finally, Windows Server Update Services (WSUS)  is a Web based tool that Microsoft offers as a free download for managing and distributing software updates that resolve known security issues or otherwise improve performance of Windows XP, Vista, 7, Server 2003, and Server 2008 operating systems.  Using WSUS gives you the ability to download and test updates before they are installed on all computers throughout your organization and then release the approved updates to be automatically installed on all client machines.

Chapter 7 “Configuring Print Services”

Thursday, March 14, 2013

The four components involved in the printing process using Microsoft Windows are the Print Device, the Printer, the Print Server, and the Printer Driver.  A print device is the actual hardware that produces the hard copy documents on paper or other printable material.  The printer is the software interface that the computer uses to communicate with the print device.  A print server is a computer or other standalone device that receives print jobs from clients and sends them to print devices.  The printer driver is a device driver that converts the print job generated by applications into an appropriate string of commands for a specific print device.  Print devices can be locally attached to a computer and used on that computer only or shared by that computer over a network.  They can also be attached directly to the network and made available to all computers throughout the entire network.  Printer security is somewhat like folder share security, clients must have the correct permissions in order to access the shared print device.  The standard print permissions are print, manage printers, and manage documents.  The print permission allows users to print documents, pause, resume, restart, and cancel the user’s own documents.  Manage printers allows a user to cancel all documents, share a printer, change printer properties, delete a printer, and change printer permissions.  Manage documents allows a user to pause, resume, restart, and cancel all user’s documents as well as control job settings for all documents.  Installing the print services role and using the print management console provides additional administrative tools that can consolidate the controls for the printing components throughout the entire enterprise into a single console.  You can access print queues and properties sheets for all of the networked printers, deploy printers to client computers using group policy, and create custom views that simplify the process of detecting print devices that need attention.

Chapter 6 “Configuring File Services”

Thursday, March 07, 2013

The File Services role and other features included with Windows Server 2008 provide many different tools that help administrators deal with all the factors that need to be considered when planning for file sharing on a large network.  The first is scalability, or how much storage space is needed now as well as next year.  The second is navigation, or how users are expected to find the files they need when they need them.  The third is protection, or how you control access to network file shares.  The fourth is abuse, or how to prevent users from consuming too much storage space.  The fifth is diversity, or providing file sharing support for operating systems other than Windows.  The sixth is fault tolerance, or the speed at which you can recover from a hard drive failure, server failure, or an entire facility.  Finally, the last is availability, or making sure that your users have continuous access to the files and services they need even on remote networks.  All of these issues can be addressed through the File services role.  Distributed File System (DFS) is scalable to any size network.  The DFS Namespace role provides a basic virtual directory functionality and DFS Replication enables administrators to deploy the virtual directory on many servers over the entire enterprise.  DFS Replication can have two different topologies, a Full Mesh topology and a Hub/Spoke topology.  A Full Mesh topology means that every member of the group replicates with every other member.  A Hub/Spoke topology allows you the ability to limit the replication traffic to specific pairs of members to cut down on the amount of network traffic.  Hub/Spoke would be more useful in a larger installation.