Dear Network Administrators,

This CPTTM NetAdmin newsletter is to bring useful news to you, Network Administrators in Macau, for references without obligations, so that you can do your jobs easier and better! Hope you like it. if you'd like to unsubscribe or recommend your friends to subscribe, just email me at kent@cpttm.org.mo. Old issues are available here. Also printable version for this newsletter.

Topics in this issue:

• Take part in a Macau IT job survey
• Doubling the network bandwidth & availability of servers
• Running the Sysinternals utilities without installation
• Effective way to turn any disk into a portable disk
• Hypervisor comparison
• Upcoming courses for network administrators

Take part in a Macau IT job survey

A group of IIUM master students are conducting a survey on job satisifaction for IT professionals. Please take the survey and enter a lucky draw for a 4G USB stick.

Doubling the network bandwidth & availability of servers

Believe it or not: You can easily double the network bandwidth and availability of your servers, as long as a server has two network cards. It works by letting the OS treat the two network cards as a virtual network card and thus doubling the bandwidth. If one of the physical card fails, the virtual network card will still work. This technique is called "NIC bonding" or "NIC teaming".

Linux has built-in kernel support for it. For Windows, it is provided by some selected drivers (e.g., Intel PRO/100 server adapter or up or on HP Proliant servers).

Running the Sysinternals utilities without installation

The Sysinternals utilities are very useful in troubleshooting Windows computers. For example, you can view what files and ports are opened by a process, which process is taking up all the CPU time (infected by a virus?). Now, you can run these utilities directly in a browser without installation. Just go here and click the desired EXE. To see the purpose of each one, see here.

Effective way to turn any disk into a portable disk

With a simple USB-to-IDE/SATA converter, you can convert an IDE/SATA disk into a portable USB disk. Why is this cool? If you need to access a DVD on a computer but it doesn't have a DVD drive, then you can plug a DVD drive into a USB port without opening the computer case. Or, you could have a hard disk containing disk images for cloning with Ghost, you'll probably want to plug it into a computer that is on the same network segment with the target computers. Again, with such a converter you don't need to open the case. We've tried all the above at Cyber-Lab and it really works fine. In addition, the converter is very cheap, something around MOP250.

Hypervisor comparison

Microsoft has recently just releasted its own bare metal hypervisor: Hyper-V. Is it good? Below is a comparison with similar products existing on the market:

	VMWare ESX	Hyper-V	Xen	KVM
License cost	About USD3,000	Free with Windows 2008 server	Open source	Open source
Live migration	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Full virtualization: Can run unmodified guests?	Yes. Uses software translation for that.	Yes. Requires hardware virtualization for that.	Yes. Uses hardware virtualization if available, otherwise uses software translation.	Yes. Requires hardware virtualization for that.
Paravirtualization: Can run modified guests for better performance?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Hardware support	Limited	It runs Windows 2008 server on top of it and passes I/O requests to it. So it supports any hardware supported by Windows 2008 server.	It runs Linux on top of it and passes I/O requests to it. So it supports any hardware supported by Linux.	It runs as a module inside Linux so it supports any hardware supported by Linux.