VPN and DFS monitoring

ddrueding

ddrueding

Fixture
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I have a company with three locations. Each is being served by a cable modem connected to a WRT54GL that establishes the VPN link between them. At each office is a Server 2003R2 machine acting as DC, DNS, DHCP, and DFS. Everything is working as expected except the DFS. It tends to not like files larger than 90MB; only replicating them one way or not at all in a sporadic fashion.

I'm trying to put together some kind of monitoring package, something that could give useful information about the health/status of the VPN/DFS links. Things I would like to know:

1. Internet (up/down/bandwidth consumed)
2. VPN (up/down/bandwidth consumed)
3. DFS (up/down/bandwidth consumed)
4. DFS extras (# of files in queue for sync, file currently being transferred, etc)

This company has some decent tech knowledge(1), so if I could give them a tool that would return this info, it would make them more autonomous (a good thing) and give more confidence in the replication scheme (a very good thing).

(1)Earlier today the boss used the phrase "I think it's a DNS issue" and was right. I was floored.
 
Handruin

Handruin

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Jan 13, 2002
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USA
What about something like Servers Alive. It's not 100% what you're looking for because it won't measure the consumed bandwidth, but it has features for monitoring links and services with your own custom rules. We used this in our lab for several production servers.

I bet there is a way to get the network data through WMI. A quick search netted PRTG Network Monitor. I've never used it or heard of it, but it might have what you need as an all-in-one. Dare I even mention there is an iPhone app for monitoring remotely.
 
ddrueding

ddrueding

Fixture
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Thanks Handruin. I realize that I worded it incorrectly, and the emphasis should be on the DFS replication performance. I will take another look at Servers Alive, as it has been a while.
 
Mercutio

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Solarwinds ip Monitor will monitor the hell out of network connections and devices in a very manager-friendly sort of way, but it's 20 times more expensive than Handy's product.

How often are these 90MB files changing that they need to be re-replicated? Have you looked at FRSDiag yet?
 
Mercutio

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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It might be better in numerous ways to set them up with some Terminal Server CALs and a central server for that data.
 
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