Brien Posey

Brien Posey is a freelance technology author and speaker with over two decades of IT experience. Prior to going freelance, Brien was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and healthcare facilities. He has also served as a network engineer for the United States Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition, Brien has worked as a network administrator for some of the largest insurance companies in America. To date, Brien has received Microsoft’s MVP award numerous times in categories including Windows Server, IIS, Exchange Server, and File Systems / Storage. You can visit Brien’s Website at: www.brienposey.com.

Windows Server 2003 Performance Tuning

Windows Networking, Windows Server 2003 / By /

Computers running Windows operating systems always seem to have a way of slowing down over time. If your server seems to be running more slowly than it should, then you have a couple of choices. You can add some extra memory and maybe a processor or two and hope for the best, or you can figure out why the server is running so slowly. There are lots of different things that can cause a server to run slowly. In this article, I will explain how you can use some of Windows’ built in diagnostic tools to determine the cause of your server’s sub-par performance.

Issues Involved In Converting Basic Disks To Dynamic Disks

Windows Networking, Windows Server 2003 / By /

One of the Windows Server 2003 features that I’ve always found most useful is the ability to convert basic disks to dynamic disks. The advantage of doing this is that the Windows operating system allows you to span a single volume across multiple dynamic disks. By spanning a volume across multiple disks, you can create a larger volume than what a single disk can hold, you can achieve better performance than what a single disk would provide you with, and you can even achieve a degree of fault tolerance against hard disk failure. Even with all of these benefits, there are some serious issues that you need to be aware of before you even think about converting a basic disk into a dynamic disk. In this article, I will discuss these issues.

Making Your DNS Service Fault Tolerant

Windows Networking, Windows Server 2003 / By /

Most network administrators know that Active Directory is dependant on DNS. What you might not realize is that there is a good chance that your DNS server is performing several other critical tasks in the background. A DNS failure can be more catastrophic than most people realize. In this article I will explain why this is the case and how to avoid such a situation.

Troubleshooting Basic TCP/IP Problems

Network Troubleshooting / By /

Over the last several years, TCP/IP has gone from being the protocol that only geeks use, to a universal protocol that everyone uses, thanks to the widespread use of the Internet. TCP/IP has been around for decades and is a solid, reliable, mature protocol. Most of the time when there is a TCP/IP related problem, the problem is related to the way that one or more of the hosts on the network are configured. In this article, I will walk you through the process of troubleshooting some common TCP/IP issues.

Analyzing Traffic With Network Monitor

Networking / By /

As an administrator, it’s important for you to keep tabs on the traffic that’s flowing across your network. I’m not saying that you need to be intimately familiar with every single packet that’s sent or received, but you need to know what types of protocols are flowing across your network. Monitoring the network allows you to have a better understanding of how bandwidth is being used. It also allows you to find out if users are running file sharing programs, or if some kind of evil Trojan is silently transmitting information in the background. What you might not realize is that Microsoft has given you a tool that you can use for monitoring network traffic. Appropriately, the tool is called Network Monitor. In this article, I will introduce you to this tool and show you how to use it.

Subnetting to Increase Performance

Networking / By /

There comes a time when a network becomes too big and performance begins to suffer as a result of too much traffic. When that happens, one of the ways that you can solve the problem is by breaking the network into smaller pieces. There are several techniques for splitting a network, but one of the most effective techniques is called subnetting. In this article, I will explain what subnetting is, and how it works.

Evaluating a New Security Policy

Cybersecurity / By /

There was a time when it wasn’t all that risky to try out new security settings on production servers, but operating systems have become much more complex since then. Today, even changing something as simple as the required password length can have unanticipated side effects elsewhere in the system. In this article, I will explain how to evaluate a new security policy in a safe and responsible manner.

Firewalls 101

Networking / By /

Firewalls have become an indispensable part of computer security, but they can be intimidating for a new administrator. In this article I will explain the inner workings of a firewall and some common firewall features in an easy to understand manner.

The Security Risks Of Desktop Searches

Cybersecurity / By /

Google has recently released a very handy new tool that allows you to perform searches against your own computer in the same way that you would search the Internet. With this tool come some serious security problems though. In this article, I will discuss Google’s security issues and talk about what this might mean for other companies developing similar applications.

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