WIRESHARK IO Graphs And Filters Its been over 20 years of installing, troubleshooting, training and writing and I still think the biggest issue in IT is the technician’s working knowledge of their everyday tools. It doesn’t matter if it’s a physical tool like a cable tester or software, you should not only be familiar with it, but with any changes with upgrades. In this case I chose Wireshark and wanted to show you how display filters affect IO graphs. As I mentioned in the video, this can be ‘bad’ or ‘good’. Which one depends if you know about this new ‘feature’ or not. I always suggest you ‘use your favorite tools one a regular basis so you can spot some of these changes when they appear so you aren’t caught off guard when you are in the middle of troubleshooting. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_8m-U-9YwQ

Looking Out for ip helper Related Issues I always seem to get involved or end up in network clean ups. ‘Clean ups’ can involve physical equipment removal but also includes equipment configuration validation and optimization. In this video I cover the typical Cisco ip helper-address command and how it can affect hosts. I would like to point out that this commonly used command forwards various UDP broadcast protocols to a specific device. I have actually seen ip helper-addresses configured with a broadcast address (not recommended) that has cause some pretty weird issues. With this specific topic, there are a few alternatives you can use to optimize this configuration from blocking unwanted protocols with an access control list, using the no ip forward-protocol udp, service command, dhcp relay and those are just off the top of my head. The key here is that I used Wireshark to simply capture some packets of a Microsoft computer broadcasting its typical protocols and how the network equipment reacts to it. I term these exercises PC bootup baseline, PC idle baseline and of course PC login baseline. I can’t stress the importance of performing these baselines to get a true picture of how your network and equipment behaves before you have an issue. I always sarcastically say to my clients that if you perform a baseline correctly, you will have some research to do. And in most cases, you will have some changes to make. I like using captures or anything quantitative so I can see what difference my changes make. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb8n53jczM4