performance

Tools for WebAnalytics and SEO

SEO and Web Analytics are a very important part of successful web pages and blogs, like this page as well.

You want to use SEO tools and plugins on your website, read up on how to use key phrases and other tools in this constantly changing world of web pages and search engines as well as now mobile first development. Having been in IT over 25 years, I saw a lot of changes.

When creating a website, make sure you engage some tools right away, make sure you have small images, JPG is still a very good idea, engage image optimizer plugins and don’t over-size them – I am guilty of this as well.

Caching or your pages with plugins and other techniques and systems is highly recommended, because SEO judges you also on render time and things like LCP – Largest Contentful Paint.

Keep all the overhead CSS and JavaScript under control, especially side loading is a huge problem when it comes to lagging speed to load websites.

To get a good overview – use Google PageSpeed Insights to see how your page is performing and where you should start improving.

Another important tool Google Analytics – it recently changed to GA4 which you can simply switch too. The data there can give you a good idea how people finding your website and where you should improve your marketing efforts.

Now, marketing is not necessarily spending money on Google Ads, find out where people interested in your page collaborate and exchange and interact with them, if there you have e.g., a good blog entry about a topic, you might be able to link it and get more visitors.

And then there is the Google Search Console – the easiest way to find out how your page is ranking on various search requests and also making sure your page has no issues – what is critical. Make sure Googles algorithms are happy with especially the mobile version of your website, that it is deemed readable and fast. Only then you will get a good SEO rating. Ignoring issues there can cause Google to stop indexing your webpage, what will result in less clicks and a decline in visitors.

Of course, there are other tools and search engines out there, but let’s face it – the DeFacto standard is Google. This does not mean you can ignore the others, but I found that Googles free tools are most of the time already very sufficient.

All of this is just a quick overview, this topic is huge and a whole industry stays behind the SEO and web marketing – my only goal was to give owners of smaller website a good overview and some tips on how they can improve without spending a fortune.

Finally, you also should make sure your website is secured and monitored for threads. Not just the incoming threads, also that your website is not unintentionally causing a thread to your visitors due to malicious plugins or altered content. Engage third party firewalls and scan systems. Yes they will cost you money, but they will save your reputation with your visitors.

ActiveDirectory/LDAP result limits – MaxPageSize

ns a website from a systems administrator for systems administrators Home IT-Admins CMDB IT-Admins tool IT Search EOL Solutions Blog Contact Links ActiveDirectory/LDAP result limits – MaxPageSize

ActiveDirectory, respective LDAP, has a result limit setting, MaxPageSize. Those are set by default to 1000 rows per query.

This is primarily important if you use some kind of programming language to get results from LDAP, this code must compensate those limits and engage paging.

Your LDAP query does not need to provide the limit, only the code needs to do the paging as you always just get the max. amount of results set in the current settings.

In order to check your settings do the following commands in a command prompt / cmd window:

In theory you could set different values now as well, assuming you have the permission level to do so. But this is not recommended and you should engage paging instead, as you otherwise risk to overload your DCs – even if your commands won’t cause it, a possibly DoS attack could happen – malicious or not, so leave the limits, but be aware of them.

 

VMware hosts network speed tests with iperf

VMware hosts network speed tests with iperf

Ever needed to run speed-tests between your VMware hosts? There is an CLI command iperf3 for this.

This command runs as a server and client command. One host will be the server and the other the client. There is further the possibility that some storage vendors even support the iperf3 command.

Example scenario with two VMware ESX hosts:

  • IT-ESX-01P – will act as server
    • IP: 10.0.0.1
  • IT-ESX-02P – will act as client
    • IP: 10.0.0.2

Steps and commands to execute the network speed test:

  1. Enable SSH on both hosts and connect with e.g. Putty to it, logon as well.
  2. IT-ESX-01P will act as our server
    1. disable the firewall
      1. esxcli network firewall set –enabled false
      2. The ESX firewall needs to be disabled temporarily to execute the tests – on client and server
    2. List the kernel network IP addresses
      1. esxcli network ip interface ipv4 get
      2. choose the interface IP that is on the network you want to test, only kernel-IPs will work
    3. go to the directory that holds the iperf3 command
      1. cd /usr/lib/vmware/vsan/bin
    4. start the iperf server on this host on the kernel IP you need it on
      1. ./iperf3.copy -s -B 10.0.0.1
      2. this command starts the server respective listener on the host on the specified IP address
  3. IT-ESX-02P will act as our client
    1. disable the firewall
      1. esxcli network firewall set –enabled false
      2. The ESX firewall needs to be disabled temporarily to execute the tests – on client and server
    2. go to the directory that holds the iperf3 command
      1. cd /usr/lib/vmware/vsan/bin
    3. execute the speed test against the server IP address
      1. ./iperf3 -c 10.0.0.1 -t 10 -V

      2. this will start sending packets to the server – you will see the flow on both sides
      3. cancelling this command – cntrl + c – can take a minute, be patient, especially if you mistyped the IP or forgot to disable the firewall etc..
  4. Review the results on the speed test
    1. Below are result samples for a 1 GB kernel network, a 10 GB kernel network and a 25 GB kernel network.
    2. Sample results – 1 GB
    3. Sample results – 10 GB
    4. Sample results – 25 GB
    5. Be aware, those results will vary and depend on the network bandwidth available in the moment of the test, respective the current load on the network cards of client and server.
  5. IT-ESX-01P exit server mode and enable firewall
    1. cntrl + c will exit the server mode and go back to the CLI
    2. enable the firewall
      1. esxcli network firewall set –enabled true
    3. EXIT SSH
  6. IT-ESX-02P enable firewall
    1. enable the firewall
      1. esxcli network firewall set –enabled true
    2. EXIT SSH
  7. Done

Additional links to this topic:

 

 

 

Automate your SUS clean up

Automate your SUS clean up

Many companies rely on WSUS respective SUS services from Microsoft – aka. Windows Server Update Services as internal source and control of their update deployment to clients and servers within their network.

One of the big challenges for IT is to keep them clean and performant. The Cleanup-Assistant in the SUS management console tends to run forever and in any case means manual labor over and over again.

Below are two scripts – a CMD script that needs to be adjusted with parameters and a powershell script that will be called with those parameters. The scripts acutally will call the same API as the MMC Assistant does, just that this can be automatically performed via a scheduled task in Windows.

It helps you to keep your SUS slim and more performant.

In any way – I highly recommend to not blindly just enable all categories rather then limiting it to the once you have in place as well as once you reached a certain patch-level even actively denying updates you never will need again (keep in mind, new rolled out systems might still need older updates – but you could possibly refresh your base images or rely on Microsoft update services / online updates for those cases).

The combination of making updates obsolete and actually running a cleanup periodically will improve your SUS server performance.

As for the parameters, those are explained in the CMD script header – therefor I will not explain them here again.