How to Boost and Increase Your Internet Speed

Need to increase your Internet connection speed/ There are a number of tweaks out there that will enable you to maximize your system’s performance and likewise, there are lots of things you can do to tweak your Internet connection to boost Internet speed. There are tons of them out there, but this article just lays out two of the most useful ones.

Tweak 1: Un-reserving bandwidth

By Default, XP reserves 20% of your bandwidth for it’s own use. This is a crying shame and should be undone immediately. To do this, you will not require any additional software, just follow the steps below.

1. Access the Group Policy Editor. This can be done by typing gpedit.msc in the Run box (Start, and then Run). You will now be looking at something like this.
   
   
   
2. Navigate to Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/Network/QOS Packet Scheduler using the pane on the left side.
3. In the left pane, there should be a Setting with the name Limit reservable bandwidth, right-click this and select properties.
4. Now this might seem a bit weird, as the State will say “Not Configured” but Windows by default will reserve 20%. So the trick is to set it to reserve 0%. You can do this by clicking enabled and then setting the Bandwidth Limit % to 0. It should look like the image below.
   
   
   
5. Hit OK then close the Group Policy Editor.

That’s it! You’re done with the first tweak. Just a quick side note here, there are lots of other little things you can change easily using the policy editor. Feel free to wander around!

Tweak 2: Optimizing TCP/IP settings

This next tweak is going to require a piece of freeware called SG TCP Optimizer. This nifty little utility will optimize the manner in which your PC sends and receives data packets, which will as a result speed up your connection. Though It is most effective for broadband connections, it works for just about any type of connection.

1.  Download SG TCP Optimizer. You don’t need to install it, just double-click and it will run. Once you run it, you should be looking at this :
   
2. That is quite an intimidating interface, but we won’t be touching most of it. Under the General Settings tab, just drag the slider to match your connection’s download speed. Then, at the bottom of the same window, select the “Optimal Settings” radio button and click “Apply Changes”.
3. You will now be looking at a window like the one below.
   
   
   
4. Make sure that the “Backup” tick box is ticked and then click OK.
5. All that’s left is to reboot your system, in order to apply the changes. You will be prompted to do so.
6. Once your system has rebooted, surf around for a while. If for whatever reason you feel your connection has been affected negatively, then fear not, for the changes you made can be undone. Start SG TCP Optimizer, click File and choose restore backed up settings. This will bring up a dialog box where you can navigate to where you downloaded the program. There, you will find a file with the extension .spg with a filename containing the date.
   For example If you applied the changes on the 21st of February “sg_backup_2008-02-21-xxxx.spg” would be the filename, where the xxxx is any number. Once you find this file select it and press open. This should bring to a dialog box similar to the one shown above. Click OK and reboot. Your original settings are now restored.

   How to increase browsing speed: 7 ways to work faster on slow connections

   1. Send multiple files faster by compressing them
   If you're sending multiple files—for example, several files related to a single project—you can reduce their combined size by using a compression utility. Compressing your files can dramatically reduce the time needed to send files online, and compressed files don't take up as much space in your (or the recipient's) email Inbox. WinZip is one of the more common compression tools.

   Compress files

   • Windows 7
   • Windows Vista
   • Windows XP

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   2. Increase browsing speed by turning off graphics in Windows Internet Explorer

   Graphics are important to web pages, but they also take time to download if you're online. You can turn them off to speed your Internet browsing.

   
   

   Disable graphics in Internet Explorer

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   3. Send email using Contact Groups (Distribution Lists)

   If you're sending an email to multiple people, create a Contact Group (previously known as a Distribution List) instead of listing each recipient separately. Messages are sent more quickly and efficiently when you're using a Contact Group. Your company may have established procedures for creating mailing lists. If not, learn how to create and edit a Contact Group in Microsoft Outlook.

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   4. Reduce email size with simple email signatures

   Email signatures leave a professional stamp on your messages, but elaborate signatures that include multiple images take up a lot of unnecessary storage space in each email. Ultimately, they can slow down the time needed to send each message. Instead, create distinctive text signatures combining fonts, type sizes, and colors to make your email signature smaller and quicker to transmit and receive. Learn how to create email signatures in Microsoft Outlook.

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   5. Work offline using Cached Exchange Mode in Outlook

   Even if you lose your network connection, you can continue working in Microsoft Outlook if you're using Cached Exchange Mode. With Cached Exchange Mode, a copy of your mailbox is stored on your computer. This copy provides quick access to your data and is frequently updated with the mail server. If you work offline, whether by choice or due to a connection problem, your data is still available to you instantly wherever you are. Cached Exchange Mode does require you to work with a Microsoft Exchange Server email account. Learn more about using Cached Exchange Mode.

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   6. Browse offline by saving web pages on your computer

   If you use or reference a specific webpage often, save it locally to your computer. If you lose your connection or are working on a slow connection, you'll still be able to read and find the information you need.

   
   

   Save a web page on your computer

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   7. Open webpages faster by increasing your cache

   If you increase the size of the temporary Internet files cache in Internet Explorer, your computer won't have to work so hard when you revisit webpages. Many of the images will already be downloaded on your computer, decreasing the amount of time it takes to open a page.

   Increase the Temporary Internet Files cache in Internet Explorer

   1. On the Tools menu, click Internet Options.
   2. On the General tab, in the Browsing history section, click Settings.
   3. In the Temporary Internet Files dialog box, under Check for newer versions of stored pages:, click the Automatically button. Then, set theAmount of disk space to use: to at least 250 megabytes (MB).
   4. Click OK.
      

There you have it. Your connection is now tweaked and ready to go! Any questions, post a comment!

Understanding “Missed Call Notifications” and voicemail message delivery with OCS 2007 R2 / Lync Server 2010 and Exchange 2007 / 2010

I was talking to a fellow Microsoft UC consultant the other day about how:

1. Missed call notifications
2. Voicemail message delivery

… worked and realized that I had problems remembering the details of the differences between the 2 and while most of it came back after thinking about it for 10 minutes, I thought it would benefit myself as well as the community if I document it here.

I believe that the best way to start is to outline the scenarios when you have Exchange 2007 / 2010 and OCS 2007 R2 / Lync Server 2010 as your PBX and voicemail solution.  Just so I don’t keep flipping around between the different versions, for the purpose of this example, we will use Exchange 2007 UM and Lync Server 2010 as the voicemail and PBX solution.

Lync Client Signed

Scenario 1:

1. User calls in
2. Rings until user gets directed to voicemail greeting
3. Leaves a voicemail message 

Looking into the C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\UnifiedMessaging\voicemail folder will show 2 files:

1. .txt
2. .wav

Opening up the .txt file will show something similar to this:

MessageType : VoiceMail
CallerId : +12892596319
NDRRequired : False
RecipientName : Terence Luk
RecipientAddress : tluk@domain.com
RecipientCulture : en-US
CallId : ad0f59fc-6798-48ac-92e5-8b31d1a7fc1e
AttachmentName : E:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\UnifiedMessaging\voicemail\efad5c6d-e09b-43b1-b601-3291e3647b58.wav
Duration : 1
Important : False
CallAnswering : True
Codec : Gsm

Callee’s Outlook mailbox will get a voicemail message but no missed call notification:

Scenario 2:

1. User calls in
2. Rings twice
3. Hangs up before being directed to voicemail greeting

Looking into the C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\UnifiedMessaging\voicemail folder will show 1 file:

1. .txt

Opening up the .txt file will show something similar to this:

MessageType : OCSNotification
sip:tluk@domain.comEUM:tluk@domain.com;phone-context=DialPlanName.domain.com2011-02-11 01:29:39Zf46b6940-03d8-45dc-8ba6-577edde1a929sip:+12892596319@domain.com;user=phoneCallerReleased

Callee’s Outlook mailbox will get a missed call notification:

Scenario 3:

1. User calls in
2. Rings until user gets directed to voicemail greeting
3. Hangs up before end of voicemail greeting

Looking into the C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\UnifiedMessaging\voicemail folder will show 1 file:

1. .txt

Opening up the .txt file will show something similar to this:

MessageType : MissedCall
CallerId : +12892596319
NDRRequired : False
RecipientName : Terence Luk
RecipientAddress : tluk@domain.com
RecipientCulture : en-US
CallId : d6a0006d-b5be-49bd-9853-d76895b48e3f
Important : False

Callee’s Outlook mailbox will get a missed call notification:

Lync Client Signed Out

Scenario 1:

1. User calls in
2. Gets directed to voicemail greeting immediately (Lync Client is signed out)
3. Hangs up before end of voicemail greeting

Looking into the C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\UnifiedMessaging\voicemail folder will show 1 file:

1. .txt

Opening up the .txt file will show something similar to this:

MessageType : MissedCall
CallerId : +12892596319
NDRRequired : False
RecipientName : Terence Luk
RecipientAddress : tluk@domain.com
RecipientCulture : en-US
CallId : 2f21959e-fe0d-40ba-9979-e3ac748b2884
Important : False

Callee’s Outlook mailbox will get a missed call notification:

Scenario 2:

1. User calls in
2. Gets directed to voicemail greeting immediately (Lync Client is signed out)
3. Leaves a voicemail message at the end of the greeting

Looking into the C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\UnifiedMessaging\voicemail folder will show 2 files:

1. .txt
2. .wav

Opening up the .txt file will show something similar to this:

MessageType : VoiceMail
CallerId : +12892596319
NDRRequired : False
RecipientName : Terence Luk
RecipientAddress : tluk@domain.com
RecipientCulture : en-US
CallId : cb9654c5-819b-4099-8d23-197481996190
AttachmentName : E:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\UnifiedMessaging\voicemail\af5ff551-df92-42fc-b6ce-6b3f8a2f9145.wav
Duration : 2
Important : False
CallAnswering : True
Codec : Gsm

Callee’s Outlook mailbox will get a voicemail message but no missed call notification:

I know it may be a bit confusing and difficult to compare and contrast as you scroll down the scenarios so to summarize the behavior:

• If the callee never makes it to your Exchange UM voicemail greeting, your Lync Client will be responsible to send the missed call notification.
• If the callee makes it to your Exchange UM voicemail greeting, Exchange UM is what’s responsible to either deliver a missed call notification or voicemail message.  Note that you would only get one of the two.

Hope this helps anyone out there that would like to gain a bit of the structural and functional understanding of missed call notifications and voicemail delivery.

Event ID: 9176 error logged on Exchange 2007 server

We had a client last week who suffered a SAN failure which required them to restore SAN snapshots that were a month old.  I won’t go into the details of the situation but I was brought in to bring their directory services up and determine what course of action we could take.  To make a long story short, they had most of their infrastructure virtualized with only 1 physical domain controller named DC2.  The virtualized environment which included DC1 and their Exchange server was restored but since DC1 was a snapshot, the event logs were littered with errors about USN rollback.  From here on, I had the choice of either fixing the USN rollback to get DC1 operational OR use DC2 which had a more recent directory services database up and fix the rest of the infrastructure servers.  I personally did not want to lose all the changes they made to their Active Directory and therefore opted to use DC2. 

Problem

After I completed seizing the FSMO roles from DC1 and rejoined the Exchange server to the domain, I began to notice that the Exchange server continuously logged the following error:

NSPI Proxy can contact Global Catalog DC1.domain.local but it does not support the NSPI service. After a Domain Controller is promoted to a GLobal Catalog, the Global Catalog must be rebooted to support MAPI Clients. Reboot DC1.domain.local as soon as possible.

Solution

What threw me off was that DC1 was no longer on the network and I had completely removed the domain controller’s metadata with NTDSUtil and all records in DNS.  After reviewing the event logs a few more times, I began remembering that I had come across an article a few years ago (don’t ask me how I remember) that had a fix for an Outlook Anywhere issue.  The article required registry changes on the Exchange server which referenced an NSPI Target Server.  From there on, I did a search on Google and finally found that article here:

http://messagexchange.blogspot.com/2008/12/outlook-anywhere-failing-rpc-end-points.html

Not surprisingly, I reviewed the registry for the keys and found references to DC1 hardcoded into the registry.  What I ended up doing was updating the registry keys to the appropriate DC, DC2, and the event errors went away.

 

Hope this helps anyone that may come across this problem.

Unable to open Exchange Server 2010’s Exchange Management Console with the error: “The attempt to connect to http://exchange.domain.com/PowerShell using "Kerberos" authentication failed: Connecting to remote server failed...”

Ran into an interesting error when trying to create an Exchange Server 2010 mailbox for a user object where I would constantly encounter the following error:

The attempt to connect to http://exchange.domain.com/PowerShell using "Kerberos" authentication failed: Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The client cannot connect to the destination specified in the request. Verify that the service on the destination is running and is accepting requests. Consult the logs and documentation for the WS-Management service running on the destination, most commonly IIS or WinRM. If the destination is the WinRM service, run the following command on the destination to analyze and configure the WinRM service: “winrm quickconfig”. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.

The first thought that came to my mind was to check the Exchange services and when I did, all of them were already up:

After searching on the internet and coming across the following 2 links:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/exchange2010/thread/694e0cdc-1044-4a68-8157-e9b132eec0d7

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/02/04/453946.aspx

… none of the purposed solutions worked but through reading the The Exchange Team Blog, I realized that this might have something to do with IIS.  Restarting the Exchange services during office hours was definitely out of the question but I had to get this working because I needed to create the user’s mailbox.  After thinking about what options I had for a bit, I realized I could probably restart the World Wide Web Publishing Service quickly and so I did:

 

Once the World Wide Web Publishing Service successfully restarted, the Exchange Management Console was now able to load the organization:

Monitoring free drive space with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Performance Monitor

Problem
You would like to monitor free drive space on a server with the native features of Windows Server 2008 R2 without having to purchase monitoring software such as SolarWinds, SCOM, etc.

Solution
I’ve found myself in plenty of situations where I need to set up a quick way of monitoring free drive space on various versions of Windows Server because I either don’t have access to the monitoring application that the company uses, lack of licenses for the monitoring application to add the new host or the company simply does not have monitoring.  When this situation comes across my deployments, I simply use the native Performance Monitor feature of Windows Server 2008 R2 to monitor and send an email alert to email addresses.  Note that this feature is also available in Windows Server 2003 but this blog post will just cover 2008.
Note that Microsoft has various articles that covers setting this up so I’ll include some of the links here:

HOW TO: Configure a Low Disk Space Alert by Using the Performance Logs and Alerts Feature in Windows Server 2003p://support.microsoft.com/kb/324796

Configure Windows Server 2008 to Notify you when Certain Events Occur http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff458614.aspx

Create a Data Collector Set to Monitor Performance Counters
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc722414.aspx

The first step in setting the monitoring up is to open Performance Monitor and create an alert so begin by opening up the application in Administrative Tools then navigate to Data Collector Sets –> User Defined:

Right click on the User Defined node and select New –> Data Collector Set:

In the Create new Data Collector Set, type in a name for this collector, select Create manually (Advanced)and click Next:

Select Performance Counter Alert and click Next:

Click on the Add… button:

Navigate to the Logical Disk selection:

You’ll find various counters in this section and whether you prefer to use % Free Space or Free Megabytes will be based on the type of application and drive size you’ll be monitoring.  I personally prefer Free Megabytesbecause the drive I’m monitoring is a 1TB drive and setting up a hard threshold based on a constant value seems to make more sense:

Note the logical drives are listed under the Instances of selected object so select the ones you’d like to monitor:

Clicking on OK will bring you back to the Create new Data Collector Set window.  Proceed with setting a threshold:

Notice how I’ve set the Alert when to Below and the Limit to 2048.  This simply means I’m setting a threshold to 2GB for each of the drives. Proceed with clicking the Next button when you’ve configured all of the drives’ thresholds:

Unless you have restrictions on the service account, proceed by click on Finish:

Notice how a new collector is now set up:

Continue by right clicking on the data collector and choose properties:

Navigate to the Alert Action tab and select the Log an entry in the application event log:

Start the data collector set by right clicking on the object and selecting Start:

Unlike Windows Server 2003, the data collector DOES NOT write logs to the application logs but rather the following log:

Applications and Services Logs/Microsoft/Windows/Diagnosis-PLA/Operational

Note that I changed the threshold from 2048 to 20480 so that I could trigger the alert:

Now that we’ve generated an information event with the ID 2031 in the logs, we can proceed with setting up a task to send an email to an address.  Proceed by right clicking on the event and select Attach Task To This Event…:

Give the task a meaningful name and proceed by clicking the Next button:

There isn’t much to change in the When an Event Is Logged so continue by clicking on the Next button:

In the Action step, change the action from Start a program to Send an e-mail:

Fill in the appropriate fields (make sure this server can relay mail off of your SMTP server:

Complete the wizard:

Trigger an event to test and you should see an email similar to the following:

I hope this helps anyone looking for a quick and dirty way to monitor free drive space on their servers.