Introduction to Network Trace Analysis Part 0: Laying the Groundwork
Nearly all modern applications use the network to some degree and knowing how your specific technology interacts with the network will help you understand not only the portion that uses the network but also how your application is designed. If you can perform a basic network trace it can help direct further analysis and prevent at least a few trips down rabbit holes (I'm looking at you DNS).Introduction to Network Trace Analysis 4: DNS (it's always DNS)
Howdy everyone! I'm back to talk about one of my favorite causes of heartache, the domain name system (DNS). This will be our first foray into an application layer protocol. The concept of DNS is simple enough, but it can lead to some confusing situations if you don't keep its function in mind. No time to waste, let's get going!Introduction to Network Trace Analysis 5: SMB? Sounds good to me!
Let's start off with the question, what is this whole SMB thing anyway? SMB is a network file system protocol. This means that it can allow Machine A to read and write files on Machine B. This protocol serves as the backbone of much of the Enterprise Windows Ecosystem. For example, did you know that the group policy SYSVOL is an SMB share? Pretty cool right? In recent history, there have been tons of improvements to SMB.Introduction to Network Trace Analysis 3: TCP Performance
A lot of variables affect TCP performance but not all of them are easily configurable. Let’s start with our absolute constraint. The speed of light. Unfortunately, we need to abide by the pesky laws of physics. Let’s say I am communicating with a server on the exact opposite site of the earth 6,357km away.
Collecting Debug Information from Containerized Applications
Howdy everyone! It's your favorite Debug Engineer, Will Aftring back again, this time talking about containers. This blog post will assume that you have a fundamental understanding of Windows containers. If that isn't the case, then then I highly recommend reading Get started: Run your first Windows container. Many developers and IT Admins are in the midst of migrating long standing applications into containers to take advantage of the myriad of benefits made available with containerization. NOTE: Not all applications are able to equally take advantage of the benefits of containerization. It is another tool for the toolbox to be used at your discretion. But moving an existing application into a container can be a bit tricky. With this blog post I hope to help make that process a little bit easier for you.Understanding Lock Contention in Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA)
Hi everyone, this is Will Aftring with the Windows Debug team. I was debugging an application performance issue and thought “this is a great example of lock contention”. For this post we will be using the Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) to review data collected with the Windows Performance Recorder (WPR). For the sake of keeping this post focused I won’t go in depth on WPR but there are plenty of resources on how to get started. Getting Started Windows Performance Recorder | Microsoft Docs
