One of the perils of working at a small company, is that there's no dedicated IT support person. I've volunteered to take on this role, as I've got years of experience of using Google, a screwdriver, and lots of brute force to get things working. Our current IT problem is that one of our development servers keeps losing its network connection for no apparent reason. The event logs don't throw up anything unusual, yet the connection just dies every few hours, which wreaks havoc with our automated backups! The most annoying thing is that the on-site IT guru in the building (servicing many small companies) came in and fiddled with the servers last month, before which this problem didn't exist. He denies all knowledge, and refuses to look into it - how typical.
After a LOT of Googling, I finally found something useful: Microsoft's DevCon utility. This is Device Manager on steroids, and allows you to start / stop / reconfigure your PC's hardware items via command-line scripts. Thanks to the smart people at Tech Republic, I've now got a working script to ping an external server, and restart the network card if the ping fails. Actually getting the right syntax for the device name took a bit of trial and error, as initially I was inputting the entire hardware ID (located through the detials tab on Device Manager) - something like "PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_1064&SUBSYS_0123456&REV_00\4&D2894CD&0&0818", which I thought should do the job. It didn't... it seems to like abbreviations though, so I just removed everything after the SUBSYS value (in the example above, this just left "PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_1064&SUBSYS_0123456"), and that did the trick. Pretty nifty little tool - you can even reboot the server using DevCon, so handle with care. Now, where did I put my hammer?
