The BASIS of SAP

Depending on how advanced the rest of your IT organisation is, you may need to be the jack of all trades. In fact, sometimes it feels as if anything that a Developer or End User doesn’t understand automatically becomes the property of the BASIS Administrator. Typicaly, these can include anything to do with the infrastructure between the users desktop and the SAP application.

An example I’ve been currently working on is a network issue where a user can access the Portal from one machine but not another. I used to use separate tools to do my network monitoring and debugging (yes, there are people responsible for this, but I have won a lot of good will by providing as much data as possible), but these days ….

Net Tools 2008 has been described as The Swiss army tool for network administrators everywhere. It is a very versatile tool, and
just like any tool it can be used for good or evil. What this means is that you may find the site blocked at work.

Available functions, usefull for both the desktop and Windows Servers, include

An FTP Client for quick file transfers,
Monitor system up status with Monitor Host IP,
Mass file renamer, to rename a whole bunch of log files,
Bandwidth Monitor.

Another tool that I’ve feard of is eToolz which is a collection of network and Internet tools that provides a graphical interface for several common commands. This includes ping, tracert, DNS lookups, http headers, default ports, etcetera. This seems more directedt to someone who who supports web sites, but after all thats what the Portal is …