Yesterday was a tough day for all of us -- at least all of us that have a heart. Ten years ago that day I was in the Atlanta Convention Center right across from CNN. I was judging the Best of Interop awards when we heard a blow-by-blow over the Internet of what happened in New York.
Two towers were struck, and planes were still in the air. CNN, I reckoned, was a pretty good possible target in and of itself, and there were a good ten thousand people already at the convention. I wasn't terrified, but did think it was a decent idea to move our now meaningless deliberations to another location. (By the way, I don't believe in the word 'terrorist.' It assumes they are scaring the bejeepers out of all of us and that gives these creeps, losers and criminals power they don't deserve.)
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Posted by Doug Barney on 09/11/20112 comments
Lately there have been a heckuva lot of cloud and Web services failures, and this week is no exception. Microsoft's SkyDrive, Hotmail, Live services, Office 365 and MSN.com all went down to some extent. Most of these are sideline services. I know very few that use Hotmail as their core business e-mail.
My services are so far uninterrupted as most of the problems were in Asia and Europe.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 09/09/20113 comments
Windows Server 2008 will come with Hyper-V, so why not Windows 8? Why not indeed. Microsoft says it will incorporate Hyper-V as a client virtualization tool, which will open up a range of possibilities.
One is security. If you run your browsing and e-mail sessions in a VM, they are isolated from your core apps and data. This is the theory behind VMware Player. Theoretically you can say goodbye to most malware.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 09/09/20111 comments
You may not want to take next Tuesday entirely off, but you shouldn't be exactly overwhelmed with patch work either.
There are zero critical items, and five deemed as important. As usual, Office, Windows Server and Windows itself get the lion's share of fixes, though it seemed that IE ducked out of this round.
How long does it take you to install patches and do you prioritize based on criticality? Send your hopefully best practices to [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 09/09/20111 comments
Software vendors always want you on their latest and greatest, this is called insuring their revenue stream. Customers aren't usually so anxious to spend hard-earned corporate dollars on new software when the old stuff works just fine.
The carrot is the promise of cool new features. The vendor stick is ending support, in particular stopping security updates and patches.
Help Doug out with a future feature by writing to him about the unsupported hardware and software you still use. Send your thoughts to [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 09/08/201112 comments
Doug is working on a story on how many may not want to take the plunge into the cloud due to slow WAN connections.
Is your current WAN setup in your area holding you back from making the move? And how do you see the overall infrastructure changing to facilitate more applications and clients in the cloud? Share your thoughts with Doug at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 09/08/20111 comments
It is rare that Microsoft, the Mozilla Foundation and Google agree on anything. But all three believe that DigiNotar, a digital cert vendor from Holland, is bad news. The trio revoked the company's offerings -- first because of fraudulent certs (which came from a hacker, not the vendor), and second because DigiNotar responded so poorly to the incident.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 09/07/20110 comments
As Rod Blagojevich, whose family nickname is apparently Milorad, knows there is nothing like a good bribe.
While I don't think Microsoft is breaking any federal laws, it is offering monetary incentives to move you from Salesforce.com and other CRM products to Dynamics CRM Online. The honchos in Redmond will give you a cool one hundred and fifty smackers for every user that makes the move. And you have until this March to decide.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 09/07/20113 comments
Are you as confused as I am about HP's smart phone and tablet strategy? Or is it a case of the company simply not having one? First word leaked that this whole business was being disbanded. Then there was a fire sale on HP tablets using webOS (which it bought from Palm). I think HP was selling a $500 unit for a cool hundred bucks.
That generated some excitement so HP is rethinking its whole plan. Now it seems that webOS will live on and will be part of HP's hardware group. It will also be included in its software division.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 09/07/20113 comments
Readers share their thoughts on applying Windows updates:
I test all patches. The testing is geared to getting a feel for what might break. Other patches we test for two weeks. The only 'updates' that do not get installed at release are application dumb stuff like IE upgrades. In general, our view is that security patches are released for a reason.
-Anonymous
Here are my brief thoughts on Microsoft patching -- as a Microsoft partner and VAR -- for most of our customers (but not all) that do not have their own in-house IT staff. In 95 percent of circumstances we install and configure WSUS 3.0 to automatically download, approve and install the updates. We have been doing this strategy for about three years -- ever since WSUS 3.0 came out.
That means as long as a computer is on it gets updates. Here are the results:
- Randomly some older Server 2003 servers hang at 'Windows is shutting down,' but not most
- Only time we've been burned was an update that killed Exchange 2007 OWA on Server 2003 x64
Otherwise, I run on the assumption that the updates do more good than harm.
-Doug
Our practice is to apply all new patches to I/T workstations and a few non-production servers, and let them run for a day or two.
If no problems occur, we have a small set of 'regular users' that get all patches (one or two from each office) for a day or two.
If no problems there, then all patches are pushed out to remaining computers.
Probably takes a week to ten days to get everything patched -- 350 PCs and 40 servers.
-Jim
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Posted by Doug Barney on 08/31/20110 comments
"Morto" is the weird name of a recently discovered worm that runs across Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). The worm is installed through a rogue Windows DLL, traverses RDP and tries to figure out your password and login.
It is not the most powerful password cracker -- if you have a complex password, you should be set. But those dummies with simple passwords such as admin could be in trouble, as Morto tries to break in using around 30 of the most common passwords.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 08/31/20110 comments
The Ribbon has been out since Office 2007, and legions of users still hate the darn thing. Microsoft, however, loves it and plans to use it in Windows 8, specifically to manage files. You can say goodbye to the old Windows Explore, and hello to a whole new interface.
The new Ribbon-based Windows Explorer will have a File tab, as well as View, Share and Home. The Ribbon is customizable and offers shortcuts for Windows Explorer commands.
Posted by Doug Barney on 08/31/201115 comments