Well this week I had my quarterly visit to sunny Brisbane.  I like going to Brisbane.  It's a nice place.  Anyway the primary reason for my trip was to attend and present at the Brisbane SBS User Group.  They were having there Annual General Meeting on Tuesday and it was kind of a milestone for them as they are now officially incorporated.  This is something they have had in the works now for 18 months.  It's good to see them make that milestone.  So in my normail style I thought I would do my normal Live Search about the place I'm going to visit.  So check out the link above for some more information on the city of Brisbane.  Bear with me hear as the post does get more interesting in a minute.

How's about a couple of photos?

View of the skyline

Map of the area

And click here for a map of where the meeting was.  This is the location of Microsoft in Brisbane.

So onto the meeting.  Stuart Applegate runs the Brisbane SBS User Group and they are always looking for new members.  So if you deal in Microsoft Small Business Server and live in the Brisbane area then get along to the meetings as they are always very informative.  They currently have 127 members and normally get 25 - 30 people to the monthly meetings.  The first part of the meeting this month was the formalities of the AGM.  This was relatively painless and they completed that in about an hour.

Here is a photo of Stuart doing his thing..Sorry Stuart couldn't resist..

Next up I got a spot to talk about the new Firewall in Windows Vista.  I've done this session a couple of times now and it seems to go down quite well.  The new firewall in Windows Vista really picks up where Windows XP SP2 left off.  It includes a bi-directional firewall that is integreated with IPSEC.  This makes is far easier to setup isoaltion rules or secure connections between 2 servers. So the key features are as follows:

• Stateful host based firewall with support for filtering of incoming and outgoing traffic.
• New MMC Snapin with for easy GUI based configuration - You can still use the NETSH ADVFIREWALL command to configure the firewall and script if needed.
• Integration with IPSEC filtering in the one console.

• Rules can be configured for Active Directory® directory service accounts and groups, source and destination IP addresses, IP protocol number, source and destination Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) ports, all or multiple TCP or UDP ports, specific types of interfaces, Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) and ICMP for IPv6 (ICMPv6) traffic by Type and Code, and for services.

• The default firewall behaviour is to block all incoming traffic unless its solicited or it matches a rule that is configured.

• For outgoing traffic the default behaviour is to block all outgoing traffic unless it matches a configured rule.

Below is a picture of the console:

I spent most of my time showing the guys the many options of this console. This is where you will setup you rules and monitoring the firewall. Having it all in the one place makes it alot easier.

So for those that were there click here to get the powerpoint deck and for those interested by all means have a look.  We didn't get through all of the slides as we went down a general securiy tangent which was fine.

So we finished up about 8:30PM or so and I was buggered. It was back to the hotel for a quiet beer and some sleep..

The next morning I caught up with Andrew Dugdell aka Dugie and Adam Clark.  Dugie runs the Brisbane Infastructure Group and Adam runs the Brisbane SharePoint User Group.  Both of the groups meet at Microsoft in Brisbane every month so if you have interest in infrastructure topics then get along to BIG and if SharePoint is your game the get along to the SharePoint User Group

So as always it was a good visit and Dugie has convinced me to come back up in December to help out with their Windows Media Centre sessions so see you then mate!

Cheers, Jeffa