Fabrice has a great post detailing R2 interop features you want to check out first. Here is the interop detail:

R2 also comes with three components designed to simplify Unix/Linux interoperability by letting a Windows system pretend to be a *nix system by donning a variety of masks:

• Identity Management for Unix (IdMU) lets an AD domain controller pretend to be a Network Information Service (NIS) server for purposes of authentication and authorization (see Figure 4, below).
• Microsoft Services for Network File System (MSNFS) lets Unix/Linux clients use NFS to mount shared folders on Windows servers. This eliminates the need for configuring Samba and makes file storage more seamless in a distributed environment.
• Subsystem for Unix-based Applications (SUA) lets you compile and run the source code for a Unix/Linux application natively on a Windows machine without an intervening emulator.

Figure 4. Identity Management for Unix lets an AD domain controller pretend to be a Unix server for authorization purposes. (Click image to view larger version.)

All these features are present in Services for Unix, but their capabilities have been enhanced, the interfaces simplified and the underlying system changes brought in line with commonly accepted industry practices.

The IT group inside Microsoft uses File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) as a centralized tool for managing file servers located in branch offices and data centers around the world. FSRM, which is found in the Windows Server 2003 R2 system, helps Microsoft IT staff to better monitor, control, and manage the quantity and types of data stored on the company’s servers. They write up the results here, including:

The cfs bloggers pass on some perf data for your estimates:

Quotas: Unlike Win2K quotas, which you could only apply at the volume level and which relied solely on file ownership to determine disk utilization, quotas in R2 SRM can be assigned to individual folders or sets of folders. Internal benchmarks have consistently shown I/O performance cost of less than 10% for tracking quotas on a volume. The cost remains fairly flat with volume size and number of quotas.

Screening: Want to keep user's pesky audio and video files off your server? Based on file extension (such as .MP3 or .WMV or even, dare we say - .PST)you can set policy to either actively prevent writing these files to the server, or you can set the policy as passive and allow users to write, but audit policy violations for follow up or chargeback. The I/O performance impact is negligible for this feature.

Reporting: You can get usage statistics reports by file size, owner, least recently used files, duplicate files and more. SRM can generate reports automatically every night so you can come to morning meetings armed with enough paper printouts to keep even the most detail-oriented manager happy. NOTE however: Running reports can negatively impact server performance. It is recommended that storage reports be scheduled for off-peak hours.

TechNet chat has a good FSRM chat transcript here.

This e-week article quotes Bill Hilf on Microsoft/JEMS interop plans. Bill run's the Linux lab at Microsoft.

Now if we could just get Bill or one of the Linux lab rats to blog....

Some upcoming webcasts that you should take a look at:

TechNet Webcast: Best Practices for Security Update Management with Systems Management Server 2003 (Level 200)

Wednesday, January 25, 2006 - 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM Pacific Time, John Baker, TechNet Presenter, Microsoft Corporation

Join this webcast to learn about the best practices you should consider when you develop an update management solution using Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003. Get detailed recommendations for all parts of a software update solution, including the setup stage and the software update cycle. We provide specific guidance on updating  desktop, mobile, and server computers. We also discuss using the Dell inventory tool to update Dell servers.

TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 for Exchange Deployments (Level 200)

Friday, January 27, 2006 - 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM Pacific Time, Keith Combs, TechNet Presenter, Microsoft Corporation

In this webcast, we explore the Microsoft Exchange 2003 Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 and show how it can help your organization proactively identify problems. We discuss the monitoring capabilities provided by this management pack and demonstrate how they can help you to identify problems and quickly solve them. We also examine the reporting capabilities provided by this management pack and explain how they can help you avoid problems.

TechNet blogs are almost one year old, and it is review time. In looking over the stats, I note:

336 blogs as of 1/12/06. Many are role-based (life of a...consultant/ts/dev). Many are geo-based (Ireland, Norway, France, Canada - EMEA, LATAM), some are really, really focused (Switzerland Security) and a lot are...um... broadly focused...

And then, there are a couple that are vertical-based.

Alpha sorted by product - blogs run by the product team or focused on a product:

I love this company. Starting with the Jan 06 secbulls, you can now get Security and critical updates on ISO-9660 CD image files from the Microsoft Download Center.

January's is here.

How cool is that? Leave comments.

I love this company. How cool is it that Dugie's posted a spreadsheet that tells you when each patch tuesday falls for the next 2 years so you can schedule lab time for testing?

Leave comments.

Many of the problems in enterprise IT worldwide have a common underlying root causative element - it is way too hard to test and model changes to the production environment BEFORE they are committed.

NO MORE. What if you could model your enterprise IT environment virtually, then do whatever "what-if" tests you needed, then simply wipe/reload, and do it again? Would you improve security through faster patching? Would you speed time to market for your appdev? Would you make better, faster, migration and upgrade decisions?

Check out the WSSRA Virtual Environments for Development and Test, released this week. WSSRA Virtual Environments for Development and Test (WSSRA-VE) is an extension of the WSSRA Implementation Guides, leveragings the power of Virtual Server 2005 and automated deployment and configuration tools to minimize the physical infrastructure and logistical overhead necessary to deploy emulations of various data center services. Like WSSRA itself, the WSSRA-VE is intended to aid users in their own effort to model their operational environment and condense it to a scale that can be representative of the infrastructure integration challenges facing developers and testers of distributed, message-based applications and IT services, and still be inexpensive and relatively economical to build and use throughout a large-scale IT organization.

The WSSRA-VE design has been rigorously tested and proven in a lab environment to provide exceptional planning and implementation guidance that addresses fundamental infrastructure issues such as lab availability, lab-to-production network security, and management of many virtualized environments simultaneously.

WSSRA-VE consists of a single downloadable package:

• A fully integrated set of guidance, including an introduction document, an architectural blueprint, a planning guide, a build guide, and an operations guide. 
• A WSSRA-VE Deployment Kit that provides most of the configuration files and supporting documents used to build instances of these virtualized environments. The WSSRA-VE Deployment Kit contains the following:
  • Useful Command files, Windows Script Host and Visual Basic scripts for automating tedious tasks
  • ISA 2004 firewall rules used to produce a software-based firewall similar to specification hardware firewalls used in the original WSSRA
  • Security policies and GPO backup files to set up a WSSRA-compliant domain schema
  • Build Verification Test cases
  • Virtual Machine settings files for each virtual system in a WSSRA-VE instance
  • For detailed information on automated deployment and configuration, Automated Deployment Toolkit (ADT) Manifest files used to build the environments in the lab and guidance on how to read these files
  • Various WinPE extensions to aid in the deployment and configuration of many IT services

Does this not totally rock? Leave comments

Just in - the updated Windows Server 2003 Security Guide provides specific recommendations about how to harden computers that run Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (SP1) in three distinct enterprise environments—one in which older operating systems such as Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98 must be supported, one in which Windows 2000 is the earliest version of the Windows operating system in use, and one in which concern about security is so great that significant loss of client functionality and manageability is considered an acceptable tradeoff to achieve maximum security. These three environments are respectively referred to as the Legacy Client (LC), Enterprise Client (EC), and Specialized Security – Limited Functionality (SSLF) environments throughout this guide.

But wait, there's more...

The Threats and Countermeasures guide provides you with a reference to all security settings that provide countermeasures for specific threats against current versions of the Microsoft Windows operating systems. This guide is a companion to two other Microsoft publications: the Windows Server 2003 Security Guide, and the Windows XP Security Guide. 

• Rate of growth in CY 2005 for technet blogs for IT Pros - 300%
• Rate of growth in CY 2005 for msdn blogs for developers - 340%

Is that success?

Earlier in the year, we discussed success metrics in the microsoft blogging community. One thing we can and do measure is RSS hits in relation to web hits. We came to the conclusion that we could look at the ratio as:

• HighRSS/Web = you have a cult following 
• Low RSS/Web = your stuff is valuable or otherwise compelling to people who don't know you 

In looking at my blog's performance, I am going to claim progress on my personal blogging goals on my review based on, among other measures:

• RSS/Web April 05 = .52
• RSS/Web Dec 05 = 1.37

"Criminal mastermind" is often a oxymoron. A new bunch of scam-artists are sending snail-mail subscription solicitations to a magazine name hijacked from a defunct Microsoft publication. Read the details on Stephen Toub's blog.

Recently, an IT Pro wrote in looking for help in finding what web pages were visited by a user on a remote machine. Some sort of security audit perhaps? There is an nifty new scriptcenter resource to help with this.

This script gets the URL and date/time of each item in the browser History. For more information on the Shell object model, see the MSDN section on the Windows Shell, especially Shell Objects for Scripting and Microsoft Visual Basic. 

The Shell.Application object is local-only, so to run this script against a remote machine you could write a script that copies it there with the Script Runtime FileSystemObject and runs it with in32_Process.Create, or else use a command-line tool like psexec.exe (freeware downloadable) to run it remotely.