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.
Looking at blogs.technet.com for review time and had to slice the blogs by internal team/org, so thought I would share.
MS.COM Ops Security Guidance (MSS) Enterprise Engineering Center SMS&P TN Webcasts MSRC Desktop Deployment TechNet TNFlash TNMag Microsoft Services Labs
The Microsoft Communities Team had launched a website to preview (and collect feedback on) a set of hosted applications, Web services, and modular components that will be available to MSCOM Web publishers, Microsoft product teams, online partners, and third-party community owners to build custom community experiences into both online and offline client environments, where users can browse, search, post, share, and contribute content or code.
Check out the Microsoft Community Search beta, the Microsoft Web Feeds Directory (Beta) and the article Managing Your Information with Web Feeds: Draft Article. Give the team feedback. Drive them to deliver what you need from IT Pro communities
Lots of ways to consume and manipulate feeds and BI about the feeds. For example, Scoble reqs everyone should take a periodic core sample of the blogosphere for phrases such as "<my product here> sucks" and examine the results. To do this, see:
www.pubsub.com
http://digg.com/
http://www.feedster.com/
http://tech.memeorandum.com
http://www.technorati.com
http://icerocket.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/
http://uckan.info/depot/monitorthis/
Recently gathered these up for a refresh of the Interop and Migration section of TechNet. Might be handy if you are a watcher of one of these products/technologies:
Windows XP Service Pack 2
KB RSS Feed
Solution Center
Windows Small Business Server 2003
Windows Services for NetWare 5.0
Windows Services for UNIX 3.5
Windows Server 2003 R2
Windows Server 2003
Visual Studio 6.0
Systems Management Server 2003
SQL Server 2005
Microsoft Operations Manager 2005
Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) 2003
IIS 6.0
Host Integration Server 2004
Exchange Server 2003
BizTalk Server 2004
ASP.NET 2.0
.NET Framework 2.0
Download Content: PowerPoint Presentation
Related Content: IT Pro Webcast | WMA | MP3
Check out the IT Pro resources for planning deployment of the next client OS on the Deploying Windows Vista page.
To answer that pesky "why?" question, check out these resources.
Imagine Olivier in MARATHON MAN interrogating Dustin Hoffman's character ..."Is it safe?"
The Windows Live Safety Center (Beta) launched a few months ago, and provides you with a FREE, frequently updated, on-demand virus scanner which you can use to scan your machine for such threats as worms, Trojans, backdoors, and some user-mode rootkits.
Did I mention it is FREE?
The virus scanner on the Windows Live Safety Center beta site runs a scan of your computer only when you visit the site. It does not run periodic scans of your system, and does not provide features to prevent you from getting infected with a virus in the first place. It simply helps you get them off once you've gotten infected.
The site has other nifty add-ons, such as the top threats box;
An active-X download is required. Highly reccomended.
I love this company. Think about how much time, money, and wasted employee effort you could save with an appliance that lets you easily and cheaply set up DPM for your environment.
Watch the webcast Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape Backup and Recovery with DPM and Quantum
February 2, 2006-11:00 AM, Jason Iehl, Manager Strategic Alliances, Quantum
As information technology (IT) infrastructures continue to grow, it becomes more difficult to implement a reliable, timely backup and recovery system. Join this webcast to learn how Microsoft is partnering with Quantum to deliver the DPM5500, an appliance based on Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) that is an integrated disk-to-disk-to-tape backup and recovery solution. The DPM5500 extends the traditional client/server backup paradigm by offering freedom to recover data regardless of media type or origin, and with far more specific options for recovery point objectives.
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:
So - Who is missing from his list? What product teams do you want to see blogging here for IT Pros? leave comments
Thanks to bhandler - a couple more
Microsoft.COM TeamSecurity Response CenterWindows Core File Services
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.
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....
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:
Benefit
Source or Derivation
Administration
50 percent less time to manage file servers
Once a hard quota system has been deployed
Hardware
15 percent reduction in hardware costs
Based on ability to more precisely measure current use and gauge future need
Operations
25 to 50 percent reclamation of storage on existing servers, on average
FSRM reports on Least Recently Accessed Files and sending automated e-mail messages to users
Projected 1.8 terabytes storage reduction
Based on 55,000 Microsoft employees, and some 35,000 partners and vendors using Microsoft IT resources each deleting just 20 megabytes of unused data through FSRM quotas. Actual reduction anticipated to be much greater.
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.
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:
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 Operations team at microsoft.com not only runs one of the world's largest, most complex, most visited web properties...often using Microsoft product before they are released to the public (we call this eating our own dogfood) - they share their IT know-how...for free!
Read their blog
Check out their webcasts:
Dean writes about the new interactive TechNet webcast calendar. This interactive calendar will quickly help you find live webcasts* that fit your schedule as well as on-demand webcasts to view at your convenience. You can choose your time zone and filter this list by intended audience, webcast series, product or topic, and presenter. Select "Filter Webcast Listings" below to access the filters.
*Oh, and if you attend a live event and give feedback, you can win a Creative Zen portable music player until June 30, 2006.
How cool is that?
The ISA team has started a TN blog. They have asked for feedback and opened the dialogue. Head on over and let them know what issues you want to see there (content filtering to protect against certain types of security exploits, for example?)
Jesper has a great article on why you should disable the admin account on your machine.
TechNet Magazine has a blog – they are looking to start a conversation with IT Pros about what you want in a magazine. Do you want to tell them? Check them out.
Want to know how the Ops team for one of the web's largest website manages 2005 availability of 99.83 % while eating dogfood hand-over-fist (like betas for IIs 7.0, .Net 2.0, Longhorn server, 64 bit)?
Read the ms.com ops team blog and find out.
See the advisory just released (912840 Vulnerability in Graphics Rendering Engine Could Allow Remote Code Execution) for information on how to get your WMF security update before patch Tuesday (1/10). The vulnerability is listed as critical for major versions, and there has been much press and some reports of exploit attempts. Read the advisory and bulletin, evaluate and run your risk management proc now. The security update will be available at 2:00 pm PT as MS06-001.
Check out the webcast Jan 6 11 am PST athttp://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032288647&Culture=en-US
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
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.
"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.
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:
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:
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.