It is the last day of 2004 and while others are
looking forward, Techlog would like to look back at the past year. We can conclude that it has been a turbulent year for Microsoft. Techlog has collected per-month Microsoft news highlights, click the link below to see the overview.
The Team from Techlog would also like to thank you for your support. It has only been ~8 months since we started and we are already getting 15.000+ visitors per month. Lets make 2005 an even better year!
Techlog: Highlights of 2004, an overview (more)
Computers running Microsoft Windows XP can be infected by a
new Trojan horse, program remotely controlled in a victim's system, even after it is patched with Microsoft's latest Service Pack 2, IT security company Symantec warned Wednesday.
The program -- dubbed "Phel", an anagram of "Help" -- infects visitors to a malicious website through Internet Explorer's Help controls, Symantec warned in an advisory.
ISA has some great tools for controlling Internet access. Schedules let you decide when users can access the Internet. Destination Sets let you control where users can go on the Internet. Site and Content Rules are where you set the rules that apply to the destination sets that you’ve configured. A good Internet Access Policy will often use all three elements.
In my consulting practice I’ve been asked to setup this scenario several times. Boss: "I don’t like people visiting eBay during work hours. No more eBay!" Employees: "What about lunch hour?" Boss: "Fine, I don’t care what you do during lunch." Boss to IT: "Make sure no one can access eBay during work hours."
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Bruce Cowper has posted an interesting
article discussing Passwords and Passphrases following Bill's keynote @ ITForum last month. Clearly we'd all like to see the back of passwords as they are unfriendly to users. In time technology may make it feasible for devices such as smartcards and federated authentication services to enable us to take the pain away. In the meantime there are so many systems that require users to enter static passwords that we need to consider how to get the maximum level of security from this basic form of authentication.
As Bruce points out in his
article there are some discussion papers located on TechNet which discuss the use of PassPhrases rather than Passwords. The concept is pretty straight forward, advise users to enter whole sentences in the password field rather than individual words or cryptic combinations of characters. It's not realistic to expect users to remember long strings of random characters for their passwords let alone expect them to change them frequently without writing them down.
When I right clicked on IE 6 to save a JPG file, Save Picture dialog box only shows BMP as the only output format. It only reproes on some computers. After some digging, I found out that Internet cache is full on the dubious computer. For more info, please check
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q260650.
Auction site eBay announced to members on its Web site Wednesday afternoon that it will drop support for Microsoft's Passport and .NET Alerts by late January. Users were told that "once this takes place, the Microsoft Passport button that is currently displayed on Sign In pages will be replaced with links to a page with more information."
The announcement came with practically no warning, however in recent months, it had become much more difficult to sign up for alerts through Microsoft's .NET services as the pages to do so were buried on eBay's site.
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Friday's demise of general support for Microsoft's Windows NT 4.0 may give alternate operating systems, such as Linux,
a temporary opportunity.
Although Microsoft extended Windows NT 4.0 support an additional year to, as the Redmond, Wash.-based developer says on its NT support site, "assist customers upgrading from Windows NT Server 4.0 to the Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 families," the 12 months of grace haven't paid off, according to Forrester Research analyst Joe Wilcox.
Microsoft, is a bit red-faced these days; not only will PC users have to wait longer for the already long-awaited Longhorn, it now seems that finding files and folders fast with a new and promised file system, WinFS, won't find its way to users for a few more years yet.
A CNet News article reported that a Microsoft exec has pretty much
killed any hopes of seeing a new file system from Microsoft anytime soon. More specifically, the article quoted Windows Server Chief Bob Muglia as having said "WinFS in not in the Longhorn client. It is also not in Longhorn Server."
The
Windows Marketplace Discussion Groups provide a public forum where you can ask questions, share your experiences, and state your opinions about products related to Windows. This is the place to learn what other users are saying about the technologies you are considering for personal and professional computing. If you need technical support with Windows-related technology, the Community Center links to support discussion groups for consumers, IT professionals, software developers, and the small business community.
California companies and consumers who purchased Microsoft PC software may be leaving more than
$1 billion on the table as a deadline for filing in a California class action approaches.
The Settlement Recovery Center (SRC), which assists businesses and non-profits making claims in class actions, said less than one million claims out of a potential 14 million claims have been filed as of Monday in the California case. The deadline for filing is Jan. 8.
Steven Bink, a Windows MVP, is predicting what Microsoft has in store for 2005. He writes: "This growing list in no particular order (yet), is based on facts and assumptions". Among other items, these are on his list:
Windows 2003 Server R2
Windows Server 2003 SP1
Monthly IMF updates for Exchange 2003
ISA 2004 Enterprise Edition
SQL Server 2005
You can read the full list on his
site.
New Year's revelers will have one more way to watch the ball drop this New Year's Eve thanks to MSN. The online service has struck an exclusive deal with New York City to become the "official" online provider for the event. Although it was announced Tuesday morning, MSN had already begun to advertise the countdown to 2005 through its video service during commercial breaks this past holiday weekend.
The webcast marks the first time in history that the ball drop will be broadcast over the Internet. Starting at 6pm EST on New Year's Eve, MSN will turn on three cameras, each promising a different angle of the festivities. In addition, MSN hired a local New York radio personality, "Romeo," to emcee the webcast.
(webcast) (more)
Microsoft Corp. on Monday chided a private research outfit for releasing proof-of-concept code for three potentially serious flaws in the Windows operating system, warning that irresponsible disclosure was not in the best interest of consumers. The software giant's rebuke comes five days after a Chinese community group called Xfocus Team said it discovered several
high-risk vulnerabilities affecting multiple versions of Windows.
A spokeswoman for Microsoft said the company is actively investigating the Xfocus Team's findings, which were re-released by anti-virus vendor Symantec Corp. but attributed to a different researcher. "Microsoft is disappointed that Xfocus took actions that could put computer users at risk by not following the commonly accepted industry practice of privately reporting security vulnerabilities to software vendors," the spokeswoman said.
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Evan Dodd is running series of blog posts on Exchange Special Mailboxes. He writes: "Every now and then, people ask about one (or all) of the system-related mailboxes on Exchange 2003 servers."
"There are actually three in particular that people frequently notice and confuse: SystemMailbox{guid}, System Attendant Mailbox, and SMTP (servername-{guid}) Mailbox. There are a bunch of common questions, which I will try to address in the next few posts".
Part 1 - System Mailbox
Part 2 - System Attendant mailbox
Part 3 - SMTP mailbox
On the Microsoft Global Development and Computing Portal you can find a handy utility which lets you view different
Windows keyboard layouts. Simply select the desired layout and a pop-up will show you how the keyboard layout looks like.
"Microsoft® Exchange
Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) is an extension of the Exchange 2003 product, to help companies reduce the amount of unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE), also known as spam, delivered to the users inbox. IMF puts suspected messages away in an archive subdirectory of the Exchange mailroot folder structure. With large numbers of messages filtered by IMF (Microsoft® Exchange 2003 Intelligent Message Filter), administrators have to decide what to do with the contents of the archive.
IMF Companion allows administrators to view, delete or unblock filtered messages. The unblock function returns message to the pickup directory in order to allow Exchange to deliver the message to the user inbox."
The Wall Street Journal has published some 27 letters from
people who Switched to the Mac because of their iPod, people who Switched because of Windows problems, people who want to Switch but have reservations, and some people who are happy in their Windows world. The letters were published in the column Real Time by Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry, in response to a column they wrote last week about the iPod Halo Effect.
On the blog of the Virtual PC Guy there are some interesting articles about migrating a physical computer to a virtual machine.
The articles are subdivided into four parts, and give a good overview of which problems can arise when you decide to migratie your physical machine to a virtual machine.
1.
Tips for migrating a physical computer to a virtual machine (part 1)
2.
Tips for migrating a physical computer to a virtual machine (part 2)
3.
Tips for migrating a physical computer to a virtual machine (part 3)
4.
Tips for migrating a physical computer to a virtual machine (part 4)
Users should stay away from untrusted Web sites and e-mails from unfamiliar sources to avoid becoming victims of an attack aided by three serious security
holes in Windows, security firms warned over the weekend.
An attacker could exploit the unpatched vulnerabilities to cause a denial of service and launch spyware or other malicious code, according to Symantec Security Response and Danish security firm Secunia, which called the problems "highly critical."
Neowin reports:
After removing all references to the 64-bit (IA64) Windows XP here, we've spoken to sources close to the company who have confirmed Microsoft's intensions to axe XP IA64. The company wants to focus on Windows Server 2003 editions of Itanium-based systems.
It is important to emphasize that Microsoft will continue to promote and offer Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and Datacenter Editions for Itanium-based systems, intended for customers who require the highest levels of scalability. For the mainstream server and workstation markets, however, we believe we can best serve our customers needs with Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 Edition, and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, respectively. (continue at source)
The Security Configuration Wizard reduces the attack surface of Microsoft Windows servers by asking the user a series of questions designed to determine the functional requirements of a server. Functionality that is not required, by the roles being performed by the server, is then disabled. In addition to being a fundamental security best practice, attack surface reduction increases the diversity of your Windows landscape and reduces the number of systems that need to be immediately updated when a vulnerability is exposed.
Security Configuration Wizard will be introduced with Windows Server™ 2003 Service Pack 1.
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In this
article the Virtual PC Guy gives an example of customizing the Virtual Server website. In his example he uses a
christmas theme by modifying the VSStyles.css style sheet which can be found in the path '..\Microsoft Virtual Server\WebSite\VirtualServer\scripts\'.
You can also modify the VSStyles.css style sheet to reflect the layout of the rest of your corporate administration tools.
This article discusses the Configuration of the ISA Firewall as an outbound Filtering SMTP Relay, it discusses procedures you can use to make the ISA firewall (ISA Server 2004) an outbound filtering SMTP relay to help offload some processing from your dedicated spam filtering solution.
The ISA firewall’s built-in SMTP Message Screener, while not a complete anti-spam and e-mail anti-virus solution, can go a long way at improving the performance of your current e-mail hygiene solution by performing basic keyword and attachment filtering duties. It will build on the configuration established in an earlier article, '
Configuring ISA for Inbound Filtering SMTP' and shows how to configure the ISA firewall as an outbound filtering SMTP relay.(continue at source)
This Article reviews two of the new features of Windows Server 2003 Active Directory 1.1: raising domain functional levels and using saved queries to simplify administrative tasks.
How does a Windows Server 2003 domain keep track of all these objects as well as their permissions and attributes? With the Active Directory (AD). Think of an object as any physical or virtual resource on your network that collectively has its properties stored in AD. In AD, even the domain itself is an object, so you can have or manage multiple domain resources by using AD. Now, think of AD as a database that stores these objects on your network in a centralized manner, and that can be managed by an administrator from one location, and you've got the whole concept....(continue at source)
I caught this in an
article on Microsoft's antitrust issues in Europe. While Microsoft does provide source for some of their networking protocols (through the MCPP), the AD replication protocol, which is proprietary, is deemed "too valuable to expose". This is unfortunate because it means that other directory vendors will never be able to plug a non-MS directory server into an Active Directory environment and have it act as a "domain controller".
This most notably affects SAMBA, but I'm sure other vendors would be interested too. I can understand there are some serious security issues to deal with by opening the replication protocols, but this could be an opportunity for MS to create a de factor standard for LDAP multi-master replication, which is lacking in the current LDAP specs (and is the biggest cause of lack of interop between directory servers today).
After you apply Exchange 2003 SP1, the behavior of badmail message generation changes. There are some registry settings which can be used to influence this but unfortunately most features of the "BadMailAdmin" script are not built-in.
The Exchange 2000 and 2003 "badmail" folder is the location where mail is stored which caused an error during processing by the Exchange SMTP virtual server. For instance, a message sent to a non-existent recipient in your Exchange organization which has no valid reply address will end up in the badmail folder. The most common messages which can be found in the badmail folder are spam messages because spam is in most cases sent by using a non-existent reply address. There are other factors which cause messages being sent to the badmail folder however.(continue at source)
The Solution Accelerator for Domain Server Consolidation and Migration is a collection of documentation that presents a prescriptive, tested, and supported approach to planning, designing, deploying, and verifying a domain migration project. In the development of such a solution, the accelerator documentation addresses issues that are not typically discussed in the product documentation, such as capacity planning and scenario implementation.
This solution accelerator adds value and uses existing documentation by outlining options available, based on best practices, for the design and considerations of a migration effort from Windows NT 4.0 domains to Windows Server 2003 Active Directory service. In addition, it addresses the key planning and implementation considerations for the migration of supporting network services. A representative enterprise scenario is also defined and the guidance provides the prescriptive application of best practices to meet the business needs of a fictitious large organization.
The whole crew of Techlog wishes you a merry christmas. For Techlog it is the first christmas, and therefore a special one. Our sponsor, Jefka, has made an original drawing about this year's christmas, which is displayed on the right side of the article. Click to see a high resolution version of the drawing. Visit his site for more great pictures.
On December 31 Techlog will look back at this year and write an article about the highlights of 2004. Stay tuned! Season greetings, the Techlog crew.
Windows guru Paul Thurrott has thrown up an amazing interview on his site, dealing with the creation of Windows XP SP2. Thurrott sat down with several of the project leads of SP2, and ended up painting a great picture of how this important security-focused update came to life. The interview also outlined that SP3 is currently not scheduled to add additional features to XP.
SP3 for Windows XP is slated to be a service pack the way we've always done service packs, and not to be a major upgrade. It will focus specifically on QFEs and fixes [to bugs] that are reported by customers. It should not contain new features... SP3 will be a regular customer fix, and also anything that we might find that's security related as part of our regular investigations. (more)
The Dutch government has abandoned its negotiations with Microsoft over an ambitious plan to upgrade more than 260,000 workstations and servers.
Despite a unanimous vote by the Dutch parliament in 2002 to adopt open standards and open source software, Microsoft recently opened exclusive negotiations with the Dutch government regarding a major software upgrade. After Dutch IT weekly newspaper Automatisering Gids leaked details about the €157m ($210m) deal, Dutch MPs
demanded an explanation as to why there hadn't been a mandatory public bid.
In an open letter to the government, several Dutch public organisations and open source lobbyists, including Novell and Bits of Freedom, criticised the government for its secrecy. Even Linspire chief executive Michael Robertson joined in on the heated debate, saying that his Linux software would cost €150m ($201m)
less than the MS bid.
Bob Roudebush writes:
If you’re a Sharepoint geek, you’ll appreciate this. If you aren’t, then you won’t. I was actually more impressed by the quality of the templates that are available rather than the fact that there were templates at all. Usually those “canned” templates are pretty corny and not very pleasing to the eye. A few of these are actually rather good. Here’s a sample of what I’m talking about - the template for “Project Management”:
Ian has enumerated a series of Site Templates
here. RoudyBob has a link to SharePoint Customization that has sites up based on some of those templates like above. Continue at source.
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced Exchange Edge Services, a set of technologies designed for e-mail protection, enhanced security and management of junk email for Exchange customers. To ease planning, testing and deployment for customers, the company has decided to ship most Edge Services components, including the new messaging policy functionality, as part of the next version of Exchange Server.
Microsoft will release some elements of Edge Services with Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2), scheduled for release in the second half of 2005. Exchange Server 2003 SP2 will include the SenderID framework, an e-mail-authentication technology that helps address the problem of spoofing and phishing by verifying the domain name from which the mail is sent.
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VMware just released the brand new product
Assured Computing Environment (ACE) for Enterprises:
What Is VMware ACE?
VMware ACE is an enterprise solution for IT desktop managers who want to provision secure, standardized PC environments throughout the extended enterprise. VMware ACE installs easily and improves the manageability, security and cost-effectiveness of any industry standard PC. VMware ACE enables IT desktop managers to apply enterprise IT policies to a virtual machine containing an operating system, enterprise applications, and data to create an isolated PC environment known as an "assured computing environment". Through Virtual Rights Management technology, VMware ACE enables IT desktop managers to control assured computing environment expiration, secure enterprise information on PCs, and ensure compliance with IT policies.(continue at source)
In a previous
article on techlog the VMWare 5 beta was announced, but then it was only released to a small group of testers. But now the time has come for VMWare to go public with a beta version of the upcoming upgrade. New features are:
Enhanced multi-tier configuration support
Multiple snapshot and snapshot management capabilities
New cloning functionality
Movie record and playback
Improved performance
New and improved Linux user interface
New guest OS, host OS, and 32- and 64-bit hardware support
Support for a new class of USB devices
Command line interface
Workstation 5 beta participants can also download and use the new VMware V2V Assistant tool, which lets users convert Microsoft virtual machines into VMware virtual machines. Download
here
Microsoft is to start shipping a cut-down version of Windows in Europe from January, following the failure of its appeal to the European Court of First Instance over penalties imposed by the Commission earlier this year. Microsoft hasn't run out of appeal routes, but the Court ordered the company to begin carrying out the Commission's decision immediately.
This, according to Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith, means OEMs will get the version of Windows without Media Player next month, with it being available to other customers from February. It's not yet clear precisely what Microsoft's implementation of the decision will entail, but the notion of Windows Media Player being illegal music software in Europe is one to conjure with. Microsoft hasn't been massively concerned about the Commission's fine of €497 million, but it sees - understandably - the Commission's attempt to limit what it can and cannot put into Windows as a direct threat to its business model. As the Commission's intent is to do something about the operation of that business model, that too is understandable.
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Here's a handy tip for those of you using Outlook 2003: if you hold down the control key and then right-click the Outlook icon in your status tray, you'll get an extra option called "Connection Status". Choosing this option reveals which Exchange server and Global Catalog server Outlook is using, together with extremely useful information such as the failure rate of RPCs, and the average response times of communication. Very useful when troubleshooting connectivity issues.
Update: There's even a knowledge base
article about troubleshooting, which reveals the trick.
Microsoft Corp. has quietly released a "critical" Windows XP Service Pack 2 update to fix a serious flaw in the Windows Firewall utility. "After you set up Microsoft Windows Firewall in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), you may discover that your computer can be accessed by anyone on the Internet when you use a dial-up connection to connect to the Internet," the company said in a
knowledge base article.
The update was not included—or mentioned—in the
five "important" advisories Microsoft released earlier this week. Two of those bulletins applied to XP SP2, but the severity rating was reduced to "moderate" for those customers. Gary Schare, director of Windows product management at Microsoft, said it was "an unfortunate oversight" that the SP2 update was shipped without notice.
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A popular configuration for the ISA firewall is to use it as an inbound SMTP filtering relay. You can setup the ISA firewall as an inbound SMTP relay and leverage the built-in SMTP filter and SMTP Message Screener to offload some of the spam and attachment filtering duties from your dedicated spam whacking device or Exchange Server located on an ISA firewall Protected Network. While the ISA firewall's SMTP Message Screener isn't a full-fledged spam whacking and e-mail anti-virus solution, it can perform some initial processing on incoming messages, which takes some heat off your dedicated e-mail scrubbing devices.
This article shows you how to make it happen.
Microsoft employee Peter Torr has started a
flame war in his own blog today. Torr claims that the distribution and code signing of Firefox isn't up to scratch. Torr provides screenshots of the latest XPSP2 protection IE but fails to mention the poor protection in IE 6 SP1 which many more users are still using. Nevertheless if you enjoy battling it out about Firefox vs IE this is a read for you. Here's a snip
"But the thing that makes me really not trust the browser is that it doesn't matter how secure the original code is if the typical usage pattern of the browser requires users to perform insecure actions."
I saw this tip about how to find out when a public folder was last accessed in Exchange which may be useful if you're trying to rationalise your folders during an upgrade or migration. There is a WMI class called Exchange_PublicFolder which has a property called LastAccessTime which you can use. The only challenge would be if you have an anti Virus solution which scanned the Public folder, as you would not be able to tall if the folder was accessed by a user, or by an automated anti-virus scan engine.
Check
here for the WMI reference documentation.
The Microsoft® Operations Manager 2005 Operations Guide includes guidance and recommended best practices for backing up and restoring, maintaining, optimizing and monitoring Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) in an existing IT infrastructure. This guidance is based on the supported MOM deployment architectures described in the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Supported Configurations Guide. Additional instructions are provided for managing agents across multiple domains, across firewalls, across slow links, and in workgroups. Detailed instructions are provided for each of the MOM components: the MOM Database, the Management Server, agents, consoles and the MOM Reporting Database. Detailed information about MOM security-related features and processes are provided in the Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Security Guide.
Description of how Microsoft IT regularly uses the Diskpart.exe utility to dynamically increase disk volume capacity on servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows 2000 Server. The Diskpart.exe utility extends disk volumes without downtime or application interruption, thereby increasing availability and decreasing costs.
Download
here
