Looks like there was more fun overnight than the Central Florida hurricanes, check out what OWN was up to:

For the past 10 hours or so we have been handling an 820% surge in reboot requests for hung Microsoft servers after applying the latest security patches. Our managed network of Windows 2003 servers has not been affected but a huge portion of our network apparently has, please be advised.

If your Windows Server becomes inaccessible as a result of the latest patches please open a ticket request and mark it as urgent. You will not be charged for the support request and your reboot will be handled with the highest priority. We have an additional shift on hand in all data centers to help you through this network event.

Ouch. I dig the quantified percentage surge breakdown, and they bitch about Shockey Monkey reporting

To be honest, I am quite happy with Microsoft patch quality as of late. For months now you could reliably install a patch and not think about it twice about not rebooting properly, hanging the system, bluescreening or worse. It has been pretty much as rock solid as patching gets.. Do I wish that was the case before a multimillion dollar investment to provide every server on the network with a remote reboot switch? Yeah, little bitter about that, but it has saved more money in SLA refunds that we were cutting because we stood behind the reliability of Microsoft software. I’m pretty content with Microsoft, even given the events.

I did a little bit of digging. The freezes/hangs were not associated with the systems that were on a regular patch schedule - so the systems that were managed by windows update server or regularly scheduled windows update were not the problem. The systems where people did their own patches and manually did Microsoft Update in the browser… poof. I guess that will make Susan feel a little better because her experience has been exactly opposite in the past few months - manual updates fine, managed updates causing problems.

The big picture…

I spent the better part of 2000’s bitching and moaning about Microsoft patches, cutting checks when they failed, escalating them through Microsoft and feeling like a complete douchebag when I asked my PSS friends a support question at 1 AM. Nobody likes being picked on for something that is not their problem. And to give Microsoft credit, the patch situation has greatly improved. 

Over the last few days there has been a little conversation going around the general displeasure with Microsoft, you know, things just not working up to the expectations. I shared a few details on the thread about how OWN faced the same issues and how we overcame them and why we were able to overcome them. The message was largely ignored, pushed forward by other complaints and issues until multiple people basically leveled that they don’t have the time to sit around and complain but a business to run.

Therein lies the problem. There are companies that are service focused and driven by the customer feedback. Then there are companies that are product focused and believe that the resolution to issues is an upgrade. I believe that Microsoft and I sit on the polar opposite ends of that world, one does everything it can to reassure the customer base that the fix is on its way, the other tries to fix the problem right away and hopes the customer doesn’t bash them as ignorant.

Customers see and recognize this as well. When everyone is complaining about an issue out loud and nothing is done about it, people stop complaining. For the most part, the peer system is very much a collaborative sanity check for an IT person - ok, now that we all agree its broken let’s just wait for a fix - but what happens when the problem is in licensing? Or product implementation? Or partner program benefits?

Well, you get quiet. You sit on your hands, you look around, you cough, and then you realize you got all this shit that needs to get done and you focus on your own problems and try to minimize the impact that Microsoft has on you. Whether you stop patching completely or invest millions of dollars in reboot switches, you find your solution and you move on.

MVPs want people to keep on complaining, to keep on escalating issues, to keep calling PSS, to keep flooding the newsgroups… because they care about the product and want to see it improve. They need the ammo to say that a product sucks and ask for changes. And more power to the MVPs.

Business owners have better shit to do, after multiple complaints and no response they get the message, they believe that if Microsoft was truly concerned about the problems they would work on fixing them, that it’s Microsoft’s job to fix the problems not theirs to continue to complain and that if Microsoft was truly interested they would do something about all their previous issues.

Although I’m an MVP, I am on the business owners side of the argument - If a company is truly concerned about their problems they would be more proactive in addressing, admitting and processing them, they wouldn’t be reactionary to the “filtered up” complaints of people who haven’t become completely disaffected yet.

[ __________ insert link where Susan beats me up over what I just said ]

Another day, another two dozen people added me as their Plaxo contacts. Grrr. The joys of being a community whore is that anyone that can Google your address adds you as a business contact.

Let me level with you friends. If I don’t know you, you’re not a contact. You are “some dude”

If I am not giving you money, you are not a business contact. If you choose to add me to your business contacts, you’re a spammer.

If you are not giving me money, you’re not a business contact. You are a prospect/lead.

Some people make a fatal mistake of thinking that a huge connection network makes them seem like they are “in” like they are “connected” - err, no you’re not. You’re just an annoying whore. Precisely the kind that everyone avoids. How do you spot a whore? Look at the connection-to-recommendation ratio. If they know 500 people but none of those choose to recommend them on the merits of the value of their business… guess what? You’z a ho.

Blackberry global network takes a monumental dump again, leaving millions of heroin addicts blackberry users without their email for several hours.

But you know who I feel for? Microsoft! Yeah, an underdog yet again. Blackberry follows up its 14 hour outage with a four hour outage and BB customers hug their little devices like a weed junkie hugs his bag of weed and a bag of chips. Apple outright rapes their iPhone early adopters, first by crippling the device, then by doing a $200 discount a month into the sales and discontinuing their 4GB model, then by crippling third party applications, then by setting the app cost to $6 and iTunes only barring the users from any decent software and locking it down to a crappy carrier… and Mactards hug their devices too.

Though it may not be nice to make fun of addicts, they are such because they love the products even given the insurmountable lack of reliability and functionality others percieve. I sure hope Microsoft is paying attention to this and responding so it doesn’t again have to dig billions into its wealth to buy a distant second competitor long after the war has already been lost (in this case, search).

And as to our gentle neighbors to the north.. Any chance you guys can either fire Jag Shokar from his position of Blackberry SP Alliance Manager or perhaps find some other H1–B reject in your monkey bucket that can process partner applications? Clocking on a month now of waiting for an update to a partner app that was submitted six months ago…. Does Canada take a 6 month vacation to scate around and chase penguins or are you just completely incompetent as evidenced by your network / staff response?

Check out the new stuff in AuthAnvil 1.5:

For starters, there are plenty of fixes and updates to the core system. There are over 50 usability bugs that have been fixed ranging for faster communication in the AuthAnvil DCOM Bridge to support for periods in AuthAnvil usernames.
 
We also include a few new things:
• The new AuthAnvil Web Logon Agent. You can now add strong authentication to web applications using Virtual Directories in IIS6. Look for an update that will also protect complete websites like Sharepoint in the first half of this year.
• The new AuthAnvil RADIUS Server. Microsoft’s Internet Authentication Server is toast… as is our IAS extension. With all the problems IAS posed for our premium customers who wished to use it along with MIcrosoft’s ISA server, we have found a better solution which also allows us to now support ful MSCHAP2 VPN,
• More documentation. You asked for it. So it’s now on the ISO.

Coolest of all – I saw AuthAnvil on a Windows Home Server today. We’re looking to use AuthAnvil as our main offering of securing the hosting side of hosted solutions since that happens to be the #1 part of paranoia when it comes to remote workers.. It’s always about differentiation.

But check out AuthAnvil, its BY FAR the most affordable thing out there when it comes to two factor authentication. If your projects fell through because you submitted an RSA quote with your pitch, you’re going to be a big fan of Dana’s.

It’s Sunday, so here is your lesson…

The man kind… Is a social one, my brothers and sisters….

Love thy neighbor, love thy fellow man. Do onto others as you would wish them do onto you….

We are all equal, created by God, and we need to pray together.. we need to geek together..

As a humanity.. as a society… as a community..

That ought to be enough for the front row in hell..

Why the tears, nobody invited you to the party? You didn’t hear about the latest event? You missed a networking opportunity? How did that happen?

People only hold the door open for so long. When they don’t see anyone coming towards it, the door gets closed.

Such is the case of the IT communities in Orlando. And boy do we have some awesome tech groups here. For example, we have four LUGs. We have a .NET group. We have an SBS/ITPRO group. We have IAMCP. We have a PHP group. We have a Cup o’ Code for Web 2.0 enthusiasts. We have PodCamp Orlando.

The opportunities to network, to discuss things with your peers, to get something off your shoulders with the only likely group of people that would understand… the way to open your mind to something new… is out there. You have been cordially invited.

But here is the bitch about friends and socialization… If you’re perceived to show up only when it has some direct payoff to you, you tend not to be invited to the special things. People like hanging out and working with people that they like. These are human beings, not clerks at a store anxious to make your day. If you don’t care about them, they won’t care (or think) about you when they could use you.

Social benefits come to those who show interest in their community and their fellow man. Relationships are primary, business relationships are secondary.

Few years ago tar-pitting was a big deal among SBSers who tried to protect their systems from spammers, worms and directory harvesting. Microsoft’s Alex Nikolayev, the big daddy of Microsoft’s SMTP stack developed the tar pitting technology for Microsoft’s SMTP server on top of which Microsoft Exchange 2003 works.

What is tar pitting you ask? It is a process of throttling bad recipient responses in the SMTP channel that are meant to slow down the spammer or directory harvesting attack meant to figure out the valid (or prune invalid) email addresses on your mail server. It works in conjunction with recipient filtering, so if you’re being a good little Internet participant and issuing NDRs as per RFC requirement, tar pitting can help. What exactly does it do? Here is a visual example:

220 daisy.theofficeserver.com Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 6.0.3790.3959 ready at  Sat, 9 Feb 2008 15:31:38 -0500
ehlo vlad.net
250-daisy.theofficeserver.com Hello [65.99.255.240]
250-TURN
250-SIZE
250-ETRN
250-PIPELINING
250-DSN
250 OK
mail from: vlad@vlad.net
250 2.1.0 vlad@vlad.net….Sender OK
rcpt to: administrator@daisy.theofficeserver.com
250 2.1.5 administrator@daisy.theofficeserver.com
rcpt to: moo@daisy.theofficeserver.com
550 5.1.1 User unknown
rcpt to: cow@daisy.theofficeserver.com
550 5.1.1 User unknown
rcpt to: bee@daisy.theofficeserver.com
550 5.1.1 User unknown
rcpt to: sheep@daisy.theofficeserver.com
550 5.1.1 User unknown

What tar pitting enables you to do is specify the timeout interval in seconds between each rcpt to: command and the 550/511 rejection. Assuming that a regular spambot will issue thousands if not hundreds of thousands of commands in an attempt to filter out the valid recipients on the domain, tar pitting delays can significantly delay their connections.

Why SBSers shouldn’t use this!

First, if you wish to use this technology, here is a Microsoft KB842851 addressing this. If this is something you believe is worthwhile, you should outsource it to a service adequate of handling the volume of these connections, check out ExchangeDefender.

There are two reasons why you shouldn’t implement this technology on a small network:

First, if you are running SBS 2003 or 2003 R2 you have likely upgraded your server to ISA 2004. ISA 2004 establishes the max number of connections per server, per rule to 1000. Likewise, if you are using cheapie firewall solutions that also throttle down the connection limits as to not exhaust an internal server, you are likely going to run out of connections on your server. Remember that tar pitting does not close the connection, it keeps it open. So if you set a timeout of 30 seconds for example, you could run into hundreds of open connections during an attack which would result in service unavailable and connection drops for the valid SMTP connections that may be trying to reach you.

Second, tar pitting has proven itself effective enough that nobody uses DHA anymore. The malicious use of DHA has gone away to a large degree, the spambots are now either being launched with a raw write straight to the socket (ignoring any delays in the connection) or tend to disconnect if more than 5 seconds (depending on the spambot config) has passed between a rcpt to and 250/550 response.

So in effect, this would be worthless to you in stopping spammers and DHA but would backfire on you the first time a larger worm/virus outbreak starts slamming your server.

All in all, not a worthwhile practice for this day and age. Remember, spammers adapt much faster than the rest of the net does, what worked in 2005 won’t work in 2008.

This question came up during the geek lunch here in Orlando, far far away from the neverland of the Silicon Valley. Who cares about Yahoo and Google and Microsoft, I am tired of that drama said one of our local leaders.

So really, what is at stake on this Yahoo-Google-Microsoft love triangle? On one hand, it is the future of the Internet as we know it. On the other, it is the future of how we will be developing systems and distributing information. Let me offer you some background here.

The Ugly Truth

First, I need you to accept one fundamental truth that may not be very easy to swallow. Microsoft is an evil corporation. Not because they are closed, but because Microsoft still has not changed a lot since the times that they were spanked by DOJ and continue to be spanked by EU. Microsoft continues to try to dominate the open environment and continues to fail. For example, you can’t land at a single Microsoft.com page without them trying to force Silverlight down your throat. Around the Vista launch, everything they distributed was XPS so you wouldn’t dream use a competitive product. Microsoft has over years shown its desire to be the owner of all protocols, jack of all trades, so it can collect licensing revenue from anyone that dream play on their turf. That is why the DOJ and EU scrutiny has been great for the Internet and allowed so many of the things you rely on to be available for free. Just imagine the Microsoft world, in which you would have to pay a royalty to send a message to MSN IM or only use Microsoft IE to browse any page developed by Visual Studio?

The Quagmire

Now while the Microsoft corporation is evil, Microsoft employees are not. Absolutely everyone I’ve met there has been just phenomenal, down to earth, looking to help and looking to solve big problems with software. Everyone except Dave Overton, who kills kittens in his spare time and is trying to destroy SBSC (footnote needed).

So how does such a great group of people, with such noble cause, such an incredible amount of resources, so many young people looking to solve problems turn into such a monopolistic asshole of a corporation?

The answer lies in the psychology of the Microsoft machine, somewhat similar to The Milgram Experiment, in which the subject will completely defer judgement to the leader regardless of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I love you Steve, but this is squarely your fault.

You see, a Microsoft job is full of promises. First promise is that you will be working for the biggest software publisher on the planet which will give you prestige over everyone else in the industry. The second promise is the Microsoft share options that you’re given (or it used to be back in the 90’s before the .com bust) so you win the more Microsoft wins. Finally, it is the promise that it is a large company where sky is the limit and there is no ceiling so long as you don’t ask questions and play by the company rules.

And then Steve Ballmer, like he just finished a porn scene, jumps out in front of the lemmings at MGX (or MDX?) or any other internal event and proclaims - we will compete, we will compete with everyone, anywhere, and we will win!

So they do! And the few guys up top that decide how Microsoft competes have far different goals than the 99.9% of the base below them, but the 99.9% of the base below them has a goal of being in the top level management. The management goals are driven by the major shareholder goals, so the inner goal of being the biggest and best gets skewed by the shareholder goal of being the most profitable. So, how do you get to be the biggest and best and also the most profitable?

You screw the customer.

So much like the rest of the world looks at Americans as angry, ignorant people bent on world domination, people look at Microsoft as the big dominant bunch of proprietary mud slingers. While the majority does not approve of what is going on, they have to feed their families.

Why is it so hard to sell this in California?

There is much discussion about being open in Silicon Valley. But for all the talk, they are not all that much more open, they just play a lot more open, talk, share and you see relationships form and people go from one company to another all the time.

Silicon Valley is open to investment, open to change, open to new solutions and they all want to integrate with one another if it means more money. Meanwhile, they all follow their own dogma. Be it that they are “not to be evil” or “worlds start page” or “what is how” or “dog food cheap”

Microsoft’s influence over Silicon Valley would be detrimental to that spirit of innovation and integration and would lead to the same old constricted environment of ignoring the world for the promotion.

So while the best possible thing for Yahoo would be to take the Microsoft check and some corporate sales knowhow in the world of designing business applications, it could be the worst possible thing for the rest of us if Microsoft were allowed to become dominant again with the heavy hand on the open Internet.

Vladcast on determination. For all those of you that asked where I get the energy to do what I do and how I get this done. You might want to turn your speakers down a little though, this is the raw, uncensored Vlad. All you gotta remember is that if you gotta be a monkey…  (if this makes any bit of difference in your life please let me know)

Play VladCast:

Add feed to iTunes  / File Attachment: Vladcast11.mp3 (4175 KB)

Being a business owner can be an intense, scary, anxious lifestyle. It gets worse when you find out who your competitors are and when you look at what analysts predict your market to look like* (note to self: blog about how analysts base their predictions on past trends and surveys filled out by complete morons who are the only ones with enough spare time to fill out surveys for cheap gift cards because they don’t have enough business to keep them from hitting the delete key the second they see something that is not the part of their mission)

When you look at the big, crazy world it is hard to keep things in perspective and see things for what they really are. You get scared, uncertain, unsure.. I understand, believe me. I compete with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Sun.. companies that have more people in their janitorial staff than I do in my entire company. By definition, I ought to be hiding in the shower, crying and scrubbing really hard. Yet, I don’t. Why?

Here are the two polar opposites in business:

You can be the best.

or

You can be the cheapest.

Those are your narrow definitions of successful paths to follow. Lamborghini vs. Yugo. So you can set out to “Outferrari the Ferrari” and become a Lamborghini, but let’s face it, you’re probably not that good. So you try to be the Yugo, and in that attempt, you will be the same as every other business that closed its doors. No matter how cheap you think you can be, there is always China and India, where a worker costs a $1 a day and a Ph.D. goes for a $1 an hour. Even homeless bring in more $.

So if you can’t be the best or the cheapest, you look for compromise. You strive to be the best among what the customers actually need. How do you know? You ask them.

Now, the general guruhood will likely disagree with that statement, which is why they are gurus and experts in your industry, not its actual participators and innovators. The best among what the customer actually needs varies from client to client, from region to region, from niche to niche. The important part is listening and giving your customers a chance to talk. That scales, so long as your respect for your customer can grow along with your company and the feedback of the people that got you to the point where you are at now still matters, despite the revenue % their opinion may represent.

To them, you will always be the best. And that sure as hell beats spending more on advertising. If these concepts are foreign, hit this link again. And again, and again, and again until it changes every single pile of junk you call your marketing collateral.

Point to someone that does…

The Killer Objection by Karl Palachuk

I’ve said this a million times, there is only one proven sales strategy out there short of outright intimidation and its called “sold you a dream” - if you can’t convince people to sell themselves on the opportunities and benefits your product offers, they will cancel the service.

(this also explains why people tend to be happier with the items they purchased vs. items they got for free)