Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

It’s time to get ready for the “second tuesday” patchday and review the new updates. Here is whats coming down the pipe on October 11, 2005 which is next Tuesday:

Security Updates
• 8 Microsoft Security Bulletins affecting Microsoft Windows. The highest Maximum Severity rating for these is Critical. Some of these updates will require a restart. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) and the Enterprise Scanning Tool (EST).
• 1 Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Exchange. The highest Maximum Severity rating for this is Important. These updates will require a restart. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA).

So be prepared to restart your server(s). If you’d like the details on the update and how it works please register for the Technet Webcast on Wednesday that will let you see whats new and give you a venue to ask questions.

Patchday Webcast Registration

In response to the previous blog post, here is the update on the security strategy.

Today in Munich, Germany, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Corp.’s chief executive officer, and Mike Nash, corporate vice president of the Security Technology Unit, outlined Microsoft’s companywide strategy and product road map for helping secure the breadth of its customers from home PC users to businesses of all sizes. As part of its comprehensive security strategy, which focuses on a defense-in-depth approach, Ballmer announced Microsoft’s plans to release Microsoft® Client Protection, a solution to help protect business desktops, laptops and file servers from current and emerging malware threats. In addition, the company announced the creation of the SecureIT Alliance, which will further enable participating security partners to efficiently integrate their solutions with the Microsoft platform to build new security features and products for the benefit of their common customers.

Since I know most of you tend to skip over big paragraphs of text: Microsoft is releasing Microsoft Antigen, software Microsoft acquired by purchasing Sybari. Thats all there is to it, the new “security” strategy is basically Microsoft officially announcing the entry into the antivirus game.

Update: Paul Bryan, product management director in the enterprise security division at Microsoft: This will essentially be an enterprise of Windows OneCare. That service is expected to include antivirus, anti-spyware and malware protection, as well as computer tune-up and backup functionality when it launches sometime next year.

One of the most frequent questions we used to get at Connections was on Microsoft AntiSpyware – Will it be free, how much will it cost, will it ever leave beta? Greg Boyd did a great job dancing around this question by saying that it will remain free but the business one with centralized management will be provided as a separate product. This was before Microsoft purchased an AV company and started the OneCare program. Anyhow, here is the announcement of something called the Microsoft Client Protection program:

Microsoft today announced Microsoft Client Protection, a new security product that protects business desktops, laptops and file servers from emerging threats such as spyware and rootkits, as well as viruses and other traditional attacks. Microsoft Client Protection represents a significant milestone in the company’s continuing development of solutions to meet customers’ needs and improve the confidence in their computing experience.

It smells a lot like OneCare, doesn’t it? No real word on it yet but I’ve pinged Miss Security MVP so we’ll know soon enough.

Update: “Susan Bradley, CPA aka Ebitz – SBS Rocks [MVP]: actually no.”

A few months ago I winged a mobility presentation for the South Florida Technology Network and talked about my biggest frustrations with the PocketPC platform. No, not the reboots 🙂 but the glazed donut effect that makes your phone impossible to use. I live in Florida and I usually need to throw my PDA into the heavy-rinse cycle every time I use it. The dust, fingerprints, sweat… insert nasty environmental stain here… make the experience quite poor not just on the PocketPC but on nearly anything that may touch your hand, ear or face.

So a few weeks ago I sprung for a ClearGuard XP screen protector. I hate screen protectors because I can never get all the air bubbles out. I saw a post about this on some site before but didn’t give it a second thought ($20 for a screen protector? Oh hell no.) – I was browsing around eBay and I found it again, for less than $10, so I figured I might as well give it a shot.

I got it yesterday and oh does it work.. First of all, on the first application it laid down with 0 bubbles. Nothing. I’ve used it for a long conference call today and I got absolutely nothing on it. No fingerprints. No ear wax. No sweat. No hair. It must be magical. And get this – you can peal it off, wash it, then stick it back on the screen. I’m impressed. Go get yours on ebay:

* Anti-Glare
* Anti-Scratch
* Razor Thin
* Washable & Reusable
* Eliminates dust, grime, and fingerprints

If you’ve never heard of bugzilla you’ve probably been under a rock for a very long time. It is one of the best bug tracking systems out there but it does run off the web which can be impractical at times. Enter Deskzilla, the dekstop version of bugzilla.

We use bugzilla not just for bug tracking but also for case work and rule evaluations at ExchangeDefender so its more than just a bug tracking system. Download it and check it out.

Update: Just had a chance to deploy it. Wow. $100 for a Java-based interface to Bugzilla? No thanks, skip this one and stick with the web.

This article covers the common problems small businesses have with Microsoft licensing. It is a brief overview of how to present, sell and standardize clients platform with Microsoft Open Value 2.0 licensing program. It is a decent overview of the problem, solution and how to actually go about selling or standarizing the small business on a Microsoft platform without a huge up-front investment.

You can read the full article here.

Beta invitation for System Center Reporting Manager is officially in beta. Below are invitation instructions from Eileen Brown so get on it if you’d like to play with this next generation reporting/monitoring tool.

1. Go to the Microsoft Betaplace Site and sign in with your Microsoft .Net Passport ID. If you don’t have a Passport account, you will need to first complete a Passport registration.
2. Enter the Guest ID “SCGUEST” (this ID is case-sensitive).
3. Click on the Systems Center Reporting Manager 2005 link.
4. Click on the Nomination link on the left side of the page.
5. Fill out and submit the nomination form and expect that in 24 hours you will have access to the beta build.

If you’re not familiar with the above, System Center is what I like to call the next suite Microsoft assault on the OS platform. It integrates platform management, disaster recovery, reporting, performance scorecards and basically gives a lot of us in the Enterprise ready-to-go tools that we’ve already had to write on our own. Things like DPM fall into it.

Don’t get SBS 2003? Think its a crippled version of real servers that barely resembles the big boy? Well, you need to read this document. It is an SBS primer for IT Professionals coming from the Enteprise environment, covering the design, purpose and 10 cool features specific to SBS.

If you are an Enterprise IT Pro who is installing or supporting Windows SBS 2003 for the first time or who just wants to know more about it, this paper is for you!

This paper begins with a brief survey of the Windows SBS 2003 design philosophy. It then continues with the Top 10 must-know facts that Enterprise IT Pros unfamiliar with Windows SBS often miss, it highlights the Top 10 cool features of Windows SBS, and then it concludes with a quick look at some of the standard scenarios that you’re likely to find in many Windows SBS installations

.. the more they stay the same. Several major vendors got in a fight with Microsoft back in the day over their right to preload Linux on their systems. Microsoft (well, Ballmer) allgeded that PC’s without an OS were exclusively purchased solely to help piracy. They fought back and ended up being sued for abuse of the monopoly. I’m sure everyone is aware of that.

Well, few years later, Dell strikes back by offering an “Open Source PC”:

The Round Rock, Texas-based company’s Dimension E510n PC comes with a blank hard drive and a copy of the FreeDOS operating system, which can be installed by customers. The computer is part of Dell’s n-Series of PCs, which first started shipping without an operating system back in September 2002.

The desktop retails for $849 and comes with a Pentium 4 processor; 512MB of advanced DDR computer memory; a 128MB ATI Radeon X300SE HyperMemory video card; an 80GB serial ATA hard drive and a one-year limited warranty.

This combined with the news of Sun and Google teaming up for an Office suite really raises a lot of questions for Microsofts long-standing cash cows. Remember yesterdays blog post about the Google threat. Well, slowly but surely things are looking worse and worse for Microsoft with major new platforms out at least 12 months. Hurry it up boys.

Why is it that my pages are attracting drunk college kids with nothing better to do? Case and point, the IM below. This came in from a school (clipper.rollins.edu % [66.195.118.2]) and someone out there is paying for this kids tuition so they can browse around my web page.

what up bro?….YOU HAVE A SWEEEEET WEB PAGE!! KEEP ME POSTED. ITS AN OBSESSION FOR ME TO LOOK HERE EVERYDAY WHEN I WAKE UP. EVERYDAY. YOU’RE AWESOME! WOO HOO!

If you think thats disturbing, over 30% of traffic to Vladville comes from Japan. I never see a single comment from Japan on here, so what brings you over? I am very confused.