Make something idiot-proof…

Posted: 11:13 am
May 21, 2008
Security
5 Comments

… and they will build a better idiot.

Honestly, there are days when I feel like people do things with my software just to dick with me. For years we didn’t enforce password complexity on ExchangeDefender, ergo 99.999% of the passwords at ExchangeDefender are “password”, “Password”, “Password1”, “P@55w0rd“, “P@ssw0rd“, “password123”, “1qa2ws” or “2ws3ed” and can be cracked by a three year old.

So I set out to write a password complexity procedure the other day, enforcing the standard MCSE complexity: at least 7 in length with the mix of three of the four options: lowercase char, uppercase char, integer, special character. So today I power on my laptop to see just how complex the passwords being generated are, thinking that people are starting to use passphrases, etc.

What I found made me scream out “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccckkk me, WHY!?$!@#” out loud. The password?

Abcd1234

Why, for the love of god, would anyone do that? Did they just look at the new password complexity alert and thought…

“Screw Vlad. What is the LEAST complex password I can come up with given the current restraints. Let’s see… how do I make this work… something everyone uses…. something sequential… start it at the beginning of that sequence. Oh, and I’ll capitalize the A for take that complexity Vlad, you Asshole.”

Thanks… whoever that was (anonymously logged)… I think my next method will check for password complexity and instead of throwing an alert or UAC or any of that annoying stuff that they can live with I will shoot back a 4096/1024bit key as their new password. “Dear Customer, The password you requested did not meet our password complexity requirements. Here is a 4096 char password to use from now on.”

Or sell them AuthAnvil….

I just don’t get it. Why spend all this money on perimeter security and protect it with a sequential password that can be guessed by a 3 year old?

The importance of corporate culture

Posted: 7:37 am
May 21, 2008
IT Business
4 Comments

Read this article earlier today and it just blew my mind. It talks about the importance of corporate culture, values and giving your customers a reliable feeling when they work with your company:

So when Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period.

After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

Why? Because if you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It’s hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture—which means, by definition, it’s not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there’s a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick—and it’s willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later. (About ten percent of new call-center employees take the money and run.)

We work in the exact opposite way – raise or fire – within 90 days, and I have to admit that the above does look better. My primary Office Space problem in growing OWN is that the experience is definitely not consistent because there is a personality tradeoff in hiring – I can hire someone social or someone technically savvy, but we generally don’t find both, so we have hordes of people that likely go home and work on their roadkill taxidermy projects for all I know. IT customer is not exactly the “people person” nurturing system, 99% of the time you’re dealing with some asshole who also gets kept in a dark, moist basement rarely exposed to sunlight much less people.

Wonder what it takes to raise socially presentable IT employees?

So much for mobile broadband

Posted: 11:07 pm
May 20, 2008
Mobility
1 Comment

Seems like Nextel-Sprint just keeps on finding ways to tie more stones around its ankles as it sinks further and further into the ocean of companies not to work with. Betanews is talking about Sprint’s upcoming implementation of a 5GB cap, effectively killing any sort of mobile multimedia experience you may have dreamed of in the future. This is not particularly bothersome today because the state of 3G networks in USA can at times rival the speeds of modems in the late 90’s… You have to try damn hard to get 5GB of data transferred over a 3G card.

So, why is Sprint going to do this? Why are they implementing a software cap that 99% of the customer base cannot hit today? Because WiMAX 4G networks that are getting built right now make all sorts of media things possible, and when WiFi can replace your broadband cable/DSL connection Sprint does not want to have to deal with the issues of network caps, bandwidth throttling, crippling applications and then some.

Establish the precedent early is the name of the game.

Ironic, this being announced on a day that Roku announces the Netflix device, allowing you to get this $100 box and play 100,000 movies from your Netflix subscription for $9 a month.

What we are seeing here is a ton of people all of which want a cut not off the services they deliver, but from the companies actually making money. It’s like me going out to my ExchangeDefender customer, all pissed off that they are making more money than me, and asking them for some extra money! Except the people asking are government organizations (State tax revenues from Internet sales), phone and television companies (free phone calls, free TV) and the list goes on.

What I hope someone points out is that the growth everyone is seeing is due to the things being open and as more interesting things show up online more people part with their hard earned money for the service – a scenario in which everyone makes more money. But as the greater fool theory crashes with the first participant trying to change the rules of the game to capture higher percentage of the transactions, their growth goes away. In this case, Sprint wants to make its network more profitable, but in doing so it will sacrifice any opportunity to grow. 3G is still a premium service, and premium services don’t succeed if you’re indistinguishable from the alternatives yet crippled….

Exchange 2007 & Outlook 2007 OST Corruptions

Posted: 10:32 am
May 20, 2008
Exchange
9 Comments

Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007 using cached-mode is one of the most powerful marriages in the business software space. But like most marriages, it can be tough when the partners aren’t working together, or when one of them is having a secret affair with a particular spindle in your RAID set. As the Outlook gains weight and starts cheating with the RAID set more and more, things tend to break. Then you find out. Every time you try to see your kids, the Outlook 2007 tells you that she can’t let you see them because you were a bastard that didn’t take care of her (OST size) or the house (computer) and she will not let you see your kids until you start showing some responsibility, fix the house (defrag) and spend some more time with her (scanpst/scanost).

In all honesty, finding your Outlook OST, corruption the first thing in the morning can be very frustrating. Depending on the size of your OST, you might be waiting for hours for the scan to complete and your mailbox to be restored to its working state.

But what do the users generally get upset the most at? It’s that they feel helpless and can’t figure out how to fix their OST/PST. If it’s a frequently experienced problem, why is it not automatic? Vlad to the rescue.

First, you will now you’re in for a scanost journey when you get the following screen:

Microsoft Office Outlook Offline Folders

Errors have been detected in the file … Quit Outlook and all mail-enabled applications, and then use the Inbox repair tool (Scanost.exe) to diagnose and repair errors in the file. For more information about the Inbox repair tool, see Help.

ost2 

The complaint is that there is no link to Scanpst.exe. Doing a file search on Vista also turns nothing up. Psst, here is a little secret:

On Vista x64:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\SCANpst.exe

On Vista x32:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\SCANpst.exe

Here is the thing. Before you close out Outlook it will prompt you to locate your set of folders. You can either write down the file location in the error notification above, or you can just go to the next screen “Offline Folder File Settings” and copy the contents of the File section.

On a default Vista system, my OST is:

C:\Users\Vlad\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.ost

Obviously replace Vlad with whatever your username is. Now, start Scanpst.exe, select your mailbox and let it work.

Youtube….

ost1

 

This may be a great time to catch up on that Star Wars trilogy you’ve been meaning to watch off Youtube because this process will take forever. Or, if you’re lucky enough to have Exchange 2007 it’s time to fall in love with Outlook Web Access 2007.

Monkey Superpowers

Posted: 1:10 am
May 20, 2008
Shockey Monkey
7 Comments

This one is going to be filthy… You’ve been warned.

The blog post I wrote earlier today really made me think.. What “ability to work on multitask” really means. Apparently it means I suck at multitasking, at least judging by ability to write a blog title and proofread it at the same time. I originally titled it “What ability to work on multiple tasks really means” but that spanned two lines so I decided to change it to “What ability to multitask really means” or so I thought. Two college degrees folks, if that doesn’t prove the value of higher education I don’t know what will.

But it does bring me to an interesting point. We work on a lot of things throughout the day. All of them urgent… to someone. Service delivery is a double-edged sword. You have to work towards the resolution as fast as possible while still keeping the client informed about what’s going on. Those are not complimentary tasks, I can either fix the problem or write to you about it. Which would you rather? I can write a blog post, I can put an announcement in Shockey Monkey, and if messed up bad enough we’re  sure to see support requests from the people that read as well as I write blog posts.

So earlier tonight I took the laptop to the bathroom and decided to make some magic.

I also wrote some code. Below is the result (of both actions) the first Shockey Monkey Slimy Vendor SuperPower (SMSVSP): MultiUpdate.

multiupdate

Above is the Shockey Monkey portal for Own Web Now. We’ll just assume that OWN rocks and has only two open support requests. 🙂

Show of hands – how many times have you come out of a meeting, or woke up from an afternoon nap just to see a bunch of support requests waiting for you? Wouldn’t it be nice to be slimy and just update  all those tickets  and say something like “I’m on it, I’ll have it fixed in a jiffy” even if you were just about to go back to your nap or another meeting? Effortless deception, baby.

Maybe you’re not a scumbag.. Maybe something just blew up and you’re working on it but as you’re rolling along you get 50 tickets opened up in the space of 10 minutes that it took you to gain control of the server. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to update all those  tickets that just piled on without opening a single one? That’s what MultiUpdate enables you to do! Usage is dead simple too.

Click on “click here to update multiple tickets” text at the bottom of the ticket listing section. A new container will slide into the view allowing you to type in your update, including all your canned responses. You can also use the full power of SM ticket update functions – change status/priority/resolution, include attachments, cc the update to someone else, send a survey, you name it!

multiupdate1

Click the nasty green button at the bottom and watch in awe as you deliver exceptional service and status update to your client base in a prompt, detailed manner with a personal touch… as far as they know 🙂

It will be our little secret.

Psst, this ships in 1.99.04 this weekend. If this doesn’t shave some serious time off your day-to-day ops I don’t know what will.

Exchange 2007 & POP3 Access

Posted: 5:41 pm
May 19, 2008
Exchange
1 Comment

Exchange 2007 features a built in POP3 server but by default it is off and will not accept plain text connections. Good luck telling that to a difficult customer who wants to send his password in clear text over the Internet just because the Apple store told him so.

By default, going to port 110 and trying pain text user/pass dialog will yield the following error:

“-ERR Command is not valid in this state”

To enable plain text login drop down to PowerShell and issue the following command:

Set-PopSettings -LoginType PlainTextLogin

Then make sure to restart Microsoft Exchange POP3 service:

Restart-Service -service msExchangePOP3

As far as how to enable POP3 service on Exchange 2007, here is some more PowerShell magic:

Set-service msExchangePOP3 -startuptype automatic

Start-service -service msExchangePOP3

What "ability to work on multiple tasks" really means

Posted: 10:50 am
May 19, 2008
IT Business
1 Comment

If you work in IT support, especially on the technology side, you are interruption driven. Simply put, your day is determined more by the events on the network and computers than by your own agenda. There is a slight differentiation between what makes a good employee capable of working on multiple tasks and a liability that leaves unfinished and halfhearted attempts at work in his or hers path: ability to multitask.

What ability to multitask really means is ability to prioritize without bothering those around you or above you. It means being able to respond to the events during your workday, address the urgent issues and still complete your original tasks.

It does not mean that you put equivalent effort in all tasks, or perform them all at once, or seek guidance in a completely disaffected way. Unless you’re being paid minimum wage, more is expected of you.

Not going to WPC this year

Posted: 3:36 pm
May 18, 2008
Microsoft
2 Comments

Time to build that autoresponder, not going to be able to make it to the Microsoft WWPC this year in Houston. Already got two meeting requests, too.

This is going to sound very hypocritical, but if you’re not me, you should go. It’s the best advice I can offer you. I am not going primarily because my new young family takes priority over out-of-town trips but in the equal amount the business is way too hot at the moment with the opportunity to stay at home and close being far higher than to go out and network for it. This is the first time that this has happened in my business, we have so many new projects, new people starting, new product lines coming online, going global, designing a new retail offering, two factor auth.. really just an incredible time for OWN.

Don’t fool yourself, this would not have been possible had it not been for the high profile people and conferences that have helped get us to this point. Networking is crucial. I really hope you consider things like WPC and TechEd because without a shadow of a doubt, they are the best. Yes, they cost a little more, but for a very good reason – they bring out the best. It has been my long time argument on this site that you need to aim high, not settle for the entry level just because that is where you think you fit the best and get immediate gratification. There is no such thing as get rich quick and get problems solved quick in this business, its a journey with long term plans and projects, and conferences are about much more than addressing your immediate needs and problems – so do yourself a favor and take a leap. Trust me, you’ll figure out SBS 2008 just fine and if you need a specialized conference to teach you that its probably a good indication that you need to seek a new career.

Time to stop playing in the wading pool and step up…

PowerShell to the Core (2008)

Posted: 7:23 am
May 18, 2008
Microsoft
Comments Off on PowerShell to the Core (2008)

windows2008logo One of the more frustrating things about Windows 2008 Server Core deployments is the lack of .NET and consequently the lack of PowerShell. This is frustrating to those of us that have a ton of servers because now the management surface of a Windows 2008 network doubles – for the servers that can be managed via PowerShell and v2 remoting features, and the core ones that can’t.

Which is why you have to check out this blog post – Dmitry outlines how to get PowerShell installed on Windows Server 2008 Core. Not to mention all the other .NET 2.0 code that can now be piled on top of the Server Core installation!

Brain Drain & Technology Business

Posted: 1:16 am
May 18, 2008
IT Business, SMB
3 Comments

Serial entrepreneurs fail when it comes to making money with a technology business.

This is one often overlooked or hidden fact among your garden variety of business topics covered at technology conferences, particularly in SMB where most people are being attracted to thanks to no criteria, no barrier to entry and an overwhelmingly large market (and supposedly remote chance of grabbing a small share of it.)

But does it make sense to go into a technology business to make money if you aren’t good at whatever technical aspect your company is built on? Statistically speaking, no. Most people fail, some with a heavy debt, and a tiny fraction sells out at a large premium. The middle is astonishingly void.

Why is that? Generally because the profile of a business entrepreneur involves high risk, high stakes, high liquidity and high growth and unlimited potential and scale. Unfortunately for them, the successful technology business has immense infrastructure expenses that are highly insolvent – you’ve never seen a yard sale for Microsoft Volume Licensing and banged up plyboard furniture. On top of that, operations of a technology company tend to be executed by someone with a very high skill set, translating into a big salary and thus a big expense, and none of the assets are immediately useful because they require a lot of training, education and specialization. These obstacles in the lack of solvency and inability to rapidly scale headcount with demand are evident before you have even sold anything.

This is why most technology companies fold, even if they achieve some marginal degree of success and profitability.

Which brings me to the actual point of this blog post – if the above are the largest, near insurmountable, obstacles for someone with a ton of money to break into the technology business, why oh why are so many technology companies just dying to outsource their technical roles to someone else and assume the role of a technology consulting business advisor?

Maybe because the message being sent by those with vested interest in taking away technology roles from technology companies is the most advertised and pitched message – on fear that a larger company will break in, a fear that skills will not keep up, a fear that the opportunity is now and it is passing you by with every moment that your name is not drying in ink on an outsourcing contract. And many people foolishly fall for such a pitch because they are uncertain of their direction, they are afraid of what is coming down the pipe  and they swallow the blue pill of business acceleration but trade in their key competence in for it.

Here is a question you should ask: If this business is dying and I should not focus on it, then why are you trying so hard to get me to sign on the dotted line and hand you over the very thing that earned me my salary in the first place? When they try to misdirect and tell you that you really got the clients on the business merits a blah blah cut them off and say: What do you see in the future of your business, and if it is truly dying then why are you in it?

Hint: Some people have thought about their exit strategy and were able to figure out that they can sell off their revenue generating assets with a high technical dependency under contract while business agreements and terms are generally always up for negotiation and are valued much, much less.

I think the future of this business is in scale, in ability to reach everyone and be dynamic enough to gather your resources and seize on the opportunities that present themselves in each segment as each goes through its hot stage.

The future of your business is in the ability to offer more services and make more money, not in trying to massacre it into small pieces and end up with a ton of expensive support contracts. The question is can you trust someone who isn’t trying to sell you either one or do you base your decisions on colorful flyers. Perhaps you should just be trying to copy the very people that are doing just that much slightly better than you to afford a colorful flyer. In commerce, there is interest behind every move, try to find out what it is.