Microsoft is planning a 64-bit version of its Office product franchise, although it remains mum on details.
Even as the company's top dogs last week talked up the newly shipping 64-bit Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP, insiders confirmed plans for a 64-bit version of Office 12, the successor to Office 2003.
The current plan is for a 64-bit Office 12 for the AMD64 platform to ship "sometime after" the 32-bit Office 12. No Itanium version is planned, but that processor is primarily server-oriented, insiders said.(
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The battle of the operating systems heated up this week as Apple Computer unleashed Tiger and Microsoft showed off some of the beef to expect in Longhorn.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates gave computer makers a brief look at Longhorn, but acknowledged that many of its key features will not be evident until much later test versions of the new Windows. A fraction of the new features will make it into an initial beta this summer. Microsoft wouldn't say when a subsequent beta, with more new features, will arrive, but Gates said the company is still focused on trying to release the final version of Longhorn in time to make it into PCs sold for the holiday season in 2006.
The company demonstrated a new XML-based document format, code-named "Metro," that it will use in Longhorn to both print and share documents. Among other features Gates discussed was the ability of PCs running Longhorn to take advantage of storage that combines traditional hard drives and nonvolatile flash memory. By using flash for frequently accessed information, laptop PCs will be able to get much better battery life given that substantially less power is used accessing flash than is needed to spin a hard drive.
NAT-T (IETF RFC 3947 and 3948) detects the presence of any NAT devices between two hosts, uses a non-IPsec port and encapsulates the IPsec traffic in UDP. NAT-T does this by inserting an additional header between the IP header and the ESP header. This header contains the original source and destination ports. (
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Everybody likes to keep their systems running smoothly and tuned for performance. For simpler scenarios with basic configuration you can probably use Exchange 2003 out-of-the box without ever having performance issues. But if you are responsible for a complex environment, then you have probably already felt the bitter taste of a system bottleneck. If you identify yourself with this description or if you are just a tweak fanatic, then this article is for you.
10 Tips to Optimize Exchange 2003 Performance (Part 1)
While doing my daily wander around the net, I came upon
this site detailing some research into search results from several companies, (primarily MSN and Google, but Yahoo and Teoma as well.) The conclusions are by no means concrete at this stage, and work is continuing but Ivor Hewitt seems to have found something of potentially significant interest to web developers.
Basically he has been testing the returned results from both Google and MSN (and the others in some cases also.) for 1000 common search terms, (lifted mostly from Google Zeitgeist) and then checking what web server software the top results are using and storing the data from each search. The results thus far show that MSN consistently seems to choose more sites running IIS (Internet Information Services) Microsoft’s web server software compared to the other engines.
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Users of the latest 64-bit version of Microsoft's Windows XP Professional x64 Edition operating system will not have the option to install Norton or McAfee antivirus software, vnunet.com can reveal. Users trying to install the Norton Internet Security 2005 security suite for consumers on the 64-bit version of Windows see an error message stating that the product can not be installed.
They are referred to a web page which states: "Symantec currently does not sell any consumer products that are certified to be compatible with 64-bit processors and operating systems."
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Microsoft says servers running the company's website and MSN Search and Messenger applications have been migrated to the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003. 'Our MSN search engine is actually built on several thousand systems running the x64 version of Windows,' a spokesperson said. In addition, 'the entire Microsoft.com site has been migrated, and we serve 30 million unique visitors every day.' According to the company, the Messenger servers handle about 70 million users.
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Steven Bink has information about the new Microsoft Clustering support in Longhorn. He writes: "A lot of stuff is changing, here are the highlights":
Improved Cluster Setup
Setup is streamlined and simplified: create an entire cluster in one seamless step. Thorough cluster testing to ensure your cluster will function properly. All the power of a full cluster test suite in your hands to guarantee the actual cluster you are setting up will provide rock solid stability. Fully scriptable for automated deployments.
Cluster Migration Tool
A cluster migration tool Will assist migration of a cluster configuration from one cluster to another. Rolling upgrade of Windows 2003 to Longhorn cluster. It will be a “roll forward” model. Migration from Windows 2003 to Longhorn cluster will not be as simple under the hood as from Windows 2000 to 2003.
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It is easy to manually setup one or two Exchange Servers, but what if you must install more than one Exchange Server in a short time and every Exchange Server with the same configuration?
The answer is simple – you must use an answer file with the Exchange Setup process.
Exchange 2003 has the capability to automate the installation process with the help of an unattended file. An unattended setup creates an answer file that stores information about a sample configuration. The file can then be used to set up multiple Exchange 2003 servers.(
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Installations of Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 now contain the Windows Firewall. Windows Firewall is a host (software) firewall, a firewall around each client and server computer on a customer’s network.
Unlike Windows XP Service Pack 2, the Windows Firewall is off by default on Server 2003 Service Pack 1, and must be turned on to begin protecting systems. The Windows Firewall is enabled for a brief time during Service Pack 1 clean installs for the duration of the new Post-Setup Security Updates (PSSU) portion of setup.
Servers are vulnerable in the time between initial installation and having the latest security updates applied. To counter this, Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 uses Windows Firewall to block all inbound connections to the server after installation until Windows Update delivers the latest security updates to the new computer. After updating, Windows Firewall is turned off until it is configured for server roles. PSSU also guides users through immediate configuration of Automatic Updates.
Passwords are an important step in a security plan for your network. Users may see passwords as a nuisance; however, the security of your enterprise relies on a combination of password length, password uniqueness, and password lifespan. These three items help defend against dictionary attacks and brute force attacks. A dictionary attack occurs when a malicious user tries known words that are in the dictionary and a number of common password names to try and guess a password. A brute force attack occurs when a malicious user tries all of the possible permutations until one is successful.
Because most users prefer passwords that they can easily remember, dictionary attacks are often an effective method for a malicious user to find a password in significantly less time than they would with brute force attacks. Therefore, the strength of a password depends on how many characters are in the password, how well the password is protected from being revealed by the owner, how well the password is protected if it is intercepted by a malicious user on the network, and how difficult the password is to guess. Even good passwords that are protected by cryptography on the network and that are not subject to dictionary attacks can be discovered by brute force in a few weeks or months by a malicious user who intercepts the password on the network.
Read the full article on Account Passwords and Policies on Technet
Need to keep track of all those great command Sean Deuby told you about?
Download and print this quick reference sheet and you'll be a commmand line guru too.
Download the Command-Line Reference
After abandoning plans for a future Microsoft Exchange Server version, code-named Titanium, that would have replaced Exchange's Jet data store with a next-generation data storage engine that uses Microsoft SQL Server technology, Microsoft decided to refocus. Rather than follow a purely technical path for the next Exchange version, the company is addressing customers' key pain points and upcoming business trends. The result, code-named E12 (for Exchange 12), will be one of the most impressive upgrades to Exchange that Microsoft has ever released. Here's what you need to know about E12.(
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Microsoft is expanding support for 3rd party guest OS's in Virual Server 2005, including Linux, Solaris and other x86 operating systems. They are commited more than ever to provide interoperability in heterogenous environments. With service pack 1, due out later this year, there are a number of improvements to Virtual Server including:
3rd party OS support
64 bit host support (run VM's from ramdisk)
an estimated 30% increase in performance
opening up .vhd standards to enable extensibility
Bruce Cowpers' Weblog
VeriTest is the only authorized worldwide lab to test enterprise applications for Microsoft’s “Certified for Windows” program. There are varying levels of certification - and each one has a set of standards associated with it. These standards and the levels of certification are established by Microsoft. The goal? To identify applications that are secure and manageable and that run reliably on Microsoft Windows.
The idea behind VeriTest executing the tests is to remove any bias from the equation. As a completely independent organization, it receives a fee from the application developer and executes the tests in complete confidence. According to the website, vendors can even sign up to have their application tested without the knowledge of Microsoft. But the question is - how do you know if an application has been tested and approved? And how do you know at what level the application is certified and which versions qualified? Well, there is a nice searchable database that allows you to receive all of this information.
VeriTest Catalog of Certified Server Applications
SEATTLE—Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates on Monday laid to rest talk that Microsoft might be scaling back its commitment to the Tablet PC, saying there will be a major new version of the Tablet operating system in the Longhorn timeframe. In his opening keynote address here at WinHEC (the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) before several thousand attendees, Gates also reiterated Microsoft's call for developers to start building 64-bit device drivers to meet the burgeoning user demand for them.
Gates also demonstrated several new prototypes of the Tablet hardware, including one in which the screen slides up and down off the keyboard. Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. are backing the idea of an auxiliary display and are working with OEM Acer around this. The companies aim to let users get information such as the time, their e-mail and their meeting details on a small, auxiliary display that does not power up the actual computer.
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SEATTLE--In a move that could rankle privacy advocates, Microsoft said Monday that it is adding the PC equivalent of a flight data recorder to the next version of Windows, in an effort to better understand and prevent computer crashes.
The tool will build on the existing Watson error-reporting tool in Windows but will provide Microsoft with much deeper information, including what programs were running at the time of the error and even the contents of documents that were being created. Businesses will also choose whether they want their own technology managers to receive such data when an employee's machine crashes. "Think of it as a flight data recorder, so that any time there's a problem, that 'black box' is there helping us work together and diagnose what's going on," Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said during a speech at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference here.
Tom Warren from Neowin writes: "Bill Gates kicked off todays Keynote by explaining the advantages of 64bit computing, his vision for the future of mobile computing and demonstrations of Longhorn. Here’s some of the pictures ReflectiaX has taken today:"
History of Windows
Microsoft 64bit Solutions for the future
Microsoft’s Moves to 64bit
Mobile Computing in 2006
Longhorn Next Gen Platform
Build5060.vbl_wcp_avalon.050417-1805
Windows Longhorn “Ready PC Program”
Longhorn Beta Sign-up on XP SP2 |
Longhorn Build 5048
Longhorn Glass Effects |
Longhorn Desktop Search
During the keynote of WinHEC 2005, Bill Gates showed the roadmaps for the different Windows platforms. Steven Bink took some pictures and posted them on his website. As you can see on the pictures, Longhorn will be broad available during the holiday season of 2006. Have a look for yourself:
Windows Client roadmap
Windows Server roadmap
Steven Bink's weblog
Microsoft has postponed most of its Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) security plan, company officials confirmed. Only a sliver of it will appear in the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, due out late next year.
Microsoft unveiled NGSCB, formerly known by its Palladium code name, in 2002. A year ago the company said it was retooling the technology so some of the benefits would be available without the need to recode applications. The vendor promised an update by the end of 2004. But it has remained silent, fueling speculation about delays and the demise of NGSCB. (
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Today at WinHec 2005 Keynote, Microsoft announced a new printing technology that will be part of Longhorn, it is codenamed: METRO.
"Metro offers a unified framework to address the growing use of electronic document-based workflows, and inclusion of advanced graphics and extended color information in everyday documents and Web applications. “Metro” offers an open document format that uses Extensible Markup Language (XML), a public standard for exchanging data between disparate systems, and other current, industry standards to create a modern, cross-platform document and imaging technologies. “Metro” simplifies creation, sharing, printing, viewing and archiving of digital documents, while also improving image fidelity and print performance.(
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Microsoft System Center Capacity Manager 2006, Express Edition, provides the IT professional with the tools and guidance required to architect a deployment in the most efficient manner, while facilitating future planning by allowing for "what-if" analyses. Microsoft System Center Capacity Manager 2006, Express Edition, enables the IT professional to effectively size an application implementation by:
Collecting organization-specific data about the end-user workload and network environment.
Recommending a topology—a particular configuration of servers, software, and network—using predefined knowledge and dynamic performance modeling. This knowledge is packaged with the tool and can be updated via the hardware vendor with server-specific metrics.
Simulating the load against the proposed architecture to measure its impact on the environment.
System Center Capacity Manager 2006 Datasheet
WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) 2005 has now begun and Microsoft have given the Longhorn preview build to attendees today. Build 5048 sports the new "Aero" theme and new search features. We will be covering WinHEC from tomorrow onwards at the Neowin WinHEC05 blog.
Screenshots:
wallpaper |
desktop |
internet explorer |
search
As Mentioned in a previous article on techlog concerning
'Why Memory Optimizers are fraudware' the techlog crew visited a Windows Internals session given by David Salomon. The slides of this presentation are now online and can be downloaded.
Download the Windows Internals & Advanced Troubleshooting slides
We’ve heard some great feedback on what web developers would like to see in IE7, both from the responses to my last post and from the resources I referred to. The rest of the team was cranking away while I was away on parental leave, and I wanted to share a few details about what they were doing: The first couple of things they’ve done are:
Support the alpha channel in PNG images. We’ve actually had this on our radar for a long time, and have had it supported in the code for a while now. We have certainly heard the clear feedback from the web design community that per-pixel alpha is a really important feature.
Address CSS consistency problems. Our first and most important goal with our Cascading Style Sheet support is to remove the major inconsistencies so that web developers have a consistent set of functionality on which they can rely. For example, we have already checked in the fixes to the peekaboo and guillotine bugs documented at positioniseverything.net so use of floated elements become more consistent.
We’re doing a lot more than this in IE7, of course, and we’re really excited that the beta release is almost here - we’re looking forward to the feedback when we release the first beta of IE7 this summer. Stay tuned for more details as we get closer to beta.
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John Howard writes: I was setting up a new virtual machine (for playing with Windows Server 2003 R2 as it happens, but that's for another day) this morning and getting frustrated when you double-click files which have no application associated with them. On most machines, I add notepad for the list of options to "Send" a file to. Then you can right-click a file in Windows Explorer, select "Send To" and then "Notepad". To quickly set this up:
Open Windows Explorer
Navigate to \Documents and Settings\UserName\SendTo
Right-Click and select "New Shortcut"
Notepad.exe as the program
Notepad as the name
John Howard's Weblog
Bob Roudebush writes: "I ran into an issue trying to configure my SmartPhone to work with the Exchange 2003 at the new job. It seems the Windows Mobile OS ships with a short list of pre-defined trusted root certificates. If you’re trying to use ServerSync to synchronize your Exchange mailbox with your phone and the Exchange server is configured with an “untrusted” or home-grown root certificate, synchronization will fail. There’s an easy fix - described in the knowledge base article below - which allows you to import a 3rd party root certificate into the trust root cert list on the SmartPhone."
MS Knowledgebase Article 841060
Microsoft released a nice document on connecting Mac OS X 10.3 clients and higher to a Windows SBS 2003 Network. I have monitored the SBS documentation weblog previously and they put out a beta of this document. It was right on. I recently had a client with Mac OS X and following the doc was smooth sailing to get everything going. This client has a Windows XP laptop, a PowerMac laptop, a Treo 600 and a Mac at home and all have Outlook synchronized with his calendar, email, and contacts on everyone! Now that’s a powerful Server Operating System.
Connecting Mac OS X 10.3 and Higher Clients to a Windows Small Business Server 2003 Network
Today is a memorable day, as Techlog celebrates its first anniversary. On 23-4-2004 we went live with daily posts about Microsoft and their technologies. The first few weeks we posted in Dutch, but as the audience grew, we switched to english. Currently we are receiving more than 30.000 users monthly and are increasingly discovered by people using Google. We had some great comments from Microsoft employees and feedback from regular users. We want to thank you for your visits and hope to see you in the second year of Techlog!
While Microsoft Corp.'s Windows team is laser-focused on Longhorn, many Windows users are more concerned with older versions of Windows, for which the support-clock is ticking away. Mainstream support from Microsoft for Windows NT 4.0 ended on December 30, and the Redmond, Wash., software maker is set to phase out mainstream support for its Windows 2000 client and server releases on June 30.
Microsoft divides its support lifecycle into two phases: Mainstream and extended. Once a product enters the extended support period, Microsoft charges for support. Microsoft continues to provide security-specific hot fixes for products during extended support, but nonsecurity hot fixes may be obtained for extended-support products only by purchasing an "extended hot-fix agreement." Windows 2000 is still the operating system of choice for a number of businesses, especially those in the small and midsize business space, according to industry watchers.
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Malcom Smith is someone working on the Transactional NTFS feature coming in Longhorn, on his blog you can find some interesting facts about this new feature:
Transactional NTFS can't guarantee that changes you make to a set files will always be successful, but it can guarantee that on failure the result will always be consistent. Consider an application install: if you can't copy a particular file, and want to undo all of the files you've already installed, what happens if your undo fails? Maybe a user has your readme opened, and locked, in their editor; maybe they've already moved your start menu entries; maybe they've deleted or moved files you carefully put there. With Transactional NTFS, all of your changes can be removed - this is guaranteed.
A better example would be a patch or service pack. If it succeeds, great, if it doesn't, that's okay, but if it half-succeeds, that's terrible. Transactional NTFS will protect your application from inconsistency.
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Troubleshooting is merely the methodical application of common sense and technical knowledge to the inevitable problems that crop up in a fallen world. If common sense can be codified (and perhaps it can with AI) then it starts with answers to simple questions like: Why? How? What? In this article I'll try to distill the issues, tools and procedures of troubleshooting Windows XP/2003 boot problems into a small amount of easily digestible information that you as a system administrator can write on the back of a note card or store in your PDA for easy access when the proverbial poop hits the fan. Let's begin with the Why question.
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Basically, you create a barrier between your domain members and non-members by using IPsec policies. Computers inside your domain can talk to one another with no problems but outside computers cannot initiate communication with your domain members. Basically, all you do is create IPsec policies and distribute and assign them using AD. Of course there are a few steps involved in the process (and some great documentation for domain isolation), but that’s really all you do.
Does It Really Work? Yup! In fact Microsoft has deployed IPsec across several domains (including the largest one). I didn’t even notice it. No bumps, hiccups, outages, no problems. (the “Improving Security with Domain Isolation” document covers the whole experience). I have set this up in a lab (using Virtual Server over Remote Desktop) and it went without a single significant problem.
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You may have heard of blogs (or "Web logs"), a new name for something that's existed since the dawn of the Web: Personal Web sites, updated regularly, containing any kind of information imaginable. Bloggers--i.e. those who maintain blogs--might argue, however, that blogs are different in some ways from personal Web sites. For example, many blogs are dedicated to a certain topic, like politics, technology, or a love of cats. Those blogs are generally as uninteresting as they are innumerable. What's really interesting about some blogs--and about the capabilities in Microsoft's free new blog service, MSN Spaces--is the same thing that's been interesting about the Web since its inception. Blogs provide people with a way to publish information on the Internet at little or no cost, and with little or no technical expertise. In a nutshell, blogs, like any personal Web site, are about giving power to the people.
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Paul Thurott's WinSuperSite
The Norwegian Competition Authority is considering investigating Microsoft Norway for breach of competition laws. Special deals for Norwegian schools involve a new generation of computer users having no choice but Microsoft.
Microsoft agreements with schools prevent competition in practice, NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting) reports. Many local authorities agree deals on behalf of their school systems, and this makes it more difficult for competitors to get a foot in the door.
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My Outlook from SAM-Consult Software | If you use Microsoft Outlook as your e-mail client/PIM then you might be interested in My Outlook. My Outlook is a new plug-in that will enable you to read your emails, view your calendar, browse your Contacts, check your tasks and look up a notes within Media Center. In addition check out My Web News which includes: My Web News, My Weather, My File Manager, My Special Folders, My Menu Editor, My Music, My Translation, and My Outlook! Damn!
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Screenshot
The Live Communications Team is pleased to announce that the Release Candidate build of Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 is available for immediate download on Beta Place. The Release Candidate (RC) build represents significant improvements over the previous release; it is also a major step towards shipping RTM. Please download and begin testing as soon as possible.
Microsoft Beta Place
Microsoft security update e-mail would will be discontinued in July. However, you can subscribe to their RSS feed. This feed delivers the headlines on major security update releases, which are usually released on the second Tuesday of each month. To subscribe, add this URL to your RSS reader:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/bulletins/updates.xml
The Security Newsletter for Home Users provides general notice about major new security update releases. You can preview it on the Microsoft
Security at Home Web site
Neowin Reports that MSN is currently developing a next generation version of their popular MSN Toolbar Suite.
The updated version will include an implementation of tabbed browsing allowing users of IE6 without Windows XP SP2 (& IE7) to benefit from tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 7 is set to debut in beta form this summer with various improvements including tabbed browsing, inbuilt MSN search and an RSS aggregator, however, IE7 will only be made available for customers using Windows XP with SP2.
It's not year clear when the new toolbar will be available and at time of writing an MSN Spokesperson said the following:
Since the launch of the beta in December, we are thrilled with the strong consumer interest we have seen. We continue to receive constructive feedback both from consumers and internet enthusiasts, which will help us deliver an industry-leading final product. Feedback topics range from accuracy of search results to suggestions on possible new features. We will continue to incorporate the consumer feedback we receive and we hope to ship the final product in the next few months. We are getting great feedback from beta customers, and continue to improve the product, and are committed to shipping a great solution for consumers when it is ready.(
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AMD says production-ready CPUs are now shipping to some leading OEMs and system builders world-wide. General system availability is scheduled for June, we learned.
The chippery will be available for both mobile (Desk top replacement) and desktop computers and feature enhanced virus protection and 'Cool 'n' Quiet' declocking marchitecture. (
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This morning at Microsoft Management Summit 2005, Steve Ballmer announced the availability of Virtual Server 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Beta.
SP1 contains the latest software updates for Virtual Server 2005. SP1 includes the following new features (detailed later in this post):
• Support for additional host operating systems, including 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP
• Virtual Disk Precompactor
• Performance enhancements
• Built-in support for network installations
• Reserved disk space for saved state files
• Virtual floppy disk for pre-loading virtual SCSI drivers
• Support for hyperthreading
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Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer spoke to more than 2,600 attendees at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2005 today, describing how Microsoft's execution on its Dynamic Systems Initiative can enable customers to build and operate dynamic environments to achieve higher business value through automation, flexible resource utilization and knowledge-based processes. In his keynote address, Ballmer announced increased investments in support of the Dynamic Systems Initiative, specifically in the area of virtualization to help enterprise customers improve the flexibility and utilization of their computing hardware. He also announced an important step toward industry agreement on the technology architecture to simplify network security management.
"We've heard from our enterprise IT customers loud and clear that they need their systems to be more automated and flexible," Ballmer said. "That's why we're investing in the Dynamic Systems Initiative and areas like virtualization, more secure network access and interoperability -- we're committed to helping IT deliver greater efficiency and value."
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Microsoft Corp. today updated its systems management software road map, announcing new versions of Systems Management Server (SMS) and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) to be released in 2006 or 2007. At its fourth annual Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas, the software maker also said it would ship a new capacity-planning tool, called System Center Capacity Manager 2005, by year's end.
The new versions of MOM and SMS will incorporate the model-based management approach being used in Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI), an ambitious 10-year plan to simplify management of software and hardware.
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The XPSE system got its start in Thailand during the summer of 2003, when Microsoft began distributing the stripped-down Windows and Office XP bundle for about $38 to the government. According to the Microsoft, XPSE helped developing countries enhance IT access for their citizens.
However, many noted that Thailand's interest in low-cost Linux options likely sparked Microsoft's effort. Since then, Microsoft's XPSE promotional efforts appear to follow the growing success of open source applications in significant developing markets in Asia, Eastern Europe, and now South America.
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After several delays, Microsoft Corp. is set to deliver in June the Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) patching tool and the Microsoft Update (MU) software patching service, a company executive said Tuesday.
Both MU and WSUS were originally due in the first half of 2004, but were delayed several times. Microsoft has blamed the delays partly on work it had to do on Windows XP Service Pack 2, a security-focused upgrade to Windows XP released last August. Most recently the company has said it would deliver MU and WSUS in the first half of 2005, a target it expects to make.
MU is the successor to the current Windows Update service. It is a single service for users to get patches for a number of Microsoft products, not just Windows. The service will be aimed mostly at consumers and small businesses, as Windows Update is today. (
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The first reports from users installing Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 are in. And as was the case with its client counterpart—Windows XP Service Pack 2—the latest Windows Server service pack breaks several key Microsoft and third-party applications.
SP1 (Service Pack 1) is primarily a security update. But as was the case with XP SP2 (Service Pack 2), Windows Server 2003 SP1 also will include some brand-new features. SP1 is the foundation for Microsoft's forthcoming 64-bit Windows Server 2003 releases. Microsoft released Windows Server 2003 SP1 to manufacturing at the end of March.
Last August, when Microsoft released XP SP2, more than 50 key third-party applications, custom applications and even a number of Microsoft's own products broke when users attempted to run them on top of the XP update.(
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Coming from Bob Roudebush:
With the release of
VMware Workstation 5 comes several utilities that can be used in conjunction with the software to do some neat things and take advantage of some of the new functionality:
The
VMware Movie Decoder utility plays movies recorded using VMware Workstation 5
The
VMware Virtual Machine Importer allows you to migrate virtual machines from Microsoft® Virtual Server and Virtual PC to VMware. The Virtual Machine Importer is a wizard that outputs a completely new VMware virtual machine based on the input virtual machine.
This new version of the
VMware DiskMount Utility allows you to mount an unused virtual disk in a Windows host file system as a separate drive without needing to connect to the virtual disk from within a virtual machine. You can mount specific volumes of a virtual disk if the virtual disk is partitioned.
The IIS Diagnostics Toolkit several is updated every three months to ensure that IIS users have the most current diagnostic tools. The toolkit includes the following tools in one consolidated download:
• SSL Diagnostics: Diagnoses problems related to Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) issues.
• Authentication and Access Control Diagnostics: Diagnoses permission or security problems.
• Exchange Server SMTPDiag Tool: Gathers data for your SMTP server that is included with IIS.
• Log Parser: Sifts through thousands of log files quickly.
Download the Internet Information Services Diagnostic Tools
Coming from Daniel Petri of MCSEWorld
Brick-Level mailbox backup is a method in which the backup program logs on into each mailbox on the store (by using MAPI, just like Outlook does) and then backs-up the contents of the mailboxes to the tape device. Each mailbox is backed up individually, and thus restoring a specific mailbox in case it has been deleted and purged from the database is easier than before.
How do I use EXMERGE to make Brick-Level backups of Exchange 2000/2003 mailboxes
Windows 2003 SP1 is the first Microsoft server operating system that has its own personal firewall, which essentially is very much like the Windows XP SP2 version.
This article aims to provide an overview of protecting Exchange server using the personal firewall. This can become a valid choice for servers hosted at an ISP, remote branch offices that have no corporate firewall and for companies willing to take the time to increase security internally.(
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Most organizations are either at Windows Active Directory or they are contemplating that move now. If you fall in the latter category, you have some decisions to make. You need to decide how you will get from where you are now, possibly a Windows NT domain(s), to Windows 2000 or Server 2003 Active Directory domain(s).(
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Microsoft was already months into A massive project aimed at taking down Google when the truth began to dawn on Bill Gates. It was December 2003. He was poking around on the Google company website and came across a help-wanted page with descriptions of all the open jobs at Google. Why, he wondered, were the qualifications for so many of them identical to Microsoft job specs?
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Microsoft is hardening its virtual wall against prying eyes. The first service pack for Microsoft's enterprise Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) has been released nearly a year and a half after the product first hit the market.
SP1 addresses the inability of the initial release to incorporate server application into its "lockbox," complies with government data regulations, applies rights management policies to dynamic groups, strengthens authentication, and broadens records management capabilities.
Windows Rights Management Services keeps confidential documents and e-mails from being viewed, forwarded or printed by individuals without the appropriate access rights. In other words, Microsoft has designed a mechanism that truly makes sensitive information "for your eyes only".(
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Virtual folders, stacking and a List Pane.
Microsoft has given a sneak peek at Longhorn's file navigation and search capabilities. Group vice president for platforms Jim Allchin said the embedded search technology is aimed squarely at products such as X1's search technology - and others. "This goes beyond search. What we're trying to do is provide visualisation," he said. Longhorn, due late 2006, will add keywords to files, to create "virtual folders", document "stacking" and a List Pane. Like desktop search tools, Longhorn's search function will include a preview window where users can view and cut-and-paste content without opening the file, Allchin said.
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Microsoft is developing 2 new "Server Centric Computing Clients" these clients are based on windows XP, so these will be "thin" clients for Terminal server purposes.
Microsoft wants to make Windows the platform of choice for server centric computing by offering new feature rich Windows SKUs for our enterprise and academic customers by providing management and servicing features parity with Windows XP Pro. These clients will offer innovative alternative to the traditional desktop for legacy PCs, low-end PCs, thin client devices and task workers.
Customers complain that Windows XP Pro too expensive for Structured Task Workers. Other request are:
- Need of one set of security, manageability & serviceability technologies across all clients
- Disparity of HW requires broad driver support
- Remote Bootable (network / diskless)
- 3rd Party Anti-Virus & Management support
- Easy Shell Lock DownSmart App Install BlockingCodename
(
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Intel Corp. officials said Friday that systems containing its first dual-core processors will begin shipping Monday.
Systems from Dell, Alienware, and other OEMs will begin rolling out, ending a wave of speculation as to when the systems will actually ship. Intel originally said that the dual-core shipments would begin this month, and Advanced Micro Devices is expected to announce its first dual-core Opterons on April 21.
Both AMD and Intel have milestones to celebrate. For Intel, the company is marking the 40th anniversary of "Moore's Law," the theorem governing transistor density that has become the ruler for measuring improvements in semiconductor manufacturing. At AMD, the company is nearing the second anniversary of the Opteron, the first 64-bit X86 processor and the catalyst for the company's financial viability.(
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This tutorial by Sean Liming and John Malin examines the issues involved in customizing thin client devices based on Windows XP Embedded. The authors note that there have been several requests on the Windows XP Embedded newsgroups asking about modifying either thin client hardware or the underlying operating system.
Things like changing the TCP/IP address or domain name are relatively easy, as they can be handled within the existing OS image, according to the authors. However, many other types of changes require reconfiguring and rebuilding the XPe image, which can lead to problems if not done systematically. The authors offer step-by-step guidance for working through the required process successfully.
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continue at source)
Although Windows XP Service Pack 2 was designed to make your system more secure, there are some situations in which installing the service pack can actually undermine your existing security. In this article, WindowSecurity.com will take a look at what these situations are and how you can get around them.(
continue at source)
Will Microsoft really ship a major new version — something that's more than just a service pack upgrade — of the Windows desktop next year?
Microsoft watchers have been guesstimating since well before the first Longhorn Professional Developer Conference (October 2003) when Microsoft's XP successor would ship. Starting in earnest last August, when Microsoft gutted Longhorn bu exorcising the WinFS file system in order to get it out the door, speculation intensified, regarding whether or not Redmond could make good on its reset 2006 delivery target.(
continue at source)
Finally, this very cool tool created by Nelson Araujo is available as a free download from Microsoft (it was demo'd last year at TechEd in WINIL401). VSDM manages a virtual library of templates and ISO images and provides a streamlined way to manage and deploy virtual machines. Administrators can configure VSDM to allow non-administrators to create and manage their own machines without impacting other users' machines, or even being able to view them. This is a "must have" tool if you manage a large number of virtual machines or need to frequently recreate images based on a master image (template).
Virtual Server Deployment Manager 1.3.0
W2K3 SP1 is essentially the server counterpart of WinXP SP2. The service pack for server is geared to security-related fixes and updates. It is expected that about 80 percent of "major server apps" will work out of the box. That means 20 percent need tweaks like turning off the MS Firewall. Microsoft's KB has a good entry with the results of the Redmond "Windows Application Experience" test teams with SP1. They grabbed 127 server apps and tried it on W2K3 with SP1.
Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 Application Compatibility
Like just released PlateSpin PowerRecon, Microsoft too is working on its tool for server consolidation projects. Megan Davis informs that two technology specialists are developing a new report for Microsoft Operation Manager (MOM) 2005, monitoring physical servers performances and highlighting candidates for physical to virtual (P2V) migration.
Read instructions and see screenshots
By most measures, it might seem that Microsoft's crucial customers are the PC builders who license Windows for bundling on new machines. Those hardware original-equipment makers, though, are not the company's most critical constituency—and Microsoft knows it.
Yes, PC OEMs depend on Microsoft to support new hardware features and to generate customer demand for more hardware resources—and Microsoft depends on those OEMs for preload licensing revenues. But Microsoft depends even more on software developers to channel customer demand toward Microsoft's platform, so that OEMs will continue to consider it a no-brainer to stay with it instead of looking at lower-cost alternatives.
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The doubts of naysayers aside, Longhorn is going to be a heck of a lot more than just Windows XP Service Pack 3.
That's the view of Jim Allchin, the group vice president of Microsoft Corp.'s Platforms group, who told eWEEK.com in an interview that Longhorn is a "big deal"—not just for the company, but also for the industry, as it will create a lot of opportunity, especially for new programs leveraging the peer-to-peer platform.
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It had to happen - RSS everywhere, and this is another great example. The Help and Support site (http://support.microsoft.com) can now provide an RSS feed to your favorite RSS reader program with daily feeds of new articles relating to the products you are interested in. For more information, see this page
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/gp/rsshelp. To register for the service, use http://support.microsoft.com/selectindex/?target=rss and simply click on the links against the products you're interested in.
Eileen Brown writes: I don't tend to blog much about Clustering as Rodney, Paul and Evan do such a storming job on their blogs, but I was going through the swathes of messages that I havent had time to look at whilst I've been at the Technet Roadshow this week, and I came across this fantastic set of links about Clustering with regards to Disaster rewcovery situations. So its thanks very much to Adis and Chuck for compiling this amazing set of resources which I've reproduced here:
185942 Cannot run ISINTEG -PATCH on cluster server computer
178311 Error running ISINTEG on a cluster server
258243 How to back up and restore an Exchange computer by using the Windows Backup program
296788 Offline backup and restoration procedures for Exchange
266689 The "ESEUTIL/CC" command does not work on cluster server
323016 Setup with the disaster recovery option does not work on a clustered server that is running Exchange 2000 Server
303949 How to restore an information store database in a clustered Exchange environment
298068 Exchange setup "Server object ... already exists" error message
328875 This step-by-step article describes the implementation of Exchange on a Microsoft Windows 2000-based cluster
328759 Considering Disaster Recovery in Your Deployment Plan for Exchange 2000
263532 How to perform a disaster recovery restoration of Active Directory on a computer with a different hardware configuration
Disaster Recovery for Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server
Disaster Recovery for Microsoft Exchange 2003 Server
Exchange 2003 Disaster Recovery Operations Guide
Eileen Brown's Weblog
Exchange 2003 provides a native Journaling feature which allows you to archive all incoming and outgoing e-mails for a specific mailbox store. Beginning with Exchange 2003 SP1 you can download EXEJCFG.EXE from the Exchange 2003 download site. EXEJCFG enhances the current Exchange archiving features to capture recipients on distribution lists, BCC recipients and other message details. In this article I will show you how to implement Exchange 2003 Journaling for e-mails.
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Are you ready to experience SQL Server 2005? Announcing the launch of the SQL Server 2005 Virtual Hands on labs. In these labs, you will get to experience many of the new features in SQL Server 2005 including CLR integration, XML support and deep business intelligence integration. Just follow the link and experience SQL Server 2005 for yourself. Registration link:
http://msdn.demoservers.com/login.aspx?group=sql2005
I spent part of this morning watching / listening to a series of interviews with Dave Probert, an architect on the kernel team. Lots of interesting data about why Unix and NT have the structure they do and why, and lots of information about how things work inside NT-based systems:
Inside the NT Kernel with Dave Probert - Part 1
Inside the NT Kernel with Dave Probert - Part 2
Inside the NT Kernel with Dave Probert - Part 3
Inside the NT Kernel with Dave Probert - Part 4
One of the biggest complaints that we have heard from customers is that the support policy for Virtual Server was not very clear. The main cause of this lack of clarity has been that it has been up to each Windows Server System team to decide and communicate their own support policy. However - thanks to the fantastic work of one of my fellow PM's on the Virtual Machine team (here's to you Jeff!) - we now have a unified support policy that outlines what is and isn't supported by Microsoft inside of Virtual Server:
KB: 897613 Microsoft Virtual Server support policy
http://www.support.microsoft.com/kb/897613
KB: 897614 Windows Server System software not supported within a Microsoft Virtual Server environment
http://www.support.microsoft.com/kb/897614
Microsoft has continued its fight against alleged spammers whom it accuses of abusing its MSN Hotmail service. Microsoft investigators have helped the California attorney general and the US Federal Trade Commission to file lawsuits against four alleged spammers, accused of sending out millions of commercial email messages to users via the MSN Hotmail service.
The four are accused of breaching both state and federal anti-spam laws. Microsoft has so far helped to bring anti-spamming lawsuits against people in Florida, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington state.
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Microsoft may soon unveil a new "mini-tablet" concept that doubles as an ebook reader, in its latest attempt to build momentum for the Tablet PC platform, according to Microsoft Watch. Sources report that a 6 x 8 inch prototpye has been making its way around the Redmond campus, and is one of a number of new tablet form-factors expected in coming months, the Microsoft Watch story says.
Microsoft Watch editor Mary Jo Foley writes: Microsoft has been criticized, by even some of its closest Tablet allies, for trumpeting the Tablet's arrival, but then failing to follow through with adequate marketing. Some said Microsoft has been compounding the problem by delivering conflicting messages about the future of the Tablet operating system. The new hybrid Tablet/eBook device may be Microsoft's attempt to reinvigorate interest in the Tablet. The new system allegedly is a pet project of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.
A federal court is blocking Microsoft from using a networking feature planned for the company's future operating system code-named Longhorn and a service pack for Windows Server 2003 that had been scheduled to come out last year, according to a company that's suing Microsoft over the technology.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco granted Alacritech's request for a preliminary injunction to prevent Microsoft from using a TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) offload technology that Microsoft has code-named "Chimney," Alacritech said in a statement today. The technology was to have been included in the Scalable Networking Pack for Windows Server 2003, which was formerly slated for release in the second half of 2004, according to information on Microsoft's Web site.
Microsoft Corp. yesterday offered details about the compatibility of its Mac products with Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger," which Apple announced will ship on April 29. According to Microsoft, it has worked closely with Apple to make sure that Office 2004 works with new Tiger technologies, and "will conduct final testing" on its Virtual PC (VPC) product when Tiger is available.
"For example, upon installation of the new OS, Spotlight will be able to index Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats," according to a statement offered by a Microsoft spokesperson. "Support for additional features such as sync services will be enabled by a future update." Microsoft offered Macworld further details of how Tiger and Microsoft Office 2004 work together at a meeting earlier this year.
The Microsoft security train made its scheduled monthly stop on Tuesday, dropping off eight updates to cover 18 vulnerabilities in a range of widely deployed products. Five of the eight advisories are rated "critical" and Redmond officials are urging customers to apply at least three immediately as high-priority updates. The top three include fixes for high-risk flaws in Microsoft Corp.'s implementation of the TCP/IP stack; a cumulative patch for the Internet Explorer browser; and a patch for a remote code-execution hole in the enterprise-focused Microsoft Exchange Server.
According to Stephen Toulouse, program manager at the Microsoft Security Response Center, the vulnerabilities discussed in the MS05-019 bulletin present the biggest threat to Microsoft Windows users because a successful exploit could allow a malicious hacker to take complete control of an affected system.
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Eileen Brown writes: "After my session at the TechNet roadshow yesterday, I promised I'd make available all the links to the documents I'd been talking about during my presentation to save everyone scribbling down URLs's like crazy."
Preparing to Administer Exchange 2003 using CDOEXM
Special groups in Exchasnge EDS and EES
Planning a split permissions model in Exchange 2003
Planning for Global catalogs and failover
DSAccess and topology discovery
Viewing the Exchange schema using ADSIEdit
Eileen Brown's Weblog
The announcement of the DPM public beta coincides with the Storage Networking World conference -- a leading conference for IT managers, storage architects and infrastructure professionals -- taking place in Phoenix, Ariz., April 12--15. The public beta will be accompanied by two related releases -- a software developer kit (SDK) to help Microsoft's storage partners develop software that can be used to archive data from DPM; and a Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) pack designed to facilitate DPM management. General availability of DPM is slated for late 2005.
Microsoft Releases Public Beta of Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager
Microsoft Corp. plans to release a low-cost, scaled-back version of its Windows operating system in Brazil, the latest in the software company's efforts to compete with open-source competitors and combat piracy.
Microsoft confirmed in a statement Tuesday that it will announce plans for Windows XP Starter Edition in Brazil on Wednesday. But it said the government had not yet decided whether to include the version of Windows in a government program aimed at getting low-cost computers to novice users.
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Microsoft releases beta 2 to a closed group of beta testers. The core of this release is built on the Windows Server 2003 SP1 platform and adds optionally-installable components that our customers have requested. This beta will incorporate a number of key features that are of interest to customers who want to take advantage of new technologies available in the next release of Microsoft Windows Server 2003.
The beta will begin during the April and continue until Q4 2005. Potential candidates should have experience in configuring and administering Windows network environments. Additionally, access to a test network environment is required as beta software should not be installed in production environments. If you meet these qualifications and would like to be considered for this opportunity, please complete the following steps by April 18, 2005:
1. Go to
http://beta.microsoft.com and sign-in using your .Net Passport
2. Select to sign-in using a Guest ID of "
R2B2Beta"
3. Complete the nomination survey
The following FREE tool for Windows XP allows image files to be mounted virtually as CD-ROM devices. This tool is provided here for your convenience, and is unsupported by Microsoft Product Support Services.
Download Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP
Microsoft won't play second fiddle to Sony next month, the company tacitly said today. It will launch Xbox 2 in a half-hour show on MTV four days before its rival reveals the PlayStation 3.
Late last week it appeared both companies had planned to launch their respective next-generation consoles on 16 May - a day before the start of the E3 games industry show, natch - at different events in Los Angeles. Sony's launch was - and still is, we assume - scheduled to take place at 3PM PST. Microsoft's meeting was booked for 6PM.(
continue at source)
Then one day in mid-March of 2005, a funny thing happened on my way to the forums. MobileTechReview asked me to expand from writing Palm OS reviews to doing Pocket PC/Windows Mobile software reviews. I gratefully accepted the new challenge with anticipation. This was truly untested territory for me, and I eagerly awaited the arrival of a Dell Axim X50v with some software preloaded for the first set of reviews. As a “career” Palm OS man, I knew that I could face the dark side (as we call it in the Palm world) without flinching. I had no idea…
My first impression: Wow, this thing is small! I could build a sturdy house with the old, brick-like Windows-based PDA’s I’d seen before. The Axim X50v is shorter than my palmOne Tungsten T3 with its slider open, while being about the same width and depth. In that tiny package, Dell packed a 624 MH z XScale CPU, VGA screen, a CF slot, SD slot, IR, audio, microphone, WiFi, Bluetooth, 64MB RAM, 128MB Flash ROM, and a replaceable 1100 mA Li-Ion battery. The PalmOne Tungsten T5 had arrived towards the end of last year with significantly less packed into its slightly-larger package, to the considerable consternation of the community.
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Microsoft has committed to sell an Itanium edition of its forthcoming Longhorn Server, part of a renewed marketing effort for Windows on the high-end processor that Intel and Microsoft plan to begin Monday. The vast majority of Windows operating systems run on mainstream x86 processors such as Intel's Xeon or Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron. Because Itanium is largely incompatible and not nearly as widely used, support for it has been a lower priority for Microsoft.
That's starting to change, as Microsoft comes around to the way Intel and its chief Itanium ally, Hewlett-Packard, see the world. Like them, Microsoft wants to use Itanium to tackle the "big iron" part of the server market--massive multiprocessor machines running demanding and crucial tasks. "Our position has not been as clear here as much as it should be," Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Windows Server Division, said in an interview. "We have a commitment to Xeon, but also very much to Itanium."
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Did you know that if you hold down the SHIFT key when selecting Thumbnails View or opening a folder, the Filenames for the items will not be displayed? I didn't, but just found out because for some reason I had no filenames in any of my Thumbnails view and could not figure out why. This seems like an obscure feature since I could find no mention of it anywhere, and it took me 15 min to search for the answer on the web.
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In 2004, Bill Gates stood before a room full politicians, economists and business leaders and declared a war on spam. "It will soon be a thing of the past," Microsoft's chief software architect told those gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, before laying out a three-pronged approach to eradicating the scourge of unsolicited e-mail.
He promised to have the job done within two years. Now, one year later, even some critics say he's making progress. Microsoft has been working on a number of anti-spam projects, including SmartScreen technology in Microsoft mail servers and the Sender ID program. In addition, the company has set up more than 100,000 MSN Hotmail "trap" accounts. These are accounts that the company monitors to draw in spam and follow the possible links to phishing scams.
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A new version of the Sysinterals PsTools has been released: 2.14 (although the readme says it's version 2.15).
The Windows NT and Windows 2000 Resource Kits come with a number of command line tools that help you administer your Windows NT/2K systems. Over time, I've grown a collection of similar tools, including some not included in the Resource Kits. What sets these tools apart is that they all allow you to manage remote systems as well as the local one. The first tool in the suite was PsList, a tool that lets you view detailed information about processes, and the suite is continually growing. The "Ps" prefix in PsList relates to the fact that the standard UNIX process listing command-line tool is named "ps", so I've adopted this prefix for all the tools in order to tie them together into a suite of tools named PsTools.
More info on PsTools 2.14
Download PsTools
New versions of the Sysinterals tools Filemon and Regmon have been released: 7.00.
FileMon monitors and displays file system activity on a system in real-time. Its advanced capabilities make it a powerful tool for exploring the way Windows works, seeing how applications use the files and DLLs, or tracking down problems in system or application file configurations.
Regmon is a Registry monitoring utility that will show you which applications are accessing your Registry, which keys they are accessing, and the Registry data that they are reading and writing - all in real-time.
Download Filemon
Download Regmon
VMware Workstation is powerful desktop virtualization software for software developers/testers and IT professionals who want to streamline software development, testing and deployment in their enterprise. VMware Workstation allows users to run multiple x86-based operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and NetWare, and their applications simultaneously on a single PC in fully networked, portable virtual machines — no hard drive partitioning or rebooting required.
What's new in VMWare Workstation 5
Download VMWare Workstation 5
Microsoft plans to release 8 high-priority patches on April 12 for security holes in Microsoft Office, MSN Messenger, Microsoft Exchange and the Windows operating system. As part of the monthly security bulletin release cycle, Microsoft provides advance notification to customers on the number of security updates being released and the products affected. This is intended to help customers plan for the deployment of these security updates more effectively. The goal is to provide customers with information on soon-to-be released security updates.
In addition, Microsoft will release an updated version of the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool on Windows Update and the Download Center. Note that this tool will NOT be distributed using Software Update Services (SUS). Finally, Microsoft will release two non-security High-Priority Updates for Windows on the Windows Update site. These will be distributed to Software Update Services and are not required to install the security updates.
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Think you can outsmart IIS 6.0 ? Take the 'Hack IIS 6.0 Challenge!'
Why hold the hack IIS 6.0 challenge?
1. Because most security breaches are caused by people not following basic security guidelines and best practices. And we want to put IIS 6.0 to the test to see if it is highly secure when properly implemented.
2. It's a fun way to engage with you, our audience !
4. It's a chance to share knowledge and demonstrate how to protect your system against hack attempts.
If you can hack IIS 6.0, we'll give away a free Xbox. Contest begins April 17 and runs through June 8, 2005
Goto the Hack IIS 6.0 Challenge
Customers continually tell us the most important online community feature is getting quick, accurate answers to technical questions—using online communities as free tech support. Today, answering questions online got a lot better: MSDN Forums Beta is now available
Goto the MSDN Forums Beta
I am pleased to announce that this month's Exchange Web release contains a tool that the Exchange performance, development, and operations teams at Microsoft have used for quite some time called Exchange User Monitor (Exmon) and can be downloaded here. Exmon for the first time allows an Exchange administrator the ability to see in amazing detail the performance of an Exchange server. Shown on a user by user basis, Exmon allows you to see how much CPU, latency, network traffic, and disk each user on an Exchange server consumes. It can be run in almost realtime (minute by minute analysis) or over longer (multiple-hour) capture periods. Exmon also 'bubbles' up data sent back to the Exchange server from Outlook 2003 and higher about the user's actual experience, showing the actual RPC (network+server) latency and even the name of the process talking to the Exchange server (so you can see ActiveSync usage and other 3rd party MAPI applications). The data Exmon exposes is the 'raw' data that many of the Exchange Performance counters use in calculating the running averages.
Internally, this tool was used to help understand the performance of Outlook 2003 and other MAPI applications during the development of Exchange Server 2003. We use it to understand the broad impact of performance across a server, but also to troubleshoot specific performance problems with individual users. The impact to the server being 'traced' is minimal, allowing it to be run on very large servers. I'd love for you to download the tool, give it a whirl, and tell us what you think. We'd love to see what use you can come up with for this data, problems you're able to solve, and conclusions you're able to make. On a personal note, I recommend looking at a number of traces to 'aquaint' yourself with what's normal. Exmon data can be highly dynamic in range. It's best to use longer traces rather than smaller ones, because MAPI traffic can be very bursty, unless you're trying to look at a very microscopic level.
Exchange User Monitor (Exmon) Tool
As a Microsoft employee, I want to do my small part in making
MSN Search better. They have the little "
Help us improve" link at the bottom of the MSN Search result page, but it isn't that easy to figure out what needs improving? So I cooked up this quick-n-dirty search page to compare the MSN Search results with Google's:
http://www.addysanto.com/dualsearch.htm
It is actually more useful than expected, and after a few hours became my new homepage (replacing
www.google.com). The page is simple (static) html so feel free to download it and run it from your local machine for best performance. But if you like it - please remember to use that
MSN feedback link every now and then :)
This is a simple batch to force a static IP address on my machines.
ECHO interface ip > "%temp%\z.netsh"
ECHO set address "Local Area Connection" static 192.168.100.173 255.255.255.0 192.168.100.1 3 >> "%temp%\z.netsh"
ECHO set dns "Local Area Connection" static 151.99.125.1 >> "%temp%\z.netsh"
ECHO add dns "Local Area Connection" 151.99.0.100 >> "%temp%\z.netsh"
netsh -f "%temp%\z.netsh"
Useful when you have to change network often... and there is no DHCP server.
Giulio Vian's Weblog
Noooo! I hear you yell. She shouldn't be telling anyone how easy it is to back up PST's automatically when we're trying to implement a centralised e-mail archiving solution and educate the users.
But I'm as bad, or maybe worse than you. I use PST's and I burn them off to CD once a year. Aaargh! Not a good mechanism to keep hold of my data. Well it'll be my fault if I have a hard drive fail one month before my annual backup. So I found this on the web. It's been around for a while, but my sloppy back up procedures meant that I've never bothered looking before today. yes - you've guessed it. I've lost something fairly important and I've got a sneaking suspicion that I've deleted something from my new PST and - I don't have a backup of it. Grrrr......
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The DNS cache poisoning that first struck more than a month ago and led to users being redirected from popular Web sites to malicious sites that infected their machines with spyware is continuing. The DNS cache poisoning that first struck more than a month ago and led to users being redirected from popular Web sites to malicious sites that infected their machines with spyware, is continuing, said the Internet Storm Center (ISC) Wednesday. The attacks are taking advantage of vulnerabilities and design flaws in Microsoft server software.
DNS cache poisoning occurs when an attacker hacks into a domain name server, one of the machines that translate URLs such as www.techweb.com into the appropriate IP address. The attacker then "poisons" the server by planting counterfeit data in the cache of the name server. When a user requests, say, techweb.com, and the IP address is resolved by the hacked domain server, the bogus data is fed back to the browser and the user is directed to another Web site, not the intended destination.
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Software engineers who attend Microsoft's annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference later this month could get their first taste of a new Windows user permissions model that could change the way thousands of programs are developed and run. But as the company prepares for the final Longhorn development push, questions remain about its plans for a new user privileges model called Least-Privilege User Account, or LUA.
Microsoft claims that LUA will make life tougher for hackers and virus writers by limiting access to administrator permissions on Windows systems. But the company has been mum in recent months about its plans for implementing LUA in Longhorn, and it is considering incentives to encourage adoption of LUA (pronounced "Loo-ah") by skeptical ISVs (independent software vendors), including a new logo program for LUA compliance, according to interviews with ISVs and industry experts. Least permissions is a principle of computer security that recommends giving software applications and their users no more privileges on an operating system than are absolutely necessary.
Steven Bink reports that the final MSN Messenger 7 is available for download.
Download MSN Messenger 7
One of the things about playing with Software Restriction Policies is that you can go too far and end up not being able to do anything to rectify the situation. Active Directory Group Policy applied through a link to an OU is easy enough to fix - simply remove the GPO link and reboot the client. However, if you are experimenting with Local Policy, you can come unstuck. To resolve this: Boot into safe mode and logon as the local administrator. Start up the registry editor and remove all values beneath the HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Safer\CodeIdentifiers. On a reboot, everything should be back to normal.
The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) is a great tool to analyze servers and workstations for security vulnerability assesments. A couple of people on the Windows Server team were brainstorming about ways to roll up data from MBSA for multiple PCs and thought that it would be cool to use color-coded Visio diagrams to show which machines have security vulnerabilities. Some of the people of the Vision team had the same idea already and have just released a tool that integrates Visio with MBSA data.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/tools/mbsavisio.mspx
Microsoft is attributing the six-month delay for its Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition product to customer and partner feedback.
Microsoft acknowledged on Tuesday night that it is running about six months behind schedule with its high-end Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition (CCE) product.
A week ago, company officials said Microsoft expected to release an updated beta of the product, formerly known as Windows Server High Performance Computing Edition, in the first half of this year, with final product release likely before the end of calendar 2005.(
continue at source)
A new version of Sysinterals major tool Process Explorer has been released: 9.03. Process Explorer is an advanced process management utility that picks up where Task Manager leaves off. It will show you detailed information about a process including its icon, command-line, full image path, memory statistics, user account, security attributes, and more. When you zoom in on a particular process you can list the DLLs it has loaded or the operating system resource handles it has open. A search capability enables you to track down a process that has a resource opened, such as a file, directory or Registry key, or to view the list of processes that have a DLL loaded.
Download Process Explorer version 9.03
Just a quick note - if you're planning on upgrading Windows Server 2003 to Service Pack 1, and you have ISA 2004 Standard Edition already installed, you should install ISA 2004 SE Service Pack 1 first - it copes with a few of the changes in WS2003SP1 better than the original release. ISA 2004 Enterprise Edition is equivalent to SE SP1, so shouldn't need fiddling.
ISA Server 2004 Standard Edition Service Pack 1
Today marks a milestone for MOM 2005 with the release of a new set of MOM 2005 Management Packs – the ten “Wave 2 MPs”. This release almost doubles the number of MOM 2005 enhanced Management Packs available for Microsoft products. It greatly enhances MOM’s capability to manage these crucial applications by adding state monitoring, tasks and new reports. This release contains the following Management Packs:
1. Microsoft Virtual Server
2. Microsoft Windows Distributed File Services
3. Microsoft Windows Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol Services
4. Microsoft Windows File Replication Services
5. Microsoft Windows Print Services
6. Microsoft Windows Terminal Services
7. Microsoft Windows Application Center
8. Microsoft Windows Desktop Base Operating System
9. Microsoft Availability Reporting
10. Microsoft Web Sites and Web Services
MOM Management Pack and Product Connector Catalog
People ask me "How much of a design document is required?" - the answer - it depends on your audience. I would take great care in determining if the audience for EACH document was technical, executive or even end-user. Each document would be tailored to the audience to ensure that it could be digested and understood for what was important to them. Obviously, the contract and the customer dictates the # of deliverables, format/medium and approximate brick thickness - but I would take the extra time to ensure the audience was kept in perspective at all times.
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Active Directory In-Place Migration Design - Part 1
Active Directory In-Place Migration Design - Part 2
Apparently, the tradition at Microsoft is, on the day of your anniversary of starting at MS, to bring in to work 1 pound of M&Ms for each year of service you have. A colleague of mine is celebrating his 12th anniversary at Microsoft today, and has set up a table outside his office with every kind of M&M I think they make--12 pounds worth! If you happen to be in Building 18 today, stop by 1216 and grab a handful... While your at it, tell Mike congratulations for reaching this milestone!
BillCan's Place - Life and Security at Microsoft
Since much of the server-based storage targeted for consolidation on Internet Protocol storage-area networks (SAN) resides on departmental servers running Windows, Microsoft Corp.'s commitment to iSCSI has been key to the success of IP SANs so far. The company began offering an iSCSI driver, or "initiator," for Windows 2000 Server, Server 2003 and XP Pro shortly after the standard was final in 2003. In February, Microsoft stated it would release late a new version that supports multipathing, a technology common in Fibre Channel SANs that supports load balancing and fail-over by allowing multiple connections, or paths, between servers and storage devices.
Previously, Microsoft offered only multipath I/O (MPIO) for Fibre Channel, although Network Appliance Inc. and EqualLogic Inc. adapted it for their iSCSI products. Microsoft's goal is to simplify block-based networked storage by providing a universal initiator and MPIO interface for Windows servers. "In the Fibre Channel world, there are a lot of proprietary solutions, and they can get quite difficult to troubleshoot," says Claude Lorenson, a senior product manager at Microsoft's Windows Server division. To avoid that situation, Microsoft will support only its own MPIO mechanism for iSCSI, although Lorenson says it will continue to support "legacy" MPIO schemes for Fibre Channel.
Quoting
Megan Devis blog:
As you may know, Windows Server 2003 SP1 has been released, and a lot of people will be rushing to upgrade their virtual machines. If you're thinking about doing this, though, plan on postponing it for a bit. Virtual Server 2005 was released many months before Windows Server 2003 SP1, and the Virtual Machine Additions are not optimized for it. You will be very dissapointed in the way your virtual machines run.
But don't despair -- Virtual Server 2005 SP1 will include updated Virtual Machine Additions for Windows Server 2003 SP1 as well as the other new supported host and guest operating systems.
If you decide to use Newsgroups in your Exchange Server 2003 organization, the first step is to choose between Local and/or Public Newsgroup implementations. If you want to implement Local Newsgroups it is quite easy and independent from Internet traffic. Public Newsgroups mean that your Internet traffic might increase a lot so you as an administrator should try to keep public information to a minimum only. (
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A fundamental rule of computing (and life in general) is that things break down. Because of this, it's important to ensure that the components of a Windows server fail infrequently and can be quickly restored after a failure occurs.
Fault tolerant technologies are hardware and software features that prevent failures from occurring (high reliability) and enable failed components to be replaced or restored with minimal service interruption (high availability). This article outlines the different options for implementing fault tolerance using Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition. We'll look briefly at fault tolerance in three main areas: hardware, storage, and network applications.(
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MOM is a management tool for consolidating information about your Windows servers and administering them from a centralized location. To use MOM 2005, you need at least one Windows Server 2003 machine on the network, but you can even run UNIX and Linux servers from MOM using a third party add-on such as MetiLinx Connect for MOM. You can monitor performance and track security, analyze network assets and automate many administrative tasks.
But what about security? WindowSecurity.com will discuss some of the security issues related to MOM 2005, how Microsoft has made this version of MOM more secure, and best practices for deploying MOM in the most secure way possible.(
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Are you ready to experience SQL Server 2005?
Announcing the launch of the SQL Server 2005 Virtual Hands on labs. In these labs, you will get to experience many of the new features in SQL Server 2005 including CLR integration, XML support and deep business intelligence integration.
Just follow the link and experience SQL Server 2005 for yourself
SQL Server 2005 Hands on labs
Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 Service Pack 1 includes several new features designed to maximize both the speed and efficiency of Terminal Services administration, and the security of communications between Terminal Services clients and servers. New features include additions to Group Policy settings for Terminal Services Licensing, a fallback printer driver setting, a new way to set authentication and encryption, and a new global setting for starting programs when clients connect to a terminal server.
Download the 'What's New in Terminal Services for Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1' whitepaper
SQLIO is a tool provided by Microsoft which can also be used to determine the I/O capacity of a given configuration. SQLIO is provided ‘as is’ and there is no support offered for any problems encountered when using the tool. Please refer to the EULA.doc for the license agreement prior to using this tool.
Download the SQLIO Disk Subsystem Benchmark Tool
Windows Update Services is Microsoft’s new version of System Update Services (SUS). In this short article, Isaserver.org will walk you through the steps involved to allow the ISA Server to contact WUS and update itself.
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A little bird recently told me some good news --
Mozilla Firefox is now digitally signed by "Mozilla Foundation." This means that Windows customers who want to download the self-installing executable with Internet Explorer can do so and be sure that what they downloaded was indeed Firefox and not some corrupt (or tampered with) download:
Microsoft has urged businesses running Windows XP to upgrade their machines to take advantage of added security features, but only a quarter of XP corporate machines have been upgraded to Service Pack 2, according to a new study.
In a study of 136,000 corporate PCs, Canadian asset tracking firm AssetMetrix found that more than one-third of the computers were running Windows XP, but only 24 percent had installed the security-oriented Service Pack 2 upgrade. Companies were initially reticent to jump to SP2 when it debuted last year, but the AssetMetrix study found that most companies weren't blocking SP2 entirely; they just had not upgraded in large numbers. Of the 207 companies that were using XP on at least 10 machines, about 40 percent were blocking SP2 universally. At the other extreme, about 8 percent had forced the SP2 on all XP-based machines as a matter of policy.
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As part of its efforts to promote Tablet PCs, Microsoft on Monday will release a free Experience Pack of pen-enabled applications for the mobile PCs. Tablet PCs run Microsoft's Windows XP Tablet PC Edition operating system, a premium version of the Windows XP operating system. The mobile computers come with a special pen that allows users to write on the screen and control their PC.
The Experience Pack software bundle includes Ink Desktop, which lets users take notes using the Tablet PC pen directly on their desktop, Microsoft said in a statement. Other applications are Snipping Tool version 2, which lets users select and capture part of their screen, and Ink Art, a drawing application.
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Experience Pack for Tablet PC
Are you a busy professional software developer? Do you want to set your own schedule for learning how to use the latest tools? Developer eLearning is all about features and functions – served up specifically for the developer audience. Rich content that targets your applications, your needs.
What is eLearning? eLearning is an effective and efficient system of self-paced personal training, available over the Internet. Microsoft has made courses available in eLearning form to cover several of the important new technologies in Visual Studio 2005, including Connected Systems and Smart Clients, plus Windows Server 2003. More courses are planned for the near future.
Microsoft eLearning
The SMS 2003 Scripting Guide provides over 40 scripts, ranging from tasks such as creating advertisements to running queries. It explains the basics of SMS objects, WMI, and VBScript through a series of 'How To' examples. Each example has extensive and appropriate links to other resources, such as the SMS SDK, the WMI SDK, and the Windows 2000 Scripting Guide.
SMS 2003 Scripting Guide
In the past days, we've engaged in a partnership with
The Tweaking Experience. The Tweaking Experience is our partnering source for the latest Microsoft Technology, Information and Beta news. Lex van der Horst, the developer and maintainer, is also the author of
The Tweaking Experience Registry Guide, which provides an extensive range of registry tweaks, tricks & hacks for optimizing, enhancing and securing the Windows XP, 2000 and 2003 Server.
At the moment of this writing "The Tweaking Experience Registry Guide" has more then 400 Tweaks divided into several categories covering almost every aspect of the Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003. Keep up the good work, Lex!
The Tweaking Experience
To enhance security you can prevent users from using the RunAs command.
For standalone Windows XP machines in a workgroup environment, you can disable Run As by hacking the Registry. Simply use Regedit.exe to locate the following key on each machine:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer
Then create a new DWORD value named HideRunAsVerb and assign it a value of 1.
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Do you ever wonder why Microsoft has not built in more reporting tools to their operating systems? Have you ever wanted to email Microsoft and suggest that they at least allow some form of reporting on the security related details of user, group, and computer accounts? With the significant advancements that Microsoft has made with Active Directory over the past 5 years, you would think that they would have developed some form of reporting mechanism within Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 for user, group, and computer security related information. Well, they finally did! (
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Over the last few years, patch management has gone from being a relatively unimportant task to being absolutely critical to an organization’s security. Although Windows Update Service (WUS) is still in beta testing, it is time to start planning how your organization will make the transition from the Software Update Services (SUS) to WUS. In this article, WindowsNetworking.com will tell you what you need to know in order to insure a smooth transition.(
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One of the biggest chores that administrators have to deal with is application lifecycle management. Whether an office has 20 PCs or 20,000, no one likes the idea of going from machine to machine with an installation CD every time a new version of an application is released. There are programs that are designed to help administrators manage applications across a network, but most tend to be overly complicated and expensive. Microsoft’s SMS Server for example costs $1,219, not counting the necessary Windows Server license or additional client access licenses beyond the ten that the product comes with.
What you might not realize though is that Windows Server contains tools that you can use to deploy applications throughout your organization without having to buy any third party software. I will tell you up front though that the built in software deployment tools are not as good as what you would get in a third party application. Therefore, if you already have a copy of SMS Server or something similar, you will probably want to keep using it.(
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The official advice from Microsoft is that you should not install Exchange 2000 / 2003 on a Domain Controller. Of course, in the real world, there are many Exchange DCs out there. Let’s face it; in a small organization, a request for another server ‘just to handle email’ is not always guaranteed to be received with a sympathetic response. Those of you that do have an Exchange DC (but not some SBS2003 servers*) in your charge, however, will have noticed that they take rather a long time to reboot.
In such a situation, it’s easy to believe that it’s only your server that behaves like this, and that there’s something wrong with it. Well, actually, they all do that - it’s a known problem, caused by the fact that the server shuts down its Active Directory services before it shuts down the Exchange services. Exchange, of course, is heavily reliant on Active Directory; therefore it takes it a long time to shut down cleanly while it is waiting for responses from AD. Naturally, this wouldn’t be a problem if you never needed to reboot your server, but those automatic updates that insist on a reboot do seem to be arriving more frequently these days.(
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SecureRDP is a security add-on for Windows Terminal Services, that allows administrators to block non-authorized users before they can even see the logon screen.
The program offers several internal filters, including IP addresses, MAC addresses, Computer Names, Client Versions and more. In addition, you can also set time periods in which the Terminal Server may be accessed (e.g during regular business hours) and specify session limits per user.
Download SecureRDP- Secure Terminal Services
Though Microsoft has discussed the Longhorn client extensively, it has said very little to date about Longhorn Server, the Windows Server version that will arrive in early 2007. Longhorn Server will extend the technologies found in Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2003 Release 2 ("R2"), the latter of which is due in October 2005.
And like its predecessors, it will offer an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary server platform that builds on past technologies while providing new functionality. Specifically, Longhorn Server won't be completely re-architected or be rewritten in managed .NET code. However, it's likely that Microsoft will dramatically change the Windows Server kernel in this release, breaking compatibility where necessary in order to deliver dramatic new features or new levels of security. (
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A new round of so-called "pharming" attacks is targeting the .com Internet domain, redirecting some Internet users who are looking for .com Web sites to Web pages controlled by the unknown attackers.
The SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC) issued a warning Thursday about the new attacks, which corrupt some DNS (domain name system) servers so that requests for .com sites sent to those servers connect users instead to Web sites maintained by the attackers. News of the new attacks comes amid increasing reports of pharming scams, and statistics that show at least 1,300 Internet domains were redirected to compromised Web servers in a similar attack earlier in early March.(
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Virtualization technology is already transforming the way many IT organizations provision and manage their systems and applications. Server virtualization enables the flexible and secure consolidation of multiple operating systems and applications onto a single platform. This helps to reduce server proliferation, increase utilization, simplify IT infrastructure, and reduce management costs.
When used in conjunction with rapid software provisioning tools, it can also enable flexible and dynamic management of hardware resources to address shifting workload requirements. These capabilities are delivering substantial value for many businesses, and adoption is expected to increase dramatically over the next few years. According to estimates from IDC, eight percent of servers shipped with provisioning and virtualization features in 2003, and the number will grow to 40 percent in 2007.¹
Download the Enhanced Virtualization on Intel Architecture-based Servers whitepaper
MSN Search celebrates April Fool's Day by introducing Spoof, a tool to let you create funny search results about a friend, family member, or co-worker. When you're done, you can send the page to the target or anyone else you think might get a laugh out of it.
Real friends tell you the truth ... then point at you and laugh.
Goto the MSN Search Spoof website
It appears that Exchange is NOT supported on a virtualized platform. Using VMWare or Microsoft Virtual Server is a great way to deploy Exchange in a Proof of Concept, development, or testing is a great scenario for saving boxes, but it’s not a supported scenario in production as noted in the Microsoft Support article below.
"Microsoft does not support running any version of Microsoft Exchange Server on a virtual machine or on an emulator. This is true for Exchange Server running on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, or any third-party virtual machine program."
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=320220
The Microsoft SQL Server Report Pack for Internet Information Services (IIS) is a set of 12 Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services reports that works with a sample database of information extracted from Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) log files. This database can be populated with your own data using the Log Parser included with the IIS 6.0 Resource Kit. You can use also the sample reports as templates for designing new reports.
Microsoft SQL Server Report Pack for IIS
Owners of Portable Media Centers, smart phones and pocket computers will be able to download daily programs and other video content from MSNBC.com, Food Network, Fox Sports, IFilm and other content providers, Microsoft said. The company had announced plans for the MSN Video Downloads service at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters)—Microsoft Corp. Thursday said it was filing 117 lawsuits against unknown Internet site operators it charged were engaged in "phishing" schemes to obtain personal and financial information from unsuspecting consumers. Often scam artists pose as banks or other legitimate businesses, sending out millions of e-mails or pop-up Web advertisements with requests that the recipient update their account information but instead direct them to fake sites.
The world's biggest software company said it was filing "John Doe" defendant lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Washington state in an attempt to establish connections between worldwide phishers and discover the largest-volume operators. "We must work together to stop these con artists from misusing the Internet as a tool for fraud," Aaron Kornblum, Internet safety enforcement attorney at Microsoft, said in a statement.
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