SCOM and SCCM

These products are driving me nuts

Official Google Blog: Unicode nearing 50% of the web

Official Google Blog: Unicode nearing 50% of the web

Hot Food Hacking

Get your hot on and pour a about 1/4 bottle of Tabasco Pepper Sauce into the bag below and chow down!

Server 2008 R2

I have Server 2008 R2 running on an HP Laptop - just using the drivers for W7 from the HP support site and so far no issues with the hardware.

BJ MOORE

Microsoft ISA Server and the NEW Forefront TMG

I love using a firewall stack (or sandwich)  of Cisco ASA's and Microsoft ISA Servers.
LINK. I have been testing the new Forefront Threat Management Gateway in a lab environment and have been more than impressed with the new feature sets in this product. But am quite disappointed in the fact that QOS specifically shaping / policing is not included in the product.

The features speak for themselves I have implemented this in environments where over 5000 devices are using it as a proxy as well as doing reverse proxy for OWA, Sharepoint and RDP Services. I am sure we will run into issues with the integrated IPS and Web Filtering in the TMG and need to tweak the rules but that is par. Malware inspection updates will require a subscription from Microsoft and I am unsure of the terms as their link is broken.

The ASA sets on the outside serving as a NAT device and as a filter via rules ( Also the integrated IPS is sweet).



Books:
- Dr. Tom Shinder's ISA Server 2006 Migration Guide
- Microsoft ISA Server 2006 Unleashed

Coming soon
Microsoft(r) Forefront(tm) Threat Management Gateway (Tmg) Administrator's Companion (Pro -Administrator's Campanion)

BJ MOORE

TechWiseTV Broadcasts - Cisco Systems

I am currently going through all of the old broadcasts, I really wish I could download them for a portable device.

TechWiseTV Broadcasts - Cisco Systems

BJ MOORE

Anti-Virus/ Anti-Malware

I have been in charge of running AV for a large company for a few years now and have tested several products from Microsoft, Symantec and there multitude of others in the market.

Consumer: For many years AVG and Spybot Search and Destroy were on all my personal machines and served  me well in ridding my machines of issues. (CLAM-AV for Mac). I have now changed and been quite happy with the Microsoft Security Essentials LINK.

Enterprise: Symantec End Point Protection Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 provides policy based control over Host Intrusion Prevention Sytems, AV, AntiSpyware, Device Control and Firewall. Very nice product but I  have little experience lately with any other enterprise product.



BJ MOORE

Cisco Learning

Cisco has one of the best learning portal in Tech, some of the resources available are information on Certifications, Access to CCIE's and other experts in the Forums, and many great learning modules.
https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/index.jspa

Also Check out IPExpert - http://www.ipexpert.com they have some of the best material available for CCIE.

Favorite books:
Routing TCP/IP, Volume 1 (2nd Edition)
Routing TCP/IP, Volume II (CCIE Professional Development)
Cisco ASA: All-in-One Firewall, IPS, and VPN Adaptive Security Appliance

And I am looking forward to getting this soon.
Cisco ASA: All-in-One Firewall, IPS, Anti-X, and VPN Adaptive Security Appliance (2nd Edition)

BJ MOORE

Healthways - Home

Healthways - Home

Nintendo DSi

I have been playing with a Nintendo DS for a couple of years, Actually its my sons DS. Anyway my got a DSi for his birthday and it is really cool as they are really going after older more technical users.

No longer just a gaming device the DSi provides the following
- Camera - with two lenses - no video. ability to upload pictures to online accounts such as Facebook.
- SD Slot - the backward compatibility slot for older cartridge games has been removed. The SD can be used to store pictures and audio and I think games.
- Wireless - The DS had limited wireless capability - the DSi has a browser, wireless firmware update, Online store where there are several nice games (points).
- Audio - Audio recording
- Not much has changed about the size, screens or controls - the DSi may be .5 inches wider.
- Supports all DS games with the small cartridge.

Below are my recommended
Nintendo DSi Matte - Black
Dsi 18-In-1 Starter Kit - Blue

BJ MOORE

DROID Update

Motorola Droid Getting Android 2.1, Droid to Get Flash 10

I am waiting on the above updates prior to doing a review

Check out these links:
- Rapid Car Charger (CLA) for Motorola Droid A855 / CLIQ
- Motorola Droid Multimedia Docking Station
- Rapid Car Charger + Home Travel Charger + SYnc Transfer USB Data Cable for Verizon Motorola Droid A855 Cell Phone

Windows Home Server

I keep finding good reasons to keep my Windows Home Server up and running. Its a great place to keep your digial assets and deliver them over your home network to your other machines or game consoles (wii, xbox... no idea about a PS). Provides backup for the machines at your house.  Also its a great place to run ORB

Microsoft Windows Home Server OEM with URP1

Book: Windows Home Server Bible

Windows Server 2008 R2

I am greatly impressed by the wide feature set available in new Windows Server 2008 Release 2 LINK. Building upon Server 2008 Microsoft has provide a wide feature set that will provide competition to many best of class providers. Here are some great books coming out: Windows Server 2008 R2 Unleashed, Mastering Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 R2 Administration Instant Reference

64 Bit only - Excellent for new installations but this stinks for old installs that need to upgrade ( Like with Active Directory). 64 bit will extend many applications ability to see memory.

Hyper V - So far only tested in the lap but has been very stable in our test. Although not as feature rich as VMWare vSphere (ESX) in the areas of Disaster Recovery and Performance Optimization (vMotion) it does provide a viable solution for small to mid sized companies.

Remote Desktop Services - ( Terminal Server) is no longer your pap's old terminal server. Remote Application Publishing internally and externally works very well, I no longer load applications on my windows machines as I can just hit a shortcut and run seamlessly from a server. Also the RD Gateway provide a superior alternative to VPN.

VDI - Virtual Desktop Infrastructure does have some work to get to the level of Cytrix or VMWare but for smaller shops this is gravy. Also combined with Remote app and HyperV you can load up legacy applications that require an old OS and publish them to your users with out having to install anything more than a shortcut to the desktop.

Branch Cache - I think this needs work as it only works for some web calls HTTP 1.1 and flat files over SMB and provides no help for email or database driven applications. Windows 7 is required on the desktop also.

Storage Management on File Servers - Provides increased abilities to manage size of files and content via policy. Also DFS has improvements LINK

Active Directory - R2 does not bring much more than just enhancements to Server 2008 but for larger environments these are welcome and needed enhancements. LINK. Federation, Cert Services and LDAP we help me the most. I am still having to buy a Third Party Auditing tool form Quest to get some things we need out of AD.

IIS 7.5 - I have not had a reason to use it yet.

BJ MOORE

Songbird

Want to get rid of iTunes? Have a non-Apple Media player Check out songbird it has a ton of features and can import tracks from iTunes. You can use it with iPod's but I have not tried it

LINK

Microsoft Live Mesh

Ever need to share files among multiple Windows and OSX Machines? try windows live mesh. LINK

Some other great features are

- 5 GB of Space Free

- Sync folders show up on all machines with all the real files not links to an online account - great for travel.

- Accessable online when you are using a machine with out the Mesh Software - If this is your preferred method you should try officelive.com it is comparable to google docs sort of.

- Remote Desktop - Free Access your home Machine from anywhere this is available on windows only

More to come

BJ MOORE

Opera 10 - UNITE

A crazy thing happened while working on my old XP laptop which contains all my media - I started using Opera Unite. LINK

This is really cool except that it will reconfigure your firewall/router if you have UPNP enabled allowing every one to get to your machine. Other than have some of the same features as ORB (which btw also uses UPNP to poke holes in your firewall) it seems to be a contender to get alot of people in trouble for file sharing.

Nice features like

Unite includes - Photo sharing, Music, Video and File sharing from almost anywhere this is new and getting better with each patch. People are also out there writing Unite Plug-ins to enhance or add features.

The Browser - I have been using this since the mid 90's has a ton of widgets and speed up's for low bandwidth connection optimization.

BJ MOORE

WolfRamAlpha is Cool

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Check it out - EOM

BJ MOORE

MACBOOK Rebuild

I am going to go through the phases of rebuilding my old Macbook Pro 17", I had so many good Security and Hacking tools (from LINK) running that it is going to run much better, but also it will take me many hours to get it back the way I want it.

So far I have been able to find the OS CD's and boot it up to the CD by pressing C, I will try Disk Util to see if anything is salvageable. Luckily we were testing some full disk encryption software on this machine a few weeks back and I dumped all the files I needed.

BJ MOORE

SUN's Virtual Box

I am very impressed with SUN's Virtual box on OSX and on Windows. It is a great alternative to VMWare's Consumer products. LINK

I was running W7 on my Macbook Pro 17" until the HDD crashed. One issue with it is that the Virtual OS will not recover from the Host going into standby (Vmware and others I have used will recover). I have not used a version since 3.0.12 so this may have been fixed.

BJ MOORE

MAC Users Beware

a MAC is a PC.

Again I am faced with a Hard Disk problem with my MAC's it happens ever few months on laptops and it is easily determined as they will slow down on anything that has to use the disk. Since this is a BSD OS and has Swap Space and a Journaled File System disk use is pretty much all the time. If you let this go over time you will end up with a machine that will not boot. For good maintenance do the following

1) Run Disk Utility and Verify the permissions, And Verify the Disk - Most likely if this is the only drive on your machine you will not be able to repair.

2) Invest in Disk Warrior Alsoft DiskWarrior 4.0: Mac Universal Binary WDD105 it has been working great for me and will repair many more problems than Disk Utility and is essentially Fsck in a GUI but can actually fix some things that no other tool can fix such as Symlinks and folder/ file length limits.

3) For the Technical Folks there are many FREE options available to repair issues but so far Disk Warrior has been the best. Also look into Apple Jack.

Alway ensure you have all your Apple install disks available if you have startup issues you will need them. LINK

BJ MOORE

Untangle

If you are looking for a small footprint free Unified Threat Mangement device for a small network and have an extra PC with a couple of NIC's. Check out Untangle. LINK

There is a windows version which runs in virtual box in a self contained package so you only have to run the windows installer, The Linux version has been an excellent gateway for me for a few of years but requires a dedicated machine.

BJ MOORE

Online Privacy

Remember what you write today is permanently etched into 1000’s of databases somewhere on the Interwebs. Although currently used only to perform spot advertising and social hot lists today in the future this information via legislation or hack can be used for almost anything. Example some famous people have had their online accounts broken into by a non-hacker (BTW Hacker is an overused ambiguous term) by doing a simple Google search on them and guessing their password from other online accounts. TRY IT… Google or Bing yourself and see what you get and don’t just stop there dig really really deep just like someone would do if they wanted to steal your identity. No longer is dumpster diving needed, most of it is in your Facebook or Myspace profile.

As a social experiment for those using Facebook, Twitter and Gmail. Set every update to include the word Chicken and then have 100’s of your friends do it to and then 100’s more and then you will directly affect the production of chicken and delivery supply chain of chicken.

GO Check out Google analytics or yahoo web analytics for more information on how information is used.

BJ MOORE

DROID RULEZ

Yes we are testing AnDROID in the enterprise as well as a couple of versions of the iPhone. A review is coming once the new AnDROID software comes out. We are a huge blackberry shop and I still love my Bold but it has it limitations.

Cisco Security Appliance SA520W - REVIEW

Since we were unable to find anything even on cisco's site on how to properly configure this piece of equipment we decided to write about it. LINK

The SA 520W Security Applicance is a Small Office device with great capabilities for remote work environments.
1) Wireless and VLAN's when used togeter can be setup to create a guest networks or provisioned for QOS or VPN segregation.
2) Enterprise VPN Support for remote site access via IPSEC
3) Remote access VPN Support -
4) Stateful inspection Firewall with schedules adn IPV6
5) Content Filtering basic and Protectlink from Trend for advanced Filtering via categories and email protection if you are still hosting email in a small site (why?)
6) SSL VPN Server

And Much More.

This device seems to have a decent amount of power to run all the feature available but lacks in documentation on how to actually do anything with it and is very fragile to change. In two cases we had to reboot the box after making a change to the VPN profile which took down wireless ( WTH?) seems this is not modular. After a few days of hit and miss troubleshooting on the Site-to-Site VPN we discovered that the rules do not follow the normal flow you would see in an ASA. One VPN Policy per subnet destination was what finally worked the odd thing is if I tried to put in 10.0.0.0 255.255.248.0 to catch the first few of subnets in I was alble to ping from only one ip at a time from the destination. So one VPN policy per routable subnet .
The Wireless and VLAN's have very little documentation but are quite easy to figure out as you just assign a SSID to a VLAN in the Wireless VLAN Settings. Guest network are setup by VLANs and DHCP which give you the ability to provide wired or wireless to guests and to keep them separtated from the production network.
Licensing of protectlink is $$$ and somewhat a pain in the butt but compared to a solution like Contentprotect (review coming) or other $$$ web filtering / content devices. So overall $300 bucks a year for a 5 seat license is bad, especially if implementing a split tunnel VPN back to a big corporation.

Grade: C , This should be a high B with good documentation.

BJ MOORE

Reviews and Our Objectives

It is true we should let every device stand on its own merit not in a comparison war where features and services may or may not be apples to apples.
Objectives

1) Focus on on what we can test, not on rumors. But we will link out as we find other useful information.
2) It is not popular we like! Underdogs and OpenSouce try harder and Innovate faster so expect to see cheap alternatives to the norm.
3) We will try to implement a standard approach to validate our findings as to ensure consistancy in reviews. Try meaning it will be a work in progress until we find the right format

Initial Post

Sometimes random thoughts will be published here, we are working on getting the word out.