Technology Update

A weekend diversion

2008-07-24T23:55:00.001-04:00

Flash back to 8” floppy disks, dog slow modems, the geek winning over the woman and the WOPR.

Have a great weekend. More real technology next week.

VMware makes the hypervisor a freebie

2008-07-23T18:00:00.001-04:00

Lending further proof to the theory I recently bought into regarding the impending demise of the hypervisor as a competitive advantage, VMware announced this week that they will no longer charge for their ESXi embedded hypervisor effective July 28, 2008.

This is a pretty big step for VMware, though they are really only foregoing about $500 per server sold. The main point is that they are acknowledging that their role in the industry is no longer to be the standard-bearer for virtualization as a concept. Instead they are now in a position where they must depend on their management tools and other functions being a value-add and having that drive their sales. The Virtual Infrastructure management tools will still cost you, as will a standalone license of ESX. Time to start planning for those ESXi implementations if you aren’t already.

VMware also announced that they were going to be getting “more active in the cloud,” whatever that means. Of course this is no surprise since the new CEO was formerly responsible for EMC’s Cloud business, but it still doesn’t explain what they’re actually going to do there. The company will, according to the new CEO, "have a lot of relevance in the cloud, and as an on-ramp into the clouds." I can’t wait for someone to explain what that actually means, because it makes very little sense to me right now.

New laptop chips hitting the market

2008-07-22T09:34:00.001-04:00

Intel has announced their new Centrino 2 line of chips for the laptop market, a move expected to spawn new products from vendors. Like the previous Centrino family, the moniker describes a collection of components, not a single product. In the case of Centrino 2, this will include the Mobile Intel 45 Express Chipset and the Wi-Fi Link 5000 series wireless product. And Centrino 2 will focus on the Intel Core 2 Extreme processor, a model that is supposed to provide the best performance in a mobile system while contributing to an approximately 30% reduction in wattage. This means more performance AND longer battery life, the holy grail of mobile computing.

The Wi-Fi Link 5000 series of wireless systems is based on the 801.11n, the latest and greatest version of the WiFi protocol. In addition, some 5050 model of the series will include WiMAX radios as well as the WiFi, allowing for easy switching between the differing radio schemes for users on the move.

The Centrino 2 family of products is expected to start flooding the market in the next 90 days or so, just after the back-to-school rush and just before the holidays.

More on hypervisor interoperability

2008-07-20T15:39:00.002-04:00

In a post about a month ago I commented on a Microsoft engineer who was describing the decreasing importance of the hypervisor in the role of virtualization. Yes, the hypervisor is still a critical component of virtualization, but it also has stopped being a differentiator between the various platforms.

Citrix made a move in this direction last week with their announcement of “Kensho,” a management and provisioning infrastructure that allows for workloads to be deployed and migrated across a variety of virtualization platforms. Interestingly, the original development of the Open Virtual Format (OVF) platform on which Kensho is based was performed with VMware, though the announcement focused on interoperability with the Microsoft Hyper-V platform.

This development won’t make all your virtual servers instantly portable between platforms. But it does mean that as application vendors develop virtual appliances they can do so to the OVF specification, meaning that the single appliance can be deployed anywhere the customer wants to. This is great for consumers as it means the appliance is more likely to work consistently, regardless of the platform. And since vendors continue to develop appliance solutions it looks like this benefit will continue to grow.

This release from Citrix is a pre-announcement of a product suite expected to be available later in Q3, so nothing is really final yet, but it seems to be coming pretty quickly. Also, check the licensing specs on both your virtualization platform and the appliance to make sure you’re running a legit implementation.

The commoditization of the hypervisor continues…

A Blackberry patch worth picking up

2008-07-20T14:06:00.001-04:00

RIM released a patch for their Blackberry Enterprise Server software on Friday that addresses a significant security hole. The patch adds a server-side screening for a specific vulnerability in PDF files that can expose the BES server to malicious code in the context of the BES service account, which has full access to the mail store. That’s pretty bad. The workaround was to deny PDF files from being delivered to the handheld devices, which also wasn’t a particularly pleasant solution. If you’re running a BES server, an upgrade to v4.1.6 should be in your next patch window cycle.

And while we’re talking about Blackberry and security, remember that there is more to it than just the software. Even with a password on the device the content isn’t encrypted, so when a high ranking government aide gets hit on at a hotel disco in Shanghai, disappears with the woman and wakes up the next morning without their device you’d better hope that the remote wipe functionality is still working. Whoopsie.

Wal-Mart getting into the PC repair business

2008-07-20T13:31:00.001-04:00

Discount retailer Wal-Mart has teamed up with Dell in an effort to offer PC repair services at “Solution Stations” located in 15 stores in the Dallas area. Thus far the retail giant is claiming that it is only a pilot effort and that there are no intentions to expand it beyond the current trial at the moment, but it seems reasonable that they will expand it if they get some traction. The service competes with Best Buy and Circuit City offerings and has basically the same goals – make money off the services side where margins are generally higher than on the hardware sales.

Not surprisingly, a lot of the reaction to this announcement has been negative, focusing on the low quality of service that Wal-Mart seems to provide in their other “technical” efforts, like auto repair. Plus, it seems pretty likely that their support approach will be similar to that of their direct competitors – pop in the “magic” CD and hope that the scan it performs solves all the problems. If not, wipe the system and start from scratch. You didn’t really need that data, did you? Sure, I’m biased, but why not? Either way, be careful with your system, and make sure that you understand what the technician is doing with it. If you don’t and if they can’t explain it to you, you’re probably in a bad situation.

More Vista support coming for small businesses

2008-07-15T10:53:00.001-04:00

Microsoft announced at their Worldwide Partner Conference last week that they are going to be offering free phone support in the SMB space for customers purchasing new computers with Vista installed on them. The support is meant to help the customers adapt to the new OS and to assist in resolving application compatibility issues. If the issues cannot be addressed the company will even help their customers downgrade the system to Windows XP, assuming they have the manufacturer’s downgrade CD available. From the FAQ:

In cases where a small business customer cannot overcome an incompatibility issue and has the PC's recovery media disc for Windows XP, we are equipped to help with a downgrade over the phone.

It is interesting to me that this announcement was made at the partner conference, where normally the vendor would be pumping up the partners, not effectively admitting that the partners aren’t willing or able to sell and support the new OS. I think that it is more of the former than the latter – partners are not selling Vista because it isn’t compelling and most companies don’t want to spend the money on the user training and rebuilding of their desktop images and processes.

Still, Microsoft is pushing ahead full bore, with plans to go on the attack over the Mac v PC Guy ads, among other things. Its a good thing they still have all the marketing dollars available to help push the product that folks don’t seem to actually want or need.

More info here.

Big changes atop VMware

2008-07-10T19:01:00.001-04:00

In a move that appears to be the end to a rather significant power struggle at the top of VMware, co-founder, CEO and President Diane Greene has been ousted in favor of former Microsoft executive and current EMC executive Paul Maritz. There hasn’t been a lot of detail released by VMware as to the reasons behind the move, but all signs point to a power struggle atop the virtualization behemoth and EMC subsidiary. Greene seems to have wanted to maintain significant independence from parent company EMC; Maritz seems to have no problems playing nice with the corporate parent.

VMware is facing significant competition in the virtualization space, both from Microsoft’s Hyper-V (released for download last week, BTW) and Citrix’s Xen Server. That being said, the real competition isn’t in the hypervisor space anymore, or it won’t be in the next generation of the products. The hypervisor is basically a commodity now, meaning that the other tools surrounding the virtualization platform is where the money is going to be made. It is hard to say if VMware is really adjusting to that quickly enough right now, but that’s mostly because they are in the lead so there isn’t a ton they can be doing right now to improve those tools. Microsoft is making their management tools integrate with VMware’s which is relatively easy, since VMware’s are out there and a known target. For VMware to make their fully integrate with Hyper-V right now is a bit harder since the platform is brand new. I’m reasonably confident that VMware will get the integrated management tools out there eventually.

Maritz’s background includes overseeing the development of Windows 95 and Windows NT, and most recently acting as the head of EMC’s Cloud Division. I don’t know if this move is a pre-cursor to melding the VMware line into the Cloud Division, but if it is I can see a couple potential synergies a few years out. While the mainstream is finally starting to accept virtualization as a hardware consolidation tool, there are more developments coming in terms of client provisioning and virtualization. And if you’re connected via broadband all the time and need to keep your session consistent and active everywhere, what better place to locate your access server infrastructure than in the “cloud” where it is the same setup from any connection, without being reduced to the lesser functionality of web-based clients. It would be an interesting move and potentially could create a schism in the virtualization field, with server virtualization and client-access virtualization forming two distinct tracks rather than the current overlap. Of course, the current overlap really resembles the client virtualization folks forcing their systems onto the server virtualization infrastructure, so maybe a split would be good for both sides.

Another possibility is that the VMware in the “cloud” is a move to an environment where the solution can become a service, rather than a product. I’ve worked with a vendor who is already renting server space in a virtual infrastructure, effectively charging for the services based on a formula that accounts for bandwidth, storage and CPU cycles while providing infrastructure to run most OS platforms. It is a pretty functional approach and seems to be working well so far. If VMware is looking to break in to that market this would be an interesting way to get there.

There still aren’t a ton of details out there as to the exact reasons behind the move, but it is effective as of June 30th, so there was no hiding the fact that this was a push rather than Greene deciding to “spend more time with her family.” In the mean time, the VMware platform is still the gold standard for hardware virtualization, and they are making pretty good progress on the other fronts. They reduced guidance on their earnings outlook, so that isn’t a good thing for investors, but it doesn’t change the status of the platform all that much.

On XP, Vista and Windows 7

2008-07-10T18:39:00.001-04:00

Microsoft continues to pump their PR machine in an effort to convince the world that Vista is the logical next step in their computing path. Interestingly, this latest salvo seems to be less of an effort to convince people of the value of Vista and more of an announcement that there really aren’t any other options and that the next version isn’t going to change that.

So what did Senior VP Bill Veghte have to say about the situation? Here are a few choice bits.

As our next generation PC platform, Windows Vista has many advantages that make it the best choice for people who are buying a new Windows-based PC to use at home or in a small business. However, some small business customers may have applications that aren't compatible with Windows Vista. In most cases, your software vendor should have an updated version of these applications. In the case that you still need Windows XP Professional as noted above, you can purchase Windows Vista Business or Windows Vista Ultimate on a new PC and then use downgrade rights until you are ready to upgrade to Windows Vista. When you are ready, you are "future proofed" since you already have a license for Windows Vista.

You may as well buy it now, ‘cause you’re eventually not going to have a choice, and we’d like your money now rather than later. Oh, and it is the vendors’ fault that the compatible versions of the software aren’t out yet, so be mad at them, not at us.

Some of you may have heard about “Windows 7,” which is the working name for the next release of Microsoft Windows… You have told us you want a more regular, predictable Windows release schedule. To this end, our plan is to deliver Windows 7 approximately 3 years after the January 2007 general availability launch date of Windows Vista.

…[O]ur approach with Windows 7 is to build off the same core architecture as Windows Vista so the investments you and our partners have made in Windows Vista will continue to pay off with Windows 7. Our goal is to ensure the migration process from Windows Vista to Windows 7 is straightforward.

That’s right folks - Windows 7 is right on time, scheduled for January 2010. There haven’t been many public showings of any of the functionality yet, much less discussion of betas or community releases, though it is still early. I’m guessing that January 2010 will slip, but that’s mostly because Microsoft hasn’t hit a release date in a few years, not because I believe that Windows 7 is special.

Possibly more importantly is the note that Windows 7 will be using Vista as its basis. That cannot really be surprising to anyone. There is no way that Microsoft was going to scrap Vista and start over, regardless of what their critics (and fans) say. There is just too much of an investment there. So if you’re holding out for a better experience in Windows 7 than with Vista it might be a futile effort, since the base code is going to be pretty much the same. Personally I’m most frustrated by the fiasco that the UI changes have produced. I’m not talking about not liking the look – I adjusted to the new Aero interface pretty quickly. But the Aero interface is just an overlay, not a native view. So all the transparency and fancy control boxes are really the same old code underneath, with an extra layer of processing required to convert the way they look to be the “pretty” version. Sure, most new computers have plenty of processor available these days and old systems will just deny the Aero option from loading, but it still seems like a ridiculously inefficient way to get to the results that Microsoft was looking for.

Those are just two of my favorite bits from the letter. The rest of it is worth a quick read. It isn’t anything all that ground-breaking, though the fait accompli tone of the message is a bit over the top. Good luck planning that upgrade. If you’re lucky Windows 7 will be out somewhere around the time you finally get the planning completed.

Tracking lost and stolen laptops

2008-07-08T22:51:00.001-04:00

Dell is under fire a bit this week (from me, among others) for publishing one of the most ridiculous “studies” I have seen recently. This one was produced to show just how prevalent lost and stolen laptops are and to help drum up business for their laptop tracking and recovery program. Don’t get me wrong – the concept is actually a really good one and I think that more folks should look in to the various tracking and recovery options out there – but this report is off the charts.

The report has been covered a lot in the media (Link 1, Link 2, Link 3) and the staggering statistic is this: 637,000 laptops are lost or stolen in airports in the USA every year. That is 1700+ laptops each day, or just over one per minute. The number is ridiculous. It turns out that the organization didn’t actually verify the data they collected, and their collection method was to email a bunch of airport administrators and ask them to guess how many laptops are lost/stolen at their airport each week. And boy were those folks wrong. Fortunately, ComputerWorld magazine followed up on the stats to expose them for what they are – the product of wild imagination. Miami’s reported 1,000 missing laptops per week was actually about 550 for all of 2007. That’s a 99% margin of error, and that may be one of the more accurate numbers in the study. Actually, Anchorage’s zero is probably closest in absolute numbers. The TSA reports that the number of laptops reported missing to them is about 75 per month.

Moral of the story is to not believe all the statistics you read, especially when they are so sensational. Also make sure that you’ve got the appropriate setup on your laptop to protect its contents from prying eyes and to get it back if it is lost or stolen. There are a lot of options out there for tracing and encryption, some of which are better than others. Email us for more information on the various choices and how you can better protect your mobile workforce.

Internet Explorer 8 – Most secure ever

2008-07-08T22:33:00.001-04:00

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… A Microsoft employee notes in a blog post that the newest version of their web browsing software will be the most secure ever. Ummm, yeah.

Seriously, the Security Program Manager for IE has posted in his blog that IE 8 will offer “comprehensive protection” against cross-site scripting and also include translation tools so that users can know what language they are submitting form data in. And similar to how they deal with bad SSL certificates in IE 7 (big warning screen forcing you to click on the red X to continue), IE 8 will do the same thing for “sites known for attacks,” however that is determined. They theoretically already do that a bit today with the anti-phishing filter – and claim to stop millions of phishing attacks each week, but I’ve never seen anyone actually use that so I don’t really know. And the browser will supposedly be isolated from the rest of the local network, so an attack stays confined on that PC instead of hitting the rest of the computers at a company.

I guess these things could really happen, but I cannot imagine that the browser will be “comprehensive” in any way; there are no absolutes in security. And so this one may be the best ever – it may actually be pretty secure – but that still isn’t enough that I’d get super-excited and start releasing updates about how great it is.

If you want to play with the secure browsing platform you can pick up Beta 1 today or wait until August for Beta 2.

New licensing options from Microsoft

2008-07-03T10:46:00.001-04:00

Microsoft is great at offering new licensing plans. Every time I think I have figured things out a new option comes along that means it is time to start over. The Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA), for example, allows you to rent your license from a provider rather than buying it outright. SPLA is actually great for growing companies or really anyone who wants to keep payments consistent on a month-to-month basis. If you’re interested in learning more about the SPLA option and seeing if it can help you manage your Microsoft licensing costs contact us and we can discuss it in more detail.

But the SPLA is old news; it has been around for a while now. The new fun comes in two forms. For large organizations there is the new Microsoft Select Plus licensing plan. This is similar to the other large volume licensing programs, including the existing Select program and also the Enterprise Agreement programs. The nice thing about Select Plus is that it allows for the aggregation and management of contracts globally under a single agreement number. This means companies will generally have more tier points on a single contract and get better discounts overall. Hard to complain about that.

For home users and students there is a new licensing format for the Office Home and Office Student editions. Called Microsoft Equipt, the new program is an annual license approach to the Office suite, plus it includes Microsoft OneCare, too. For $70 annually one gets Office Home (Excel, PowerPoint, Word and OneNote) and OneCare’s malware protection services. Even though it is an annually licensed service the Office offering is NOT truly a SaaS offering; you get full install media and the applications all run locally on your computer. And you get to install the software on three computers on a single license. That’s actually not a terrible deal if you’ve got a few PCs at home. It seems that Microsoft’s goal is to get after the folks who are buying a security suite subscription (e.g. Symantec) anyway and get them on to the OneCare platform by using Office as a loss leader. It is a somewhat risky approach since they could be losing a lot of Office revenue, but it can’t be a worse idea than buying Yahoo.

Which licensing option is right for you? Hard to say since I barely know you out there. But a short conversation could help answer that question and many others.

The problem with biometric login security

2008-07-02T21:54:00.002-04:00

It can fail.

I’m a huge fan of the biometric approach to security. Nothing to remember (or forget) and the process is relatively easy to set up and get running. I am, however, slightly less of a fan this evening than I was this morning. I just learned what is involved in recovering a system when the TPM software goes bad, and let’s just say that it wasn’t pleasant. I was able to eventually get the software off the system and get myself logged in using a normal password, but the security is pretty hard to work around. I suppose that is part of the point, as if it were easy then it wouldn’t be all that secure. Plus there seems to be very little documentation about the implementation that Dell uses which further frustrated my efforts.

I’ll still push it as a great technology, but now my comments will be a bit more guarded. I guess it is only really good, not great.

Grasping for straws on the Microsoft-Yahoo merger reasons

2008-07-01T10:51:00.001-04:00

The buyout is apparently off, at least for now, but that hasn’t stopped the various “analysts” from continuing to cover the potential MS/Yahoo deal as though it is just moments away from happening. I didn’t understand the merger 5 months ago and I still don’t understand it today, but these analysts seem to have it all figured out. On Sunday I actually heard this as a justification: A user could be running their fantasy sports league on Yahoo and then be able to seamlessly export the data to Excel to be able to analyze it. Yup. The justification is that simple. I’d spend $45Bn to make that deal happen.

The deal still seems to be dead, and Yahoo is busy trying to shore things up otherwise. And in the mean time you’ll have to come up with a different method for analyzing your fantasy sports leagues. Oh, the humanity.

The Hypervisor doesn’t matter

2008-06-27T11:57:00.001-04:00

Most presentations from company reps focus on just how great their product is and how much it is what all the others are not. When I hear a company man saying something else it is certainly refreshing, and it happened again recently in a conversation with a Senior Engineer on the Windows Server team. His responsibility pretty much covers the virtualization space, and this is the second time I’ve heard him talk about Hyper-V (notes from the first session here, here and here). And just like last time this session was a very insightful look at the Microsoft product as well as the direction the industry is heading overall.

The most poignant comment that was made throughout the session was that the industry has had far too much focus on the hypervisor and not enough on the actual value of virtualization. The vendors have all pretty much agreed that the hypervisor itself is a commodity – there just aren’t that many differences between them and any differences that there are will be wiped out in the coming months as the vendors continue to improve their products. The key is to look past server consolidation towards the areas where virtualization can truly start improving the performance of an environment, not just cut down on the number of physical servers in your environment.

So how will that happen? Part of it is more efficient and functional management tools. The ability to manage workloads rather than just servers (i.e. shift a workload to a different server to account for a hung process within a single server) is a huge component of this next step in management tools improvements. The other big aspect of improved management tools is efforts that are being made to improve the server deployment process. Today’s process is pretty much to deploy a sysprep’d server image and then spend a couple hours adding various components and configuration settings and then finally loading the server application(s) on the system. Microsoft is putting efforts in to streamlining the deployment process. So you can indicate that a virtual server will be an Exchange 2007 Hub Transport Server and it can know to install the .net framework and other various components as part of the provisioning process. This idea of “composing” a server rather than installing apps is going to be a major piece of Microsoft’s push in their management suite and application installation process going forward.

Of course, I’m not all that surprised to hear Microsoft calling the hypervisor a component, particularly since theirs isn’t one of the best out there right now in terms of overall functionality (e.g. no live system migration/Vmotion, though supposedly that is functional but didn’t make the cut for the RTM release). Still, the move towards actually making better use of the the virtual environment beyond just reducing physical server count is a rather notable goal.

Some other minor notes from the session:

Don’t expect any further cooperation between AMD and Intel to allow guest OS sessions to migrate between servers running the different processor families anytime soon. Not likely to happen.
Multi-core VMs are almost always a waste because so few applications are written to support multi-threaded operation. Nothing new here, but it is worth repeating.
The next version of Windows Server probably won’t scale up all that much more in terms of processor core support. Today’s 64-core support seems to actually be sufficient for 98%+ of the server hardware or implementation needs in the world. The next version might up the number to 128 or 256 cores, but there really isn’t all that much of a need for it as best as anyone can see.
Server consolidation doesn’t do much for server application availability. Remember that next time you’re trying to sell the benefits of virtualization to someone and they ask what the benefits are.

More notes from the session next week. In the mean time, start getting used to the idea that the hypervisors are all pretty much commodities and that the management aspects are the most important thing to look at when you’re planning a new environment. And you’re ultimately probably going to want to mix and match to get the best benefits from all the vendors.

Intel decides to skip Vista, for now

2008-06-26T17:21:00.001-04:00

According to unnamed sources inside Intel’s IT department, a decision has been made to not upgrade from Windows XP to Vista, because “This isn’t a matter of dissing Microsoft, but Intel information technology staff just found no compelling case for adopting Vista.”

I wanted so much to be excited and wowed by Vista when it came out, but I have to agree with the Intel assessment for the most part. The fact is that the upgrades would require newer hardware and more powerful hardware to run, and that means a bigger CapEx spend today just to get the systems into the hands of employees. On top of that, there are some efficiencies in deployment and management, but not enough for a company with 80,000 stations and an almost certainly well established workstation management process to want to change them up now. The other benefits, such as application virtualization (via SoftGrid), just don’t seem to be compelling at this point for most customers. It is a very cool concept and it mostly works most of the time, but the SoftGrid solution actually has enough limitations that it isn’t really ready for 80,000 seats either. Native IPv6 support and the security improvements aren’t compelling either, it would seem.

It is also a particularly ironic decision considering the efforts that went in to getting some of the older Intel chipsets declared “Vista-capable” despite the fact that they cannot run Aero or really make the Vista experience anything other than insanely frustrating.

It seems that a lot of companies are pinning their hopes on Windows 7 in 18-24 months. That’s a huge risk right now, but given the alternative (Vista), it doesn’t seem to be one that companies are shying away from.

Hyper-V now on sale

2008-06-26T13:57:00.001-04:00

Microsoft has started selling Hyper-V, the second major component of their 2008 wave of applications. The release came six weeks earlier than originally expected which seems to be a good sign from the company that they are confident in the quality of the product.

If you read the articles you’d think that VMware is quaking in their boots over this one, but there are enough limitations in the Hyper-V platform that VMware, Citrix (Xen) and the other players have some time before they need to really be worried about the Microsoft foray. Interestingly, I was at another session with Microsoft earlier this week and there were some rather revealing comments about virtualization and hypervisors and the future trends of the product space; hopefully I’ll get my notes together on that later today or tomorrow.

In the mean time, go grab a copy of Hyper-V and give it a test run. Once you have your 2008 server installed, of course.

In-flight Internet returns

2008-06-25T17:52:00.001-04:00

Today saw the initial commercial flight for AirCell’s Gogo service on board an American Airlines 767 flying between JFK and Los Angeles. The service will be available later this summer on all of AA’s 767s flying between New York and LA, San Francisco and Miami. This is either a blessing or a curse, depending on whether you were trying to use those few hours in the air to get away from work or not. The service will have reasonably high latency, so I wouldn’t expect that a Citrix/Terminal Services session would be too functional, but email and other activities should be pretty reasonable. And these companies seem to think that they have a setup that will allow them to stay in business where the Boeing Connexion service couldn’t. This is the culmination of a long road that I’ve written about a few times before, and I’m very excited to see it in action.

ODF coming to Office 2007

2008-06-19T13:23:00.001-04:00

Microsoft has recently announced that they will be including full integration for the Open Document Format (ODF) in Office 2007 as part of the SP2 release, expected in early 2009. This is an interesting move by Microsoft, away from previous plans to only include converters for the competing document format. It also seems that they are planning on including native support for XPS and PDF documents in the service pack, which is interesting because they had to pull the PDF support out of the product back in June 2006 because of complaints from Adobe. I can’t imagine that Adobe isn’t going to complain again, so we’ll just have to see how that goes.

I haven’t seen a ton of adoption of the ODF format, so I’m not sure that this is really a big deal, but it is nice to see Microsoft at least pretending to play nice with the others these days.

WiMax takes off in Amsterdam

2008-06-18T17:32:00.001-04:00

WiMax has long been seen as a potential competitor to cellular-based data networks, allowing a combination of high speeds and reasonable range. Plus roaming between access points is supposed to be way easier to manage than normal WiFi connections. Of course, it also requires a whole new infrastructure to be built out and it isn’t backwards compatible with other technologies such as WiFi, so it is a bit of a hard sell to drive adoption. Still, companies are developing solutions. Sprint has been working on their XOHM network for a while now, with a launch expected any day now or in several months, depending on who is giving statements to the press on any given day.

Things like this seem to take off more quickly in Europe, with more densely populated cities and a populace generally more willing to adopt the new technologies. And so it is that Amsterdam was the target of a WiMax network launch this week. With access priced at 20 Euro per month and unlimited download capacity the offering is priced lower than most other broadband options, so they’ve got a chance to take over a decent market share. At the same time, however, the company’s management acknowledges that unless they are able to expand their coverage area and their subscriber base pretty significantly that they won’t be able to stick around too long.

Patching the patch process

2008-06-17T16:19:00.001-04:00

Microsoft is wiping a bit of egg off their face these days as they try to work out from under some issues related to deployment of June’s monthly patches. Specifically, customers using System Center Configuration Manager 2007 for patch management and where the clients have the older Systems Management Server 2003 client installed cannot deploy this month’s patches.

In this scenario, the Microsoft Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) Offline Scan Catalog cab file (Wsusscn2.cab) may not correctly synchronize with the site server database when you use the Inventory Tool for Microsoft Updates (ITMU). This problem may prevent the June 10, 2008 security updates from being deployed to SMS 2003 clients.

Microsoft has released a manual update for the WSUS catalog to address the issue in the short-term. No word on whether July’s patches will roll out correctly or not.

Happy patching!

Dell gets into the sub-notebook space

2008-06-13T19:32:00.001-04:00

Dell has joined the ranks of manufacturers selling smaller, lighter (and occasionally cheaper) laptops, targeting folks on the go and others looking for lightweight alternatives to traditional laptops. The Dell product will be called the E, similar to the name Asus uses for their product, and the specs will also be similar. There will also be a model/version that will compete with the MacBook Air at 0.8” thin. And they will all have XP as the OS, taking advantage of the Microsoft policy to allow XP to continue to be installed on systems with smaller screens (the E will have an 8.9” screen). That alone may attract some folks. It looks like the devices will top out at 1GB RAM and most will only be available with a 16GB max SSD hard drive, so there isn’t a lot of flexibility there, but the light weight may make that a reasonable trade-off for some. They are expected to be available starting in August with the initial price point at $299. Maybe time for a birthday present to myself…

Help for securing admin passwords

2008-06-13T08:12:00.001-04:00

One of the biggest pains in administering a network is keeping track of the variety of admin passwords. Even more important than that is keeping the passwords “fresh” by changing them regularly. Service accounts are often the ones that have the “password never expires” check-box selected, and that is a security risk, though one most of us take regularly. The fact is that changing the password in AD and then making sure you change it everywhere else in the system is a major pain, and has a pretty good chance of resulting in something breaking on the network while you do it.

Lieberman Software has introduced a product called Enterprise Random Password Manager that addresses this issue. The product performs a discovery of service accounts and places they are used throughout the network, and then manages those passwords. It creates complex and random passwords for the accounts, changes them on a regular basis and propagates those changes to Active Directory and to the various systems across a variety of platforms and technologies. It also includes a management interface that can reveal the passwords to authorized parties, with everything logged for follow-up auditing.

If you’re looking to address your password management nightmare, this seems like a pretty good place to start.

SQL Server 2008 hits Release Candidate status

2008-06-12T22:23:00.001-04:00

As part of the 2008 wave of product releases (including Server 2008 and Hyper-V) SQL Server 2008 has been released to the public in its final beta format as Release Candidate 0. The updates available in SQL Server 2008 do not seem to be particularly significant unless you are running major data warehouse systems, but at least they are able to finally get one more of the product wave almost out the door. At this point the good news is that it would seem that all the 2008 products will actually be released in 2008.

SQL Server is a key component in the Microsoft architecture. It is the backbone of SharePoint deployments today, and many thought that Exchange 2007 would be SQL based rather than continue to use the JET database engine. And the same thoughts are being tossed about regarding the next version of Exchange server. There are also rumblings from Bill Gates of all people that SQL server may become the backbone of Active Directory, allowing for enormous scalability and more resilient replication options, or so they hope.

No matter what, SQL 2008 is a big release from Microsoft’s point of view, and this step is a significant one towards increasing the value of the product. Whether it really matters for the rest of us – or even if vendors support it in a reasonable timeframe which they didn’t do for SQL 2005 – remains to be seen.

The requisite iPhone 2.0 post

2008-06-10T09:23:00.002-04:00

New iPhone available soon, along with new software for existing models. The price will be lower, apparently subsidized by the carriers. And all the features that were previously discussed are going to be available. The Exchange ActiveSync integration will be great, though it still doesn't allow for a fully managed mobile environment, so some companies are still going to shy away from supporting the device.

I really wish there were something new and exciting to post about with the news of the new device. Alas, there is not.