Tag: Windows

Another great FREE utility

Well no so much a utility as a setting I suppose. What is it? It is OpenDNS. What does it do? It allows you to point your DNS to much bigger, faster, better featured, highly reliable, etc service for retrieving the domains you type into your web browser. Why is it better? Well apart from being all the things I just mentioned it allows you to monitor all your DNS requests, for all your networks from a web console (cool). Also, it can be configured to prevent requests to phising and “adult content” web sites. This means that if a user inadvertently clicked on an email that contained a link to a phising site (to obtain their banking details for example without them knowing) then the request would be automatically dropped and the user would get a nice warning page.

By using OpenDNS on your network you’ll ensure that not only will your users get a faster response to their request for web sites but they’ll also be better protected. Even better you can access all you DNS statistics from a web console and lots more features. To cap it all off OpenDNS is TOTALLY FREE! So there is no reason not to use it.

Take a look at OpenDNS and I think you’ll find that it has plenty of really cool benefits for a price that is hard to match.

Don’t believe Windows Vista ain’t selling?

Heard recently that last year PC (excluding Macs) manufacturers shipped 260 million PC’s. Microsoft also announced that in the same time frame it sold 88 million copies of Windows Vista.

Say what??? 260 million PC’s and only 88 million shipments of Vista. But wait it get’s worse for Microsoft. It is my understanding that the 88 million shipments of Vista include upgrades (ie not destined for new hardware anyway).

Now Vista does have some excellent features that do make it a worthwhile purchase BUT for the average consumer it means they are going to HAVE TO buy new MORE POWERFUL hardware to run Vista on. Strangely, most consumers ask WHY? To them apart from the flashy Aero interface (which is a resource hog anyway) what benefit makes it worthwhile now? NOTHING! They’ll just wait until they upgrade their PC in 3-4 years and get it then. If we go into recession then this may blow out to 4-5 years.

In my books another mistake from Microsoft not looking at what customers ACTUALLY WANT rather than telling them WHAT THEY SHOULD HAVE. The market has spoken Microsoft and I certainly hope you are listening. But ….

2 worthwhile utilities

Ok, let’s start off the New Year with 2 interesting and helpful utilities.

Firstly IEPassview – This utility will allow you to display all the passwords stored by Internet Explorer. Yes, that’s right boys and girls, all those passwords for login to protected sites and things like ADLS routers.

IE PassView utility can recover 3 types of passwords:

  • AutoComplete Passwords: When you enter a Web page that contains a form with user/password fields and a login button, Internet Explorer may ask you if you want to save the password, after pressing the login button. If you choose to save the password, the password is saved as AutoComplete password.
    Be aware that some Web sites (like Yahoo login page) deliberately disable the AutoComplete feature, in order to avoid password stealing by other users.
  • HTTP Authentication Passwords: Some Web sites allow the user to enter only after typing user and password in a separated dialog-box. If you choose to save the password in this login dialog-box, the password is saved as HTTP authentication password.
  • FTP Passwords: Simply the passwords of FTP addresses (ftp://…)

Next WindirStat – will calculate and display disk usage.

WinDirStat reads the whole directory tree once and then presents it in three useful views:

  • The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,
  • The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,
  • The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.

This is a great tool for determining what is chewing up all your disk space and then actually going in and cleaning it up.

Best of all both utilities are free for download. How’s that for a New Year’s present?

Talk about a D’Oh moment

Recently restored a server using Shadowprotect and had issues with the Active Directory upon reboot. The error said that Active Directory couldn’t be loaded. Hmmm…Ok so we restore from a different image and end up with the same error. Ok, this doesn’t make sense, the image worked not long ago and nothing since then has changed. Ah ha, because the image is >60 days the Active Directory is now too old to load with the current date.

Now back in the Novell days you could set the ‘epoch’ time to the current time and get around the issue. So we started looking at which utility to use to reset this in Active Directory. Strange, why can’t we find anything. This could be a problem, until someone pointed out that couldn’t we simply set the server date back in the BIOS, restore the data, boot and change the date. D’Oh, how stupid are we??

We did this, changed the date and it all worked – geeze aren’t we stupid? So after we changed the date, we updated the server with the latest patches and re-imaged. Image how much time we would have wasted if someone didn’t suggest simply to change the date? Days!

WSUS causing SBS reporting issues

Seems like some update that WSUS pulls down automatically has caused an issue with the SBS reporting. We have seen something similar when there have been OEM issues with WSUS. For more information we suggest you take a look at the official SBS Blog posting. which should give you everything you need to know.

The solution appears to be that under WSUS 3.0 you force a resync from the console. since this can’t be done with the standard WSUS 2.0 on SBS 2003 R2, the best bet appears to be simply to wait for WSUS to resync with the server. Admittedly, it is a bit of fingers-crossed scenario but for the time being their doesn’t appear to be much choice.

In all honesty, can’t say that we like or use WSUS that much at all. There are far better solutions from third parties out there. True, you have to pay fro them but when you look at the additional functionality and flexibility it is well worth the investment.

Also reading Susan Bradley’s blog, seems that SBS R2 installations are not the only ones experiencing issues. See the following Computerworld article for the impact on enterprise users. And all of this the day before patch Tuesday – Yeah WSUS !!!

The Microsoft WSUS have now posted an official response to the WSUS issue. You can find it here.

Home server offerings are coming

Wanna see what people like HP will be offering Microsoft Home Server on? Click here for a multimedia demo of the Media Smart Server from Hewlett Packard.

Must admit that box looks really sexy, which it needs to be if it is going to succeed as a consumer item but will it succeed? Do most consumers really want the added complication of a sever at home? Don’t they really just want more disk space to save all their junk on? Today’s NAS (Network Area Storage) devices are becoming more sophisticated yet simpler to use because they fulfil just one need.
Now, sure there’ll be a market for home servers for the geekier consumers but on a wide scale? Hmmm..not so convinced yet. Now, I could certainly be wrong about this but I don’t see as much potential as some of the suppliers see (knowing the consumers that I know).
Don’t get me wrong, I certainly believe it is only a matter time before every home has its own server and perhaps this is just the first attempt at that offering. Much like the early days of Small Business Server, there will be plenty of challenges but you gotta get into the market before someone else does.
It will very interesting to see the prices of these devices when they hit our shores. I wonder whether they will make in time for Christmas? You gotta think so.