There are probably a slew of these being posted to various blogs, all linked from Techedbloggers, I assume, but I’ve got to throw mine up too.
As I take more photos, I’ll post more to the gallery.
The Feeding of the Nerds
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Category Archives: Work
Active Directory Security Monitoring with MOM
Good session in general, though it disappoints me to no end that an MS MVP was pushing 2 3rd party tools to do security event collection with Microsoft Operations Manager. If MS was truly security minded, security event collection wouldn’t require individual admins to write regexs to identify and decode cryptic event details, there would be a team in Redmond that writes, tests and publishes everything you need to monitor security.
The 2 tools are MP Studio from Silect and Secure Vantage‘s Control Management Pack.
Of course, any evaluation of MOM requires that we be using it first, not something we’re doing now.
I’m sitting through an Exchange 2003 Clustering session now, not that I think Housing will ever need it, but there isn’t much else during this timeslot that I can imagine being needed.
Boston
The flight to Boston was smooth, my bag beat me here. They got on the 10:xx am flight and I got on the 11:45 flight. I’m always generous with connecting flights, you just never know coming out of CMI.
Got to Logan International, walked outside looking for the standard “Airport Shuttle” stand, got hit up by someone in a random shuttle for transportation. He had my hotel name on the side window of the van, so it looked good. After loading up a couple more, he was asking someone on the sidewalk where they were headed, got something not on the side of the van…Up walked a Transit Authority cop, took the drivers tag and told him “If I see you on airport property again, I’m having you arrested”. That didn’t sound good. But, he got me and the 3 other passengers to our hotels just fine. Hopefully his returning passengers didn’t get him arrested.
The Boston area isn’t striking me as a good place to hold a convention, there are no hotels near the convention center. The shuttle service is about as good as can be expected with the terrible traffic that comes from a Sunday afternoon Red Sox game.
Check-in at the convention center was smooth as silk and now the nerds are grazing and queuing, waiting for the Sunday night keynote that starts in 35 min….
I think I’ll go grab another water, some more healthy snack food and join in the waiting.
Microsoft patches and confidence level
I’d say this post sums it up pretty well, MS might be working on killing the trust when it comes to patching.
SQL Disaster Recovery
It’s nice to read things from people who are smarter than me:
Disaster Recovery and SQL Server, Part II
How to be an 31337 hax04 and send mail to a DL to which you don’t have rights
Display names
So I don’t lose this link again:
How to change the display names of Active Directory users with Active Directory Services Interface script
TechEd 2006
Yes, I will be attending TechEd 2006 in Boston.
(This is mostly so the category shows up in the list to the right.)
RIS and ISC DHCPd update
To update a previous post, if you are using ISC DHCPd, you don’t need to copy startrom.com and others around to alter the path the RIS client tries to use, you just need double slashes:
filename "\OSChooser\i386\startrom.com";
And, I’d recommend Argon’s RISme, though looking at the capabilities of RIS Menu Editor, I’d say either one are perfectly capable of doing the job.
Still at work?
Yes, I’m still at work. Updates and patches go so much easier when no one is here.
Active Directory is coming right along, 1 server reinstalled, 2 to go.
Office Clipart, WMF and TippingPoint intrusion prevention systems
(This is to get this knowledge into the Google cache more than anything else.)
If you are seeing Office applications (Word, Powerpoint, Publisher) hang when trying to insert WMF clipart from Web Collections AND your network is protected by a TippingPoint IPS device, check with your network people about signature 4054. If your IPS is running with the recommended ruleset, all WMFs that cross the device are being blocked and the Clipart manager doesn’t handle that well. The error that is returned is something like ” 0x800c000c “.
I’m guessing they rushed the signature out the door to be the first to post a press release about protecting their customers. Hopefully they will fix the signature in the future.