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Anyone remember the old movie Force Ten From Navarone? If you don’t know it and like WWII movies, I heartily recommend it.
So why Force Ten From Redmond? Microsoft’s latest update cycle seems to be doing some strange things regardless of what the users decides to choose as their update process. As you know, there are [...]

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According to a report released by the Yankee Group [www.yankeegroup.com] titled 2007-2008 Global Server Operating System Reliability Survey, based on a poll of 400 corporate managers, executives, and administrators in 27 countries, both Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 are the new downtime twins.
AIX experienced a mere 36 minutes of downtime over the course of [...]

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We’re having a telephone conference call conversation with a vendor who will try their best to sell us a Network Access Control “solution,” as they say.
To be sure, this is a good thing to have in one’s arsenal, but I’m loathe to buy something that Windows 2008 includes for free—Microsoft doesn’t make too many things [...]

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As we all should know by now, Microsoft’s implementation of certain “standard” protocols is anything but and now I’ve found another, if one can believe a bunch of Brit systems administrators currently attending the same class I am.
The topic is Kerberos and the time skew built in to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.  We all know about [...]

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It’s been a while since I did any serious web server administration so it didn’t surprise me that the following debacle has until recently unsullied my brow.
Note: from everything I’ve heard, only certificates from Verisign have this problem. Why? I have no clue.
What is this problem? It has to do with renewing [...]

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Found an interesting little tidbit this morning.  Administration in the Windows world is filled with such interesting little tidbits, some of which pass from merely interesting to hair-pulling interesting.  In this case, it was more of an annoyance than anything else.
Due to my incessant, conscientious laziness, through Group Policy, I’ve turned off the Windows firewall [...]

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A colleague of mine was looking through the Group Policy settings of a domain we manage when he found a Group Policy Object (GPO) named “New Group Policy Object” and freaked out.
After realizing this was probably a slip up—one of the reasons why administration by clicking can be a Bad Thing™—he wanted to know how [...]

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Bloody hell, I would love to exchange Exchange for something else.  Anything else.
Remember the problem I’d earlier about creating a RUS for a subdomain?  Well, it’s back.  After installing the Exchange tools on the subdomain’s DC, I attempted to create a RUS only to be met yet again with the most annoying error in the [...]

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Joe Stewart, a veritable malware wunderkind and senior security researcher for SecureWorks, gave a talk at SANS Las Vegas about malware attribution.  From what he said and the way he talked, you just knew this guy thoroughly knew his stuff.  I made a mental note, amidst devouring my snack, to look him up.
Well, I found his [...]

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My newest project is to understand then implement SSL offload hardware for our front-end Exchange servers.  It has come to the point that we need something like this due to the impending high number of RPC over HTTP/S connections in the near future.  My poor server is not going to be able to handle all [...]

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