July, 2008

Jul 25 2008   12:58PM GMT

I know who I am - Do you know my name?

Posted by: Troy Tate
administration, awareness, design, howto, blogging, Database, DataCenter, DataManagement, Development, Exchange, email, Exchange 2007, Microsoft Windows, Browsers, subscriptions, troubleshooting, internet, Security, Policy, online identity, policy enforcement, reporting, research, website, wiki, www

If you read my previous post then you know we recently went through a major e-mail system migration. Part of that e-mail migration included moving from various naming conventions (firstname@domain.com, firstname.lastname@domain.com, FirstInitialLastName@domain.com, etc.) to a single naming convention of firstname.lastname@domain.com. Of course this was a huge undertaking and also a political move. One thing I am sure of is that the users will never understand the discussions taking place behind the scenes and will continue to take place about names of other non-user specific mailboxes like a project engineering team or an application mailbox.

Another thing which struck me during this process is that we netizens are identified by our e-mail address in many places on the web. Have you ever looked to see how many places you are identified by your e-mail address? I had to take some time and go out and change my e-mail address wherever the old one was in use. That is not a easy task let me tell you! First of all I went through the mailing lists I subscribe to. I went to their websites and tried to find the area to change my profile’s e-mail address. There are some sites where I could never find this and/or could not change it. So, webmasters & publishers…. please make it easier for your subscribers to modify their e-mail address or credentials! There is this need for companies that may get purchased or change names. There is the need for the users who change names when getting married or divorced…. this should not be as difficult as I found it to be.

In the end, I’m not sure what I will be missing out on when we go back and clean out all of the non-standard names which we will likely do by the end of the year.

Thanks for your time. Let’s be good network citizens together & practice safe networking!

Jul 25 2008   12:41PM GMT

2000 users - new mailboxes - one weekend - DONE!

Posted by: Troy Tate
administration, design, CIO, DataCenter, DataManagement, Exchange, email, Exchange 2007, Outlook Web Access, OWA, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft, Powershell, troubleshooting, Networking, internet, antivirus, CA, certificate authority, digital signatures, tools

Well, we did it! We implemented new mailboxes on Microsoft Exchange 2007 for over 2000 users in one weekend. Of course it took lots of planning, testing and blood, sweat, tears during the process, but we are now on one e-mail platform where there were at least 5 before. We had more domains than we needed and now the company is on one domain. We had to plan and provide for inbound messages still to the old domains.

The implementation was not without a couple of minor glitches and learning how users use the application. One glitch was a mistyped IP address. This prevented e-mail flow for a short period of time, however that is not a huge issue since SMTP servers will continue to retry sending messages. Another issue that was encountered was administrative rights to “shared” mailboxes like customer service or supply buyers.  This has now been resolved and users are getting full use from the system.

We still have some work to be done on things like:

• proactive system monitoring to detect issues before the users do;
• alternatives to sending large attachments (our attachment limit is 15MB);
• running Outlook Anywhere so a mobile user can attach to their mailbox without having to use VPN;
• supporting mobile devices like smartphones (our focus is on Windows Mobile v6 and up);
• user certificates using private PKI to allow for digital signatures and encryption.

So, as you see, work in IT never finishes… it just continues to grow as more services and systems are implemented and change happens. Please feel free to leave a comment if you would like more information about our implementation process and decisions we made along the way.

Thanks for your time. Let’s be good network citizens together & practice safe networking!

Jul 17 2008   2:29PM GMT

Did you see this? - SharePoint Administration Toolkit (Office SharePoint Server)

Posted by: Troy Tate
administration, design, MOSS, SharePoint, howto, DataCenter, DataManagement, Microsoft Windows, tools

SharePoint Administration Toolkit (Office SharePoint Server)

This article provides information for farm administrators about Batch Site Manager and the updatealert operation for the Stsadm command-line tool, which are available in the April 2008 release of the administration toolkit for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies.

Jul 17 2008   2:10PM GMT

Did you see this? - Microsoft Security Compliance Management Accelerator toolkit

Posted by: Troy Tate
Data security, design, DataCenter, Microsoft Windows, Security, Monitoring, metrics, policy enforcement, reporting, tools

Monitor the security compliance state of your IT environment for computers running Windows.

In today’s IT environment, the ability to comply with regulations and industry standards, such as the Sarbanes Oxley Act, is a source of deep concern for many organizations. In addition, organizations need to manage risks resulting from emerging threats and changing conditions within their IT infrastructures. As a result, organizations need sound methods that they can count on to understand the state of the security settings in their IT infrastructures, assess the compliance of a security baseline, and demonstrate that compliance requirements have been met.

To help organizations address these challenges, Microsoft has created the Security Compliance Management toolkit. The toolkit provides best practices from Microsoft about how to plan, deploy, and monitor a security baseline. In addition, the toolkit provides remediation recommendations to address security baseline issues. The toolkit also offers a proven method that your organization can use to effectively monitor the compliance state of recommended security baselines for Windows Vista®, Windows® XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), and Windows Server® 2003 SP2.

Jul 10 2008   7:46PM GMT

Ten ways to realize your Internet connection is a little slow

Posted by: Troy Tate
internet, humor, Browsers

- Text on Web pages display as Morse Code.
- Graphics arrive via FedEx.
- You believe a heavier string might improve your throughput
- You post a message to your favorite Newsgroup and it displays a week later.
- Your credit card expires while ordering on-line.

- Playboy web site exhibits “Playmate of the year”…for 1994.
- You’re still in the middle of downloading that popular new game, “Pong”.
- Everyone you talk to on the ‘net phone’ sounds like Forrest Gump.
- You receive e-mails with postage due on them.

- You click the “Send” button, a little door opens on the side of your monitor and a pigeon flies out.

Jul 8 2008   5:12PM GMT

Browser warnings - Danger Will Robinson! - or did it just cry “Wolf!”?

Posted by: Troy Tate
Data security, Google, Firefox, anti-virus, awareness, botnet, honeynet, IT education, Development, Security, antivirus, forensics, honeypot, malware, Policy, metrics, online identity, policy enforcement, reporting, web, website, www

I sometimes browse the internet using Firefox. I say sometimes because Internet Explorer is the standard browser at my company and Firefox is not supported by IT. Well, since I work in IT, sometimes you have to test things on behalf of users and also to see how certain sites are different depending on the client browser.

Well, I recently upgraded Firefox to v3. It does seem much better than v2 although some of my useful addins are now broken (when will YSlow get fixed for v3?). One of the new features of Firefox v3 is the ability to report to the user if the visited website is a known potential malware site. This is a good feature! It provides the user with some useful information and education about the dangers on the internet. However, how accurate is this feature? What if you are visiting a trusted website that you frequently visit and now get this message?

For your information, this is the message that you will see when you attempt to visit a site deemed as risky.

Reported Attack Site!

This web site at certification.xxxxxxx.org has been reported as an attack site and has been blocked based on your security preferences.

Attack sites try to install programs that steal private information, use your computer to attack others, or damage your system.

Some attack sites intentionally distribute harmful software, but many are compromised without the knowledge or permission of their owners.

I blanked out the actual website address above. However, those of you with a bit of detective in you are likely going to figure it out.

What is interesting about this particular warning message is that it is referring to a website that has security as a guiding principle. When you see this message in Firefox, you have three options presented:

• Get me out of here!
• Why was this site blocked?
• Ignore this warning - in very tiny print at bottom of message.

I was curious as to why this site would be considered as a danger. I clicked on the Why was this site blocked? option. The report I received was interesting and as I mentioned earlier, could this be an example of someone crying “Wolf!”?

The report was as follows:

What is the current listing status for certification.xxxxxxx.org/?

Site is listed as suspicious - visiting this web site may harm your computer.

Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 1 time(s) over the past 90 days.

What happened when Google visited this site?

Of the 6 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 1 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 07/06/2008, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 07/06/2008.

Malicious software includes 1 scripting exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 3 new processes on the target machine.

Malicious software is hosted on 3 domain(s), including lokriet.com, clrbbd.com, catdbw.mobi.

1 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including catdbw.mobi.

Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?

Over the past 90 days, certification.xxxxxxx.org/ did not appear to function as an intermediary for the infection of any sites.

Has this site hosted malware?

No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days.

How did this happen?

In some cases, third parties can add malicious code to legitimate sites, which would cause us to show the warning message.

Next steps:

• Return to the previous page.
• If you are the owner of this web site, you can request a review of your site using Google Webmaster Tools. More information about the review process is available in Google’s Webmaster Help Center.

This is great educational stuff, but did it really happen to this particular website? I don’t know, but apparently Google does. With the report of just one incident, does it make this site really worth the notification? How many incidents should it take before a site is considered malicious and who determines what malicious is?

Just something else to mull over in your copious time as you go perusing websites in Firefox.

Thanks for your time. Let’s be good network citizens together & practice safe networking!

Jul 2 2008   2:33PM GMT

Did you see this? - The Great SPAM diet results are in

Posted by: Troy Tate
anti-virus, awareness, botnet, Data security, email, spam, Security, antivirus, malware, Monitoring, metrics, online identity, Performance, reporting, research

See my previous post on The Great SPAM Diet. The results are now in and darkReading has the scoop.

McAfee’s Great Spam Experiment, Unplugged

Many spam messages sent to participants in the study were phishing emails or contained malware or links to malware-ridden sites

Did anyone doubt that these would be the results? Thanks for your time. Let’s be good network citizens together & practice safe networking!

Jul 2 2008   1:57PM GMT

If no one is answering the front door - try the back door

Posted by: Troy Tate
awareness, diagnostics, howto, CIO, blogging, DataManagement, Development, Browsers, troubleshooting, metrics, Performance, web, website, design, customer service, www

I recently went to Target and was going to look at my daughter’s wedding registry to see what she and her fiance had selected. When I got to the registry kiosks, there was a Target team member and a customer having problems getting into the service. The Target team member was on the phone apparently with another store or technical support. I heard things like “This is happening at all of the stores.” “We can’t get it to work.” “How do you reset this thing?”

Since there was another open kiosk, I thought I would try my luck and see what errors may appear. The main kiosk user page is intuitive and I immediately found the wedding registry icon and clicked it as any customer would. The application immediately responded with an error page describing some issues with scripting or something. Ahhhh… so I was receiving the same error as the other customer.

Well, the IT detective side came out in me and I started back over at the kiosk home page. Target designed this page with lots of options and ways to get to information that a customer may be looking for. Along the side of this page I found another link to get into the various registry areas, baby, wedding, etc. I clicked on that topic, navigated my way to the wedding registry and lo and behold… I was able to print out my daughter’s wedding registry while the other customer and the Target team members were still grumbling about the other kiosk.

I want to commend Target for providing multiple navigation means around their website. I would hope this experience would encourage more of the same for other vendors. I know, in IT, we like to restrict how many paths a user can go through an application to get to the same information, but in this case, Target did the right thing and provided good customer service.