OCNTUG Newsletter
Volume 1 Number 4
October 1,
2003
Good Evening
Members, Visitors and Friends!
Inside this Issue:
LoadFest
Nogginfest 2.0
Upgrade to Office 2003?
QHosts Trojan Horse usurps Internet Explorer
Meeting Announcement: October 9, 2003
At the Previous Meeting...
Random Access Department:
3rd Party Tools Department:
Employment Opportunities
Final Notes…
Email the Editor
And Now, The News...
Windows® Server 2003 LoadFest Waiting List
Microsoft offered a LoadFest
for Windows® Server 2003 to be held Saturday, October 4th. Seating was limited,
and by RSVP, and it filled up very quickly. If you didn't get a chance to
attend, but would still like to, please register at www.msugevents.com
as soon as possible to add your name to the Waiting List for the next LoadFest!
Use "ws03loadfest" (without the quotes) to RSVP.
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Nogginfest 2.0
Thursday, December 11, 2003
What is NogginFest? NogginFest
offers IT professionals in the Orange County and surrounding areas a chance to
gain valuable knowledge as to the most advanced products in the industry.
NogginFest is considered a premiere Orange County industry event for
establishing and increasing your brand awareness and generating valuable sales
leads. With budgets decreasing, the people who come to NogginFest are serious IT
decision makers looking for new solutions to solve problems and they are
prepared to buy!
Why should I become a sponsor? NogginFest provides a
superb marketing environment for Sponsors. By being a part of this show, you
will be able to gain valuable exposure in the local community and reach target
customers. Click here for the Event Information Sheet (PDF) and sign up.
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Should I
upgrade to MS Office 2003?
On a personal level, I was curious about new
features in MS Office 2003, so I went first directly to the source (www.microsoft.com/office) for an
overview of the product…and got thoroughly lost, finally coming up with an
overview of its resource kit, which didn’t interest me at the time! I settled
for a review of Office 2003 by Bill Howard of PC Magazine. Mr. Howard notes that
there is backward compatibility, which means you don’t have to force everyone to
upgrade at once, very useful if your company upgrades, but your partners don’t.
He mentioned cost and other complaints, but more importantly, he said that Word,
Excel and Powerpoint are little changed, (although Excel adds a few useful
statistical functions) but that Outlook is moderately improved for handling
large quantities of business-oriented email, making the program worth the
upgrade.
A link in Mr. Howard’s page led me to another article about the
beta version of the product by Edward Mendelson, who described the ingenious
capabilities of the XML features, which I quote, "…a set of XML-based features
that allows developers to create documents that can import and manage data from
remote sources. Let's say you export a travel-expense spreadsheet in XML format.
An accounting package could then automatically process the spreadsheet and issue
a check. Microsoft hopes the XML capabilities will entice potential users, since
access to the new features will require an upgrade to Office 11." Wow! Talk
about efficient! Just dream of the possibilities…
In the meantime, go to
http://www.pcmagazine.com
and follow the links…then drool until you get your free copy at the November
meeting*…
* The fine
print: Only paid members are eligible for free software.
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QHosts Trojan Horse usurps Internet Explorer
A new Trojan Horse program, QHosts,
redirects DNS searches made by MSIE, reported Robert Lemos of ZDNet on October
2. The program was originally found on a banner ad at FortuneCity.com, and
though that particular banner ad has since been deleted, it or others like it
will likely pop up on other web servers. This Trojan will send you to the wrong
web server, possibly one harboring more malicious code.
The code takes
advantage of a flaw that Microsoft calls an "object type" vulnerability in IE,
which the company attempted to patch once before, but the patch failed to work.
Microsoft is currently working on a new fix for the problem. In the meantime,
they suggest that you modify your IE Internet Security Zone settings to prompt
you before running Active-X components. A further suggestion would be to avoid
clicking on banner ads which might launch the malicious code. For further
details, see Robert Lemos' article, "Attack program hijacks surfing in IE" at
http://www.zdnet.com,
or at Network Associates, Inc.,
http://www.networkassociates.com.
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Meeting Announcement: October 9, 2003
Window's Digital Communications
Technologies Jeff Foster of Cisco Systems will be giving a seminar
and demo showcasing Cisco’s MS Windows based Call Manager (part of Cisco’s AVVID
family – AVVID stands for architecture for video, voice, and internet data).
Cisco will also be showing other applications including the award winning Unity,
an MS Exchange based unified messaging platform.
Next, Bill Rice, of
triCerat Software (),
will be providing an Executive Overview, Case Study, Technical Discussion &
Live Demo. Tricerat is the maker of nifty tools for system Adminstrators. Their
most popular product is ScrewDrivers. All attendees who fill out their request
form will be emailed a copy of ScrewDrivers. TriCerat Software has just joined
OCNTUG as a Bronze Sponsor.
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At the Previous Meeting...
At the September meeting, we had two fascinating presentations. The
first, given by Kevin Moylan, Vice President of Product Marketing, and Ariel
Peled, CTO and co-founder of Vidius, Inc. (http://www.vidius.com), described the amazing
capabilities of their Port Authority Server software. Port Authority Server
makes and stores an encoded, shorthand copy of important documents. The server
then scans outgoing email. When an unauthorized attempt is made to email these
documents, or even portions of the documents to an unauthorized person, the
server can compare the email to the text of the original documents and stop the
transmission. At the same time, it alerts the originator of the email, the owner
of the original document, and the appropriate security officer. The server log
will show which document the stolen data came from. Thus Port Authority Server
both blocks confidential information from being distributed to unauthorized
personnel, and addresses the security issues of information leaks.
The
second presentation, by Eric Sauter, a fellow MCSE, was a whirlwind discussion
of a few of the new capabilities within Microsoft Office Suite 2003, given from
the perspective of technologist who must implement and manage it within the
network environment. A few of the features Eric covered were network and
resource options, information access and protection, enhanced security, and user
self-reliance. He also mentioned the extensive implementation of XML for
developers, and that InfoPath controls how XML data comes from and goes to
applications.
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Random Access Department:
Hey, how about someone out there contributing
some random thoughts, huh? Watch this space...
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Favorite Third Party Tools Department
Hey Guys...Gals, too, here's a
cool Internet application--CyberKit v2.5 by Luc Neijens. I have occasionally
used version 2.4 for several years, and recently found 2.5 to be even better!
For those who eschew the command line, CyberKit gives you (yes, gives--its
Postcardware, which is free. If you like it, send Luc a postcard!) eleven useful
functions: Ping; Traceroute; Finger; WhoIs; NSLookUp; Quote of the Day; Time;
NetScanner; DBScanner; KeepAlive; and Mail Accounts functions.
I use it primarily for time synchronization and the keep alive
function. You can set the keepalive function to either ping or sync time. For
time sync, I use nist1.datum.com, which is in California. However, I do
sometimes need to trace a route, or use NSLookUp. Mr. Neijens has now included a
NetScanner with port scanning capability. You can scan a range of addresses.
DBScanner scans your winsock database for available services and protocols. You
can have it minimize to the tray, and the whole program and its associated files
is less than a megabyte! You can find CyberKit v.2.5 at http://www.softlookup.com.
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Employment Opportunities
Employers, please note, we will publish job opportunities in the OCNTUG
Newsletter. This publication is released once per month, and can be found at http://www.SoCalITPro.org.
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Final Notes…
Another call for articles. Notice that the Random Access
Department was left open this month...I'm waiting for some other brave spirit to
express an opinion or two. If you have some information that you feel would
benefit our members, you could write an article for the OCNTUG Newsletter! All
submissions should be in text, or rich text format (because the virus writers
haven't figured out how to plant a bug in that, yet…). If you would like help
writing an article, just let me know.
Excellent sandwiches last time.
(But where were the walnut fudge brownies?)
See you at the meeting on
October 9, 2003, enjoy!
Robert Holtzman,
Editor
rholtzman@netzero.net
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OCNTUG
Newsletter
Volume 1 No.
4 10/01/03
End
of Transmission