SoCalITProAssociation Newsletter
Volume 2 Number 12
Southern California Information Technology Professional Association December 1, 2004
Welcome Members, Visitors and Friends!
It's HERE! December! Nogginfest 3.0! Presents! High Tech Presents! I asked my wife to get me the new multi-function Hyperbolii, which has a finepoint black pen, a PDA stylus, a diode light, a laser rangefinder, USB 2 40 GB memory stick, MP3 player (with earphones), telescope, 3 channel 5 watt CB radio, a GPS receiver/transponder, pen knife, #1 philips screw driver, and secret message decoder. She called Sharper Image, but they were out of stock. Darn! I may just have to settle for the USB stick. She'll probably get me a BIC pen.
Of course, if such wild gadgets don't interest you, there are other high tech toys you can order to show the corporate accountants that not only can your department justify its present budget, but that you may need a larger budget next year. I mean, what about all the fantastic products we've been privileged to view over this past year? Think about Intransa's IP-SAN in combination with Raptor Network's 10 GB switches in a solution that avoids disasters altogether!
Cisco Security Agents, a host-based intrusion prevention system can stop bad behavior before it gets out hand. Webroot's SpySweeper will detect and remove spyware and adware on your systems. Raxco's PerfectDisk, the best disk defragmenter and disk-space optmizer, will keep your hard drive transfer rates as high as possible. If your organization runs it's own version of the FBI, you may need Computer Associates eTrust Network Forensics application, to find out who is sending corporate secrets out of the LAN. Then again, you might turn to Waterford's MailMeter Forensic for similar results. Or, maybe you could call Gateway Telnet and ask them to provide Shoreline' Voice Over IP for your company. Then again you may need Sybari's Antigen antivirus, or their Advanced Spam Manager and Advanced Spam Defense software to keep your email systems optimal and your workers on task, instead of on break. Is your server farm outgrowing its closet? Call agile360 to get the skinny on VMware Virtual Servers, to save space, money, and time (since you can rebuild a server and get it online in less than an hour!). (Of course, you'll need Intransa's IP-SAN to store the VMs.) To combat spam, you may wish to consider Barracuda Networks'SPAM Firewall, or MX Logic's low cost Advanced Email Defense service. If your workers telecommute, and their laptops are possible points of intrusion, you'll want to look at Trlokom's OmniVPN. If you're using Terminal Server or Citrix, you'll definitely want to save time and administrative costs (and reduce frustrations) with triCerat's Simplify Printing, Simplify Lockdown, Simplify Resources and Simplify Profiles.
Wow, we have had a rather full year. If you don't remember just which month each of these presentations were made, go to our Newsletter page and look back through our past issues. You'll find them. And you may find some interesting ideas or 3rd party tool that you forgot you wanted to try out.
So enjoy the Holidays! Order some of this cool stuff, you know you want to. Me, I'll probably be lucky just to get that BIC pen, if she can't find the Hyperbolii.
Inside this Issue:
Nogginfest 2004
Meeting Announcement:
Previous Meeting:
Opinions and Commentary Department: Free Training
Favorite Third Party Tools Department: Autoruns
Final Notes…
Email the Editor
And Now, The News...
Nogginfest 2004
What is Nogginfest?
Nogginfest 3.0 is a FREE OPEN HOUSE, where you get to nash on great junk food (I'm looking forward to the walnut-fudge brownies), schmooze with the many vendors, network with the most brilliant minds of the 21st century, or just spend a couple of pleasant hours away from the house while your significant other wraps presents while trying to get the kids to do their homework. Did I mention it's FREE? There will be lots of FREE give-away (promotional) items (I'm hoping to get a Hyperbolii from the Microsoft table), and doorprizes (I'm counting on winning the bronze door for the entrance to my workroom). So, come to Nogginfest 3.0! Discuss with friends, aquaintances, vendors (and competitors) the ins and outs of IP SANS, VoIP, the latest AntiSPAM solutions, spyware solutions, Virtual Servers, ultra-high speed switches, solid-state storage, site security (spying on your users).
Rememeber, it's FREE! It's Thursday evening, December 9th, Two-Thousand,Four starting at 18:00 hours! It's at 65 Enterprise, Aliso Viejo, California, Sol-3, Carina-Cygnus Arm. I'll see you there!
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Meeting Announcement: Thursday, December 9, 2004: See Nogginfest 3.0 above.
As always please RSVP on the http://www.SoCalITPro.org website. The link is on the lower left hand side of the home page.
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At the Previous Meeting...
Building an IP SAN
Article by Rick Ow (rick.ow@intransa.com), Sr. Systems Engineer from Intransa, Inc.
http://www.intransa.com
At the November meeting of the Southern California IT Professional Association, I discussed all the components needed to build your own IP SAN and finished the evening with a live demonstration of our IP5500 Storage System. Building an IP SAN is really very simple. You simply needed to decide on a NIC or HBA, which Gigabit Ethernet Switch you wanted to use, and determine which model of IP SAN is needed. It's as simple as that.
The primary points about the system are it's simple to setup, use, and administer. Intransa has found that anyone who can use a RAID card to build a volume on a set of disks, load Windows, and configure the NIC with an IP address, possesses all the skills necessary to set up and administer their own IP SAN. On top of that, the price of our system fits nearly every company's budget that's in the market for a NAS or SAN storage system.
I also described how some of our recent Windows customers have been using IP SAN for:
- Primary disk storage for customers migrating to Blade Servers
- Disk-to-Disk Backup for quicker backups and restores snapshots for quick recovery from corrupt databases on Exchange and SQL Server
Key features of Intransa's IP SAN systems are:
- Snapshots: The ability to take a nearly instantaneous point-in-time copy of a volume without interrupting the server. Along with that, it also has the ability to restore a Snapshot without server intervention.
- Performance: It was demonstrated at Storage Networking World this year that their IP SAN is also very scalable. The system had 24TB's installed and demonstrated fantastic performance numbers.
- On-The-Fly Volume Expansion: it was demonstrated how easy it was to expand a volume on the IP SAN, and more importantly, have the server use that larger volume without rebooting or interrupting applications. Their GUI was used to expand the volume on the IP SAN and a tool by Microsoft was used to expand the volume on the server. [Editor's Note: We watched in awe as Rick created a new partition, and simply added it to an existing volume, all in less than two minutes! This was IMPRESSIVE!]
At the end of the presentation Intransa extended a No-Obligation Offer to demonstrate an IP SAN at your company.
MailMeter Forensic
Article by Jeff Laubhan
Waterford Technologies, Inc.
Lorcan Kennedy of Waterford Technologies, Inc.
http://www.waterfordtechnologies.com, discussed how email has fundamentally changed in the last few years. We are all familiar with certain aspects of email security, such as spam, viruses, and content filtering. But emails are beginning to cause other problems as well. Many of us can relate to archiving and storage problems that are created when users have lots of attachments and how that affects back up time and migrations. He showed us their MailMeter Forensic product that can help find storage abusers, and find many other cool statistics on how email is used inside a company.
It turns out requests from attorneys, managers or Human Resources staff are more frequent than we realize because email contains a lot of valuable business transaction information, intellectual property and recorded actions between employees.
A single request in a legal case for "all outgoing messages in a 12 month period that contain the words profit or revenue" could cost your company thousands or even millions of dollars searching backups" We need to have a way to effectively search and retrieve email from the archives in case of lawsuits, HR investigations, or compliance audits.
Even employee productivity can be affected by how email is used today, and with so many MP3's and other copyrighted content in your email archive, your company needs to be more aware of what is in there and what can get you into trouble.
MailMeter Forensic archives all incoming, outgoing and internal email header, body text and attachment information. Combined with a comprehensive search and reporting platform, <>bMailMeter Forensic is a powerful solution for Storage Management, Regulatory Compliance, Litigation discovery, and Internal Policy enforcement.
They are the only solution to offer a powerful drill-down web-based reporting capability which allows for fast and easy investigations or analysis on the most context-relevant information to help identify bottlenecks, storage abuses and suspicious content.
MailMeter Forensic also can be offloaded from IT and delegated out to Business Managers so they can search the archive in real-time, and focus on for their own department's email usage patterns to take immediate corrective action, change Email Usage policies, or to make better informed business decisions.
As we demonstrated, MailMeter could help you if you wanted to offer an auditing service to your clients. Here are two approaches to consider:
- MailMeter Insight Evaluator: We offer a free download from our site. This is a simple, PC based tool that imports 20% of an email store from the last week. This shows all of our reporting and demonstrates to organizations a snapshot of how people use email. Forensic capabilities (body text and attachments) are not captured here. Administration features such as automatic report generation and setting up users is also disabled.
- MailMeter Audit: We can license you a version of MailMeter that you can use to either import data or run real-time. If you wanted to capture an entire data store and all the detail, then this would be the approach.
MailMeter Insight can be downloaded at: http://www.waterfordtechnologies.com/products/downloads/MMdownloads.asp
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OpInIoNs and Commmmmentary: The Free Training Courses
In November, I was treated to an excellent free training course, courtesy of Culminis and Microsoft! Our instructor was top notch! We received a printed (not Xeroxed) Official Hands-On Lab #2811A, Applying Microsoft Security Guidance, which led us through the details of managing security updates, implementing server security, implementing security on XP and 2000 clients, and implementing application security with IIS 5 and 6, as well as on Exchange Server 2003. I learned a fair amount on precisely how hackers attack, and how Microsoft's security settings prevent those attacks. The labs provided other useful tips and tricks as well.
The laboratory setup utilized Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, allowing us to have three fully functional servers running on top of Server 2003, so each student had all local and foreign servers available immediately at hand. And Virtual Server 2004 was so simple to use! What a wonderful design for a hands-on lab! It certainly beats the old method of pairing up students on different servers. This way, each student performs all modifications on all servers, so she/he can see everything as it happens. Talk about fun!
--Editor
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Favorite 3rd Party Tools Department: Autoruns by SysInternals
Well, SysInternals has done it again! Another wonderful FREE tool to help make your administrative life a little easier. You know all those annoying little applets that run at system startup, that slow down the Windows startup...things you don't want to start, things your users don't need, things that just waste processor time, and lengtheennn the startup process??? And you can't find the little buggers in the Startup folder? And you can't find them under program files? And you can't find them under Services? And you have no idea where the #@$!&*! things are hidden in the registry???!!!
Autoruns is the program for you. It finds all those #@$!&*! programs that automatically start without your knowledge or permission. Autoruns will give you a graphical tabular listing of each program, where it is in the Registry, a description of it, who published it, and where it resides in the directory tree. Cool, huh?
It gives you the choice of leaving them in place, shutting them off temporarily, or Deleting the little nasties (Ctrl-D)! It's best, before you actually delete them, to temporarily disable the apps, and run the system for some time (rebooting even once or twice), to determine whether anything depends upon them, or whether turning them off will screw up something else. If no ill effects are found, it should be possible to delete them permanently.
I found Autoruns in the November 2004 issue of Windows IT Pro Magazine (pp75-76), where you can get a more detailed account of this great tool. Better yet, go to http://www.sysinternals.com where you can download, not only Autoruns, but many other fantastic tools. Did I mention it's FREE?
--Editor
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Final Notes…
>Submissions: If you any ideas for an article that you might like to write for this Newsletter, or about any third-party software that you would like to share with our members, please submit your article to the Editor, contact information below. Please use the Rich Text Format (.rtf file) for your article, and in the subject line of your email, put the word, Newsletter, so I don't accidently delete your email. (I tend to delete emails from people I don't know unless the subject line clearly indicates something important.)
See you at Nogginfest 3.0 on Thursday, December 9, 2004, enjoy!
Robert Holtzman,
Editor
rholtzman@socalitpro.org
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SoCal IT Pro/OCNTUG Newsletter
Volume 2 No. 12 12/01/2004
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