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Microsoft SUS failures?

by | Nov 9, 2005 | evilzenscientist, patching, Uncategorized

It’s another big patch week – and SANS are reporting that Microsoft SUS is having problems:

Microsoft SUS not playing well (NEW)
Published: 2005-11-09,
Last Updated: 2005-11-09 16:45:28 UTC by Tony Carothers (Version: 2(click to highlight changes))

Matthew Bailey just provided this input in regards to the SUS problems that are occuring

“I found this posting at http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.softwareupdatesvcs

The SUS 1.0 update cab is delayed today but will be published at ~ 5:00pm PDT today.

The WSUS cab has no delays and has been published.”

We’ve had a busy last ~12 hours. Reports are coming in that Microsoft’s SUS is not updating correctly, causing a lot of readers to have to manually roll out patches. If anybody has found this to not be the case, or found a way to kick SUS into gear, please send us a note, and I’ll get it out to the rest of the world 🙂

Most enterprises who are relying on SUS/WSUS for deployment of patches are still on SUS (the older technology). This is a pretty important process for enterprises – patching, and the race to patch on time, is causing a lot of IT administrator headaches.

For SUS to fail and administrators to have to manually roll out patches is a disaster; I am sure that after this many CIOs will mandate a close look at other options; maybe this will cause them to switch platforms, or at least look at a more robust patch solution.

Windows Live – software as a service?

by | Nov 8, 2005 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Uncategorized

I’ve been lurking around with Windows Live for a while – since it was announced at least (Scoble seems to be the aggregator of the Microsoft bloggers on this one). Glad to see that now Firefox is now supported.

Windows Live is interesting; I’m still not seeing the ‘Woo!’ factor here; much of this has been done before. I blogged on some of the cutting edge ‘Web 2.0‘ pieces earlier. Protopage is still one of my favourite neu-portals – it’s clean and fresh.

My personal take is that Windows Live is a direct head-to-head response to Google – and some of the innovations they are delivering.

It will be interesting to see who ‘wins’ in this space; Gates vs Schmidt; both have openly stated that the content is not king; the advertising revenue is king. [Note to self – dig out the quotes and references on this..]
Here’s one:

“This coming ‘services wave’ will be very disruptive,” Gates said in an Oct. 30 e-mail to top Microsoft employees, which was seen by CNET News.com. “We have competitors who will seize on these approaches and challenge us.”

Microsoft have millions of developers and a captive desktop audience of hundreds of millions of machines. If the mooted Office Live comes to fruition and delivers an online office and neu-desktop environment targetted at the home and small business users – then that is a great revenue stream. I can see a ‘free’ (a la Hotmail) service funded by ads; and a ‘nominal fee’ service with minimal or no ads. Interesting.

Google on the other hand have cornered the search market; they are also becoming the de-facto standard for mapping and directions in the web. Can they turn this into another ad-driven revenue stream without becoming another Microsoft/AOL – and incurring the wrath of their users.

Remember – when everything is ‘free’ and ad-supported; the next cool thing can easily kill you.

Software as a service; will it finally be a reality?

Lupper – Linux worm

by | Nov 8, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Linux, patching, Uncategorized

ZDNet and others are flagging a new Linux worm.

Quoting McAfee:

The worm blindly attacks web servers by sending malicious http requests on port 80. If the target server is running one of the vulnerable scripts at specific URLs and is configured to permit external shell commands and remote file download in the PHP/CGI environment, a copy of the worm could be downloaded and executed.

There are some well understood methods to minimise this risk.

Practice good security. A good robust perimeter firewall – I use IPcop; along with a good patch regime is vital. I (naturally) use ZENworks Linux Management to keep my Linux servers up to date.

One other addition is application hardening – I blogged a while ago about Novell AppArmor – I run this on my outward facing and internal Linux servers. If anything untoward happens – AppArmor is my final line of defence keeping my servers in good health.

[Edit – also to note – keep your applications themselves up to date; if they are RPM based – ZENworks Linux Management can deliver the updates. My blogging software is WordPress – they posted a note saying the updated versions are not affected.]

KDE vs Gnome

by | Nov 8, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

There has been a lot of discussion recently about Novell dropping KDE in favour of Gnome on its corporate desktop offering Novell Linux Desktop.

[Note – I really don’t think this matters on a server – clean up your servers; reduce the bloat; reduce the risk – remove X and a desktop from your servers 🙂 Believe me – ssh is your friend]

I’ve posted before on this – my personal opinion is that the real battle is not over KDE vs. Gnome. It’s about making a more productive, good looking, consistent desktop; one that you can “Just Use” (TM). It would be great to see components of KDE running nicely on Gnome, Gnome pieces running on KDE, common themes – can you see my paradise here?

This should not be a religious argument. There has been much work between the two communities – even as far back as the 1.0 versions (common menuing for example).

There have been some notable efforts in this space more recently. freedesktop.org tries to drive interoperability for all GUI/WM environments on X – with some success; even more recently last month the Tango Project was launched to try and deliver a common user experience.

These are all good efforts. I believe Novell has supported several of these initiatives; as well as promoting choice within (over 50% of Novell employees are using NLD as their primary production OS).

Novell licensing changes

by | Nov 4, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Novell recently announced an interesting change to its product licensing:

Device Licenses
Customers will now have the option to license qualifying products by device for their organization.
This optional counting method is available on select “User” licensed products. To implement this option, customers can simply begin counting User-licensed products according to the number of devices utilizing the software functionality, rather than the number of users.
No conversion forms or documentation are required. However, customers should track device licensing counts and products internally for usage and audit purposes. Customers must declare their counting method to Novell or their partner up front, and must adhere to this method for audit and payment purposes. If the customer does not declare device licensing, user is assumed to be the default on all user-licensed products.

This is a change that was included in ZENworks 7 – it makes licensing a lot simpler for some organisations.

ZENworks Server Management

by | Nov 3, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized, ZENworks

Wow. There has been a flurry of activity with ZENworks Server Management in the last month or so.

Martin Irwin in WorldWide Support built a set of CPKs to deploy ZENworks 6.5 SP2 across your infrastructure; he is now working on delivering this with the standalone CPK engine (think of this as a small part of the ZENworks Server Management subscriber agent) to all customers. That is way cool.

Peter Lambrechtsen in New Zealand has almost finalised a CPK (hopefully soon with the standalone engine) that will let you deploy ZENworks 7 in your network.

All very cool – and showing real savings for customers deploying ZENworks in an enterprise.

Centralised deployment, across hundreds of servers – in hours. Now that’s value.

More free and kinda-free wireless

by | Nov 3, 2005 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, travel, Uncategorized

McCarran Airport in Las Vegas has fast free wifi.

The JW Marriott Resort in Las Vegas has a voucher-based wifi implementation – but it only blocks ports 8 (http/https) – not anything else. So if you don’t mind not having web browsing you can – hypothetically – do email (GW, POP, IMAP, SMTP), other stuff (SSH, RDP) and also things like IM. Oh well.

Zappos – a web site that works

by | Nov 1, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I’ve been using Zappos for a while – it’s a great example of how a web-based service can and should work.

Here are my positive pieces:

  • if you know what you want – it’s really easy to find and buy a pair of shoes. Look at real shoes in a real shop; buy online. (Oh how traditional stores must hate that)
  • if you want to look for something new – it’s nice and clean navigation to find what you want to compare. The images of the shoes look clear and realistic. That’s good.
  • great shipping policy. Free shipping – I’m often ‘upgraded’ to 2 day priority at no cost. That’s just splendid.
  • excellent returns policy. Print out the return label online; put it on the box; arrange pickup. No cost, no hassle. Compare this to other online stores (urg – Swatch are awful for this) where they issue an RMA then make you ship the product back. Or they ship you a return document. It’s all time and hassle.
  • feedback on purchases. Just like any other successful site you can comment on the goods purchased (shoes – how much can you say about a pair?) and on the service itself.
  • purchase history. I liked those shoes so much I’ll buy some more. Or you can view what you did purchase and look for similar things.

Overall Zappos is pretty splendid.