Paul's Down-Home Page

So, I thought I’d set up an ISA Server firewall. While I already have two other firewalls on other network segments, ISA allows you to make Exchange available with good security. So, I built a standalone machine and put ISA Server on it. So far, I’ve spent two days with no luck. It looks like I have to do all of the following:

1. Install the Secure NAT client on the Exchange server. I don’t want to do this, becuase I don’t like installing anything on the Exchange server. However, it appears to be necessary to make Exchange publish-able.
2. Get a new SSL certificate for the ISA server. Of course, since I tore down my internal CA a month or so ago, that means I have to either set it up again (a pain) or buy an external certificate (a bigger pain).
3. Go buy Tom Shinder’s book. I probably should have done this already.

So, that’s what I’m going to be doing, probably for the rest of this week, unless I get a better offer. Right now, Halo is looking pretty inviting. (At least I set up a new blog for e2ksecurity.com, which will be visible as soon as the DNS gods feel like it.)

Wednesday and Thursday were busy days too. Wednesday morning I did my session on best practices for migrating to Office XP. It was moderately well-attended, but posted good numbers (7.6/9.0, my best session overall). A surprising number of people are still using Office 97, which to me makes sense only if you can’t afford better hardware. My own productivity is measurably higher with Office XP, based on just two features: the Send To collaboration features and the offline improvements in Outlook. I’m really excited about seeing the betas of Office 11, which promise improvements in the collaboration and disconnected-from-server environments.
In the afternoon, John & I went pistol shooting with Pierre Bijaou and Kieran McCorry of HP and Jerry Cochran of Microsoft. We had a great time, even though we could only stay on station for a short while. Pierre shot a little better than Kieran did, but they were both shooting respectable groups (Pierre with a Beretta .40S&W, Kieran with a 9mm Glock) by the time we left. Next year in Dallas, watch out!
Wednesday night was the Windows & .NET Magazine editorial dinner. What a great group of people! I met Darren Mar-Elia for the first time and got to spend some quality time talking with Kim Paulsen, the new publisher. These folks are serious about making a great magazine that gives their readers the information they want, but they’re serious about doing it in a fun and lighthearted way.
Thursday was my storage management session, largely a repeat from last year. It was well-attended, and it got good evals, but it ran long (just like last year), so I missed most of the panel discussion I was supposed to attend. I had a meeting with some interesting hardware people, then it was time to head to the airport for my flight to Sacramento. That trip (and the associated wedding) was so cool that it deserves its own trip report, coming soon.

Busy day yesterday. John & I met in the speakers’ lounge for a delicious convention center breakfast. We fell in to a conversation about WLANs with Spyros Sakellariadisand Nick Cavalancia, two opinionated and knowledgeable guys.
My first session, “Big Security for Small Exchange Sites”, was well-attended. Many of the attendees, however, came from large Exchange sites, so I was a little nonplussed. My eval numbers were good, although the high sessions are doing no better than about 7.4 or so on a scale of 1-9. This is a bit unusual; the high sessions for last year’s MEC were in the 8.5 range. Of course, Steve Riley and Jerry Honeycutt, two of the MEC’s perennial stars, haven’t presented yet.
After the session, I had a pleasant lunch with Sue Mosher and Randy Bryne, where they mostly talked about incomprehensible Outlook stuff. Then I went to the show floor, where I spent more time in the security ghetto talking to anti-spam and content filtering product vendors. I’m impressed with Nemx’s PowerToolsproduct and IMLogic’s suite of instant-messaging logging/reporting/auditing tools.
Session #2, “Exchange Security Secrets”, was packed– they had to turn people away at the door. My energy level was a little higher for this session, and I spent about two hours shoehorning in new content right before the session, but disappointingly my numbers were slightly lower than the first session. Such is life. (In an entertaining twist, the database that’s supposed to give the speakers access to the attendees’ comments on sessions is scrambled– my comments page has comments about at least three other sessions, including two that got panned pretty badly. A little schadenfreude never hurts…)
I went to the big product show-floor reception and alternated between checking out booths I hadn’t been to and staying near the Windows & .NET booth, where people asked me some interesting and flavorful questions about SANs, ISA Server, and a variety of other stuff. I’d finally had enough about 8:30, so I went back to the hotel and met John for a late dinner– a giant banana split.