2006-11-27 · 05:56

Some Vista irritations

I’ve been using Vista daily for a while now, and on balance I like it quite a bit. However, there are some things that irritate the dickens out of me, mostly because I haven’t figured out to escape them. I’m going to keep a running list in the hope that either people will suggest solutions, or that I’ll attract enough other people who have the same problems to gain critical mass.

  1. My new #1: turning off offline file sync for an existing folder. It’s possible, but what a hassle!
  2. Connecting and disconecting VPNs. I like the way XP and Mac OS X both do it: you get an icon in the system bar, and you can directly click it to disconnect. With XP, to connect I can hit Ctrl+Esc, T (for “Connect to”), <return> and be connected to my primary VPN. In Vista, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent, except for putting a shortcut on the desktop.
  3. Bonus annoyance: after you close a connection, you get a dialog telling you it was closed, which you must dismiss.
  4. The center scroll feature of the TrackPoint doesn’t work. Update: this was because I didn’t have the correct driver. Lenovo will be releasing full versions of all their Vista drivers at the end of January; the prerelease versions I have work quite well.
  5. There’s not yet a working version of Verizon Access Manager, so I can’t use the spiffy integrated EvDO modem. Update: still no love on this. I’ve seen reports
  6. I’m having fits with one particular client’s VPN implementation; I can usually connect, but I can’t reach most of the internal sites I need. If I connect at the same time from my XP machine, the connection is rock-solid, so it’s clearly a Vista oddity. Update: Turns out this is a Vista bug, slated for a QFE sometime in the future.

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2006-11-22 · 11:28

McAfee: yes, we changed our FAQ

So, via this article from Computerworld, confirmation that McAfee’s SiteAdvisor FAQ did say that it included anti-phishing features, as I said it did the day our phishing tool report was released. I am pleased to see them owning up to it, and I look forward to seeing how the new and improved Site Advisor Plus does in a head-to-head test.

Update: Sandi says it better than I could, since she’s a disinterested third party.

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2006-11-21 · 16:11

452 4.3.1 Insufficient system resources SMTP error

Ryan pinged me because he was getting this error on a test Exchange 2007 VM today. I hadn’t seen it before, but asking some smart friends quickly produced a reasonable answer: this is the message an Exchange edge or hub transport server produces when it’s low on RAM or disk space. How low? You’ll get this if you have less than 4GB free on the queue volume. That seems like a lot, but given how large disks on transport servers are likely to be, it’s probably reasonable. Anyway, freeing up more space on the queue volume solved the problem, so I’m blogging it for the next person who runs into the same error.

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2006-11-21 · 11:43

Very cool “99 E-Mail Security and Productivity Tips” article

The folks over at ITSecurity.com just published a wonderful article, “Hacking EMail: 99 Email Security and Productivity Tips“. None of these tips will be surprising to power users (don’t forward chain mails; respond promptly; remember, e-mail’s not private). However, it’s refreshing to see them collected in one place, and I hope the list makes the rounds of corporate America, where hopefully it will start to sink in. (Hat tip: Rich).

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2006-11-21 · 11:22

Sneak King

Sneak King is hysterical! The boys and I had a great time playing it last night. The basic premise: it’s an Xbox 360 game in which you are the Burger King, and your job is to sneak around and surprise people by handing them Burger King food (or, as the package puts it, you “silently unleash your hot sandwiches on unsuspecting civilians”.) For $4, plus a value meal that I enjoyed for lunch, we’ve definitely gotten our money’s worth of entertainment.

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2006-11-21 · 10:46

Hate voice mail? Don’t use it!

I missed this first time around, but thanks to the power of NewsGator I got a second chance. Ed takes a critical look at Gartner’s new report about Exchange 2007. Ed said a couple of things that got me to thinking.

First up: Gartner said “We believe integrating voice mail with e-mail creates business efficiencies via common access and command services, and that it will become a cornerstone of the unified communication and collaboration movement.” Ed said:

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t get this. I hate voicemail, and the fact that e-mail and instant messaging have replaced it over the last few years has been a most welcome development. Why would I want anyone to do anything that encourages more of it?

Well, first off, if Gartner is praising something that you don’t have, it’s natural to downplay its utility. However, Microsoft is making a choice play here. If you want to use voicemail as a peer to IM and e-mail, you can. If you want to get e-mail on your phone, you can. If you want to save money by consolidating your voicemail infrastructure, you can. If, like Ed, you hate voicemail and want to avoid it, now you can deal with it without ever picking up a telephone; from your desktop client or Web browser, you can see who called you and listen to the messages when necessary. The point is that MS is making these things possible as a fully-supported part of the product, not a separate (and poorly integrated) add-in. In the comments to Ed’s original post, Henry Ferlauto offers some excellent reasons why unified messaging is cool, including unifying the inbox and providing CYA/evidence tracking.)

Second, Ed says

It’s interesting how many customers seem to be listening to Microsoft’s pitch for Exchange 2007, with its emphasis on unified messaging, without accounting for this additional cost. Microsoft is smartly using the halo of the Exchange brand, but the reality is they are pitching a new product at a substantial cost as the main innovation of this supposed-upgrade.

But that’s the beauty of Microsoft’s approach! If you don’t want or need voicemail capacity, you don’t have to pay for it. If you don’t want or need the other items in the enterprise CAL, don’t buy them. If you only want hosted filtering, for example, just buy it from EHS and ignore the bundling option. Given that IBM has a large number of add-ons for mobility and wireless, IM integration, and other features that are included in Microsoft’s core collaboration products, I would think Ed would welcome this pay-as-you-go approach.

Ed does have a legitimate point about Gartner’s upgrade numbers. In my experience, most analyst firms, and even software vendors, routinely miss upgrade market share predictions. I suspect that Gartner is going to miss low, and that more than 40% of the Exchange installed base will be on 2007 in the three-year window they predict. We’ll have to wait and see, though.

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2006-11-21 · 10:17

Basement UM setup, part 3

Not much activity on the UM front lately, as I’ve been moving into my new office in what used to be the attic. This is a huge upgrade, so I decided to upgrade my phone from my old AT&T deskset to a Mitel 5340. This required me to do several things.

First, I relocated the Mitel 3300 and Intel PIMG to my equipment rack on the other side of the basement. I ran a single silver-skin phone line to it for my work phone line (xxx-xxx-8308). I interconnected it with the house network and verified that I had connectivity to the upstairs office. The upstairs drop is actually plugged into one of the power-over-Ethernet (PoE) ports on the 3300cxi so the 5340 can get power.

Then I moved the 5340 upstairs; that was simple enough. It has a jack on the underside that acts as a passthrough, so the 5340’s plugged into the wall, and my desk switch is plugged into the 5340. Unfortunately, the 5340 only passes 10Mbps out, at least according to my switch. No big loss for my environment.

Then the fun began. From the minute I plugged the 8308 line into one of the LS (loop-start) ports on the back of the 3300, I could place outgoing calls by lifting the handset and dialing 9. So far, so good. However, the phone display said “ANALOG”, which wasn’t really what I wanted. The label for that display comes from the trunk service assignment name, which you can change. There’s a separate option in the class of service (“Display Dialed Digits During Outgoing Calls”) that fixes that.

My basic setup is this: three handsets at extensions 5001, 5002, and 5003, plus two analog lines ( xxx-xxx-8305 and xxx-xxx-8308). My desired end state is to have both analog lines ring all 3 handsets, e.g. just like a POTS phone would. That way I can answer either line from anywhere. So far, I’ve gotten 1 line to ring 1 handset, which is progress. Here’s how:

  1. I created a circular hunt group, 5000, using day and night COS 1.
  2. I modified trunk service assignment for trunk 9 (the 8308 LS line) to have a non-dial-in answer point of 5000.
  3. On the multiline key set assignment page, I assigned handset 5001 button 2 to be label 8308, type key system, ring type ring, button DN 5308.

At that point, I had a new button on the handset labeled “8308”. When I placed an incoming call from my cell phone to xxx-xxx-8308, my conventional wired phone would ring, but the deskset connected to the 3300 wouldn’t. I then went back and modified the trunk service assignment answer point to be 5308, vice 5000. That did the trick.

I still have to hook up 8305, then verify that the hunt group sends 8308 to the other handsets. Once that’s done, I’ll be in pretty good shape, and it’ll be time to configure the PIMG to start answering 8308.

(I’d like to say I figured this all out myself, but that would be a flat-out lie. Thanks to the friendly folks on the Mitel forum at tek-tips.com!)

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2006-11-21 · 08:14

What’s “class of service”?

One acronym you’ll see a lot in the UM world is “class of service”, or CoS. A class of phone service is just a set of options– think of it like a group policy object. The Mitel 3300 lets you define multiple CoS objects, then assign them in various combinations. For example, you can define a day CoS that has one set of behaviors, then a night CoS that acts completely differently (perhaps it turns off inbound ringing, or disallows all outbound non-emergency calls). You can define multiple CoS objects and assign them to different extensions, and there are different types of CoS for handsets, trunks, and other various types of objects.

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2006-11-17 · 10:17

CMU releases updated anti-phishing report

Dr. Lorrie Cranor of CMU and her team have recently released a new version of their own anti-phishing analysis. It makes for interesting reading, as its methodology is slightly different from 3Sharp’s (and quite different from the Firefox team’s methdodology). Cranor’s team used an automated system to feed phish in and record the tool responses, which is much more scalable than the human-driven system that 3Sharp and Firefox both used; there are a few other methodological improvements detailed in the study as well. (Interestingly, they too chose to include SiteAdvisor, which scored very poorly.)
Table 4 of the study is the big burrito; it lists both false positive and catch rates for the ten technologies they tested. SpoofGuard had the best catch rate, but it also scored a whopping 38% false positive rate… oops. EarthLink came in second, followed by Netcraft, Google, IE7, and Cloudmark.
What does this mean? I’m not sure. The CMU study used a data feed only from Phishtank, which means its results should line up with what the Firefox team found. However, CMU didn’t test Firefox 2.0, so there’s no way to make a direct comparison. The URLs they tested were gathered over a 3-day period, which IMHO is too short to give a good baseline. However, I like the automated testbed that CMU used, and the discussion of toolbar exploits is really interesting stuff that I hope all the toolbar vendors are paying careful attention to.

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2006-11-15 · 09:55

Limited blogging for the next few days

Wow, so much to write about and so little time to do it in! I’ll be blogging less than usual for the next week or so. This is mostly due to the fact that I have a large project due by month’s end that I don’t want to slip, combined with the happy news that my new upstairs office is ready for me to move in. First, though, my existing office needs a good Thompson Deep Clean, which will take time in itself. Not to mention that my birthday gifts included both Viva Piñata and Gears of War, both of which could suck up a huge amount of free time. Then there are the basement ceiling panels I have to put up once I move out… and the Ohio State-Michigan game on Saturday… and so on. Thus, don’t look for a huge volume of posts here for the next little while.

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2006-11-14 · 15:51

Apple, airlines to offer in-seat iPod access

Very cool news: six airlines (including Delta) will offer in-seat iPod docks that will charge the iPod

and allow the iPod to play video on the in-seat video screen! This is super cool for those (like Jim and I) who have to fly long-haul routes, though Jim does it a lot more than I do. This will definitely influence where I choose to fly (when I get a choice, that is.)

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2006-11-14 · 13:09

Mozilla releases anti-phishing report

So, the fine folks at Mozilla have released their own anti-phishing study comparing the anti-phishing features of Firefox 2.0 with IE 7. Unsurprisingly, they claim that Firefox beats IE7 handily, which is the opposite of what we found in 3Sharp’s report.

First off, I’m glad the Firefox team is doing this kind of testing. I always want to see as much data (and as much data about the data) as possible. That’s why I I like to read both Car and Driver and Road & Track to see how well their data agree– or where they don’t agree.

Anyway, reviewing the study didn’t take long, as it’s only 3 pages. (Interestingly, SmartWare, the company that authored the study, doesn’t seem to be distributing it; the only copy I could find is at the Washington Post. It’s not available yet from Mozilla, either. Go figure.) Here are my initial thoughts:

  • They didn’t make any attempt to score false positives. This is a critical omission, because a filter that produces significant numbers of false positives will quickly train users to ignore its legitimate warnings. (Interestingly, PhishTank’s own FAQ agrees with me). IMHO any study that doesn’t include false positive data is meaningless.
  • Speaking of “doesn’t include”, the report only looked at IE and Firefox. I would have liked to see some other products (note: not SiteAdvisor) included to give a broader basis of comparison.
  • The Firefox report mentions that IE can warn or block, but it doesn’t credit IE with any actual warnings. This is a significant omission, although we can’t tell how significant because…
  • The Firefox report doesn’t include any information about the actual URLs used. They promise to publish this data “soon”, but without that there’s no way to gauge the quality of their data. (I understand that they’ll publish the data later today; it’ll be interesting to see the raw stuff.) Of course, we published all our URL data in our report.
  • Speaking of data: the Firefox team used 1040 phish from Phishtank, a community filtering system, gathered over a two-week period. That’s a good number of phish, but the study period was awfully short, and the phish all came from one source. We used multiple sources, including honeypots and user reports, to generate the phish list we used.
  • Because they used a community-generated feed of phish, there’s no way to tell which of the phish had also (or already) been reported to other systems that may have fed into the “Ask Google” or Microsoft data feeds. By contrast, we took great pains to try to find phish that we knew hadn’t been submitted to Microsoft’s URL reputation service.

So, my personal opinion is that this study isn’t as rigorous as the 3Sharp study or the one done by Dr. Lorrie Cranor et al of Carnegie Mellon. Both our studies found that the version of the Google Toolbar available at the time lagged other products, sometimes by a wide margin. Some of the difference in Mozilla’s results and the ones we and CMU obtained are due to updates in the tool, but some are no doubt due to differences in methodology as well, and those are very difficult to discount.

Update: looks like Sandi independently came up with many of the same objections.

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2006-11-13 · 16:41

Getting an alert when a command completes

As part of some testing we’re doing, I’ve been running some lengthy command scripts. I don’t want to sit and wait for them to finish, and I don’t want to get an e-mail when they’re done because my e-mail app isn’t open. I asked a group of smart friends and here are the two best answers.

First, you can use the echo command to echo a beep. Try it: open up a Windows command prompt and type “echo ^G” (where the “^G” is displayed after you press Ctrl+G). Voila– a beep.

Second, you can use the very helpful color command. Try this:

dir && color E2 && pause && color

This will print a directory, turn the entire screen yellow, and pause. It’s impossible to miss this visual effect as long as any part of the window is open– especially if you’re using Vista. Two thumbs up!

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2006-11-10 · 17:32

Vista, day 1

I’m working on a project that requires me to spend a lot of time working with Vista’s BitLocker feature. That meant I needed a new computer. Sure, BitLocker runs on a wide range of machines, but its TPM mode requires a machine that has a supported TPM. The ThinkPad T60p has an upgradable BIOS, and word has it that there’s a BIOS upgrade that enables full BitLocker support for TPM, so I took the plunge and ordered one. It arrived last week, the day before I left for Vegas, but I didn’t have time to work with it last week. Today, while I was busy doing other things, I downloaded and installed the RC2 build. The installation went flawlessly, and I was easily able to join my home domain and install Office. I haven’t yet enabled BitLocker, though I did create the required “small” (~ 1.5GB) system partition that it requires. I’ll be occasionally writing more about Vista as I get more experience with it.

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2006-11-07 · 11:50

Live blogging David Lemson’s keynote

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, except when I blog it!!

Right now, I’m in the main ballroom at the Mandalay Bay, waiting for David Lemson to start his Exchange session keynote.

8:09: Talk about each of the areas where we decided to put features into the release. 4 more sessions this afternoon covering mobility, admin, transport, and how to get started on deployment. Show of hands: who’s installed a beta build of Exchange 2007? About 25% of the audience. Some of the things shown today aren’t in the beta.

8:19: core focus in Exchange 2007 in 3 areas: built-in protection, anywhere access, operational efficiency. Familiar slide, as it’s been the leadoff for most tof the MS presentations since Jan 06. Comparisons between Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007 in various areas (HA, etc). DAS instead of shared storage for clustering brings huge savings in many environments.Nice change: 14-day deleted item retention out of the box. Restore any database to any server via recovery storage group because all servers are in same admin group.

8:22: move-user-configurationOnly cmdlet: rehome a user’s mailbox very rapidly. Nice feature; I didn’t know about it. New best practice: do weekly full backups from the passive cluster node, coupled with CCR. No more daily backup requirement. “Big burrito”: nifty chart: same hardware and user load. 0.6 IOPS Exchange 2003 4GB, 0.32 IOPS Exchange 2007 4 GB, 0.13 IOPS Exchange 2007 8 GB: 78% fewer IOPS/user. (Ed: this is pretty sweet! 4GB of RAM is much cheaper than disk spindles.)

8:28: new compliance approach: create managed folders, then users move mail they need to keep into managed folders. Delete everything else! (Ed: this puts the onus of figuring out what to keep on users– many of whom will hate this.)

8:32: automatic Kerberos and TLS for all internal server-to-server mail, with automatic/opportunistic TLS (ed: finally!) “Domain Authenticated” e-mail uses mutual TLS, but no real details on how this works. Pre-licensing for RMS prefetches RMS use license on the hub transport server– useful feature for travelers.

8:40: demo of Outlook safe sender aggregation.

8:45: slight error in Forefront slide: he says you can have 7 concurrent AV engines, but you can only run 5 at a time (out of the 9 available). Recovery PIN for mobile devices lets you unlock a mobile device by getting a recovery PIN from within OWA– new post-TechEd feature. Exchange UM demo, which went better than any of mine ever did thanks to a better audio setup (and a better presenter :)) Screenshots of OWA, mobile device, and Outlook search: same search experience, driven by new, faster content indexer.

8:55: calendaring improvements, including the availability service. Eliminates calendar latency by allowing auto-tentative-acceptance of meetings. (Ed: this is one of my favorite features so I’m glad to see it getting some play!) Built-in resource booking. Scheduled OOF with rich text. Set OOF from a Windows Mobile device. Internal vs external OOF, with separate messages. “LinkAccess” provides admin-controlled access to UNC paths and SharePoint sites throuh OWA or from mobile device.

9:01: “open as web page” document transcoding: doc attachments converted on the fly to HTML (with pretty good fidelity). Better embedding of OWA in SharePoint. Now we’re down to the feature grab bag: improved ExBPA,

Big finish: RTM in December. 80K mailboxes in production at MS, all inbound mail filtered by Exchange 2007. December or bust!

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