Weekend Roundup 1

1:57 PM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

This week, I’m a day late, but I have some new links to some interesting software products, a virus warning, and more news:

New Applications:

• ”Open Data Center Network Management System” - Late last week, I got an email asking me to evaluate and comment on this new application.  I haven’t had a chance to install or look at it yet, but I wanted to throw it out to everyone until I have time to review it myself.

  This appears to be an ideal solution for documenting network data centers, racks, patch panels, routers, etc. - especially for those of us who have to maintain a frugal IT environment (like my office).

• This one isn’t new, but I just found it for the first time today.  “Royal TS“.  This is a good replacement for the “Remote Desktops” MMC applet that isn’t available (at least not easily available) on Windows Vista.  It allows you to organize your Remote Desktop sessions in a nice console list.

Exploit / Virus Warning:

• This item was more tailored for delivery on Friday, but it doesn’t hurt to reinforce the importance of making sure that your Adobe Acrobat software (either the reader or the creator) is up-to-date.  Last Friday, there was an open exploit using PDF files of the Adobe Acrobat (or Microsoft Windows, if you prefer) flaw that allowed your computer to run exploited code.   I noted two attempts of this virus emailed to my office early morning Saturday morning, but my spam/virus gateway was updated to filter it out.

More News:

• I’m posting in the Microsoft Newsgroups once again (primarily in Vista Networking, Server Networking, DFS, and DNS).  It’s about time that I got back to my “roots”.
• I had the joy of helping someone install Leopard this weekend.  It seems nice and quick, but I don’t know if I could stand using the Mac OS X user interface long enough to use it.  Also, Parallels was not working properly on the machine I saw, so that would preclude me from using it in an office situation (AutoCAD doesn’t exist in Mac OS X, nor will it ever).

That’s it for today.  Have a great week if I don’t post again this week.  I’ll try to be more active than that..  And feel free to send comments.  I’m open to criticism… 

Networking and IT World for the past week:

• MS Internal use of Network Access Protection Channel 9 Video - Jeff Sigman (of the NAP team) and Brent Atkison (of MS-IT) talk about how NAP is implemented on the Microsoft network.
• Ubuntu 7.10 (GutsyGibbon) has been released, both in Desktop and Server releases. For the benefit of others at the office, we have implemented some of our public web servers on Ubuntu (although I am more a Centos or BSD dude…). Downloads are still rather slow due to the Slashdot effect.

Weekly Wishlist:

• x64 version of PageDefrag for my servers.
• A working version of Veridian on two of my AM2 systems that should support Virtualization, but are disabled due to processor stepping level.

Task List for the week:

• Installing the RTM build of Windows Home Server at home…
• Upgrade my Trixbox installation and implement OpenWingo soft phones…