VMWare announced today a new price point for their ESXi hypervisor product, a price point of zero dollars, pounds or yen or free as they choose to put it.  Now whilst they are hoping you eventually upgrade to their more costly VMWare Infrastructure 3 product, there can be no excuse not to give server virtualization a try at this price.

     

It's Sys Admin Appreciation Day today.  But you knew that already, didn't you?

     

If you've ever wanted a way (for free!) to send yourself notifications via SMS whenever certain predetermined events occur, now you can!  We've cooked up a really simple console application to do just that.  However first you'll need to setup a twitter account to act as the notification conduit.  When you've done that simply follow the account you've just created from your own account.  Now you can download Tweet.exe.

There are many different ways to use Tweet.exe; you could call it from a batch file, from a powershell script, using Windows scheduler and many, many more we doubtless hadn't thought of.  So it would be remiss of us if we didn't mention, that we provide no guarantees that this tool will even remotely work let alone do what you expect.  But it works for us, and we hope it'll work for you too.  Give it a whirl, but don't go using it for anything too critical just yet.

Tweet.exe <username> <password> <message>

     

Microsoft have a substantial problem, and one for which we have at least some sympathy.  Their operating systems are practically everywhere, and configured in a multitude of ways many of which surely they could never have predicted.  So providing a one-size fits all approach to patching is always going to be problematic, but that's exactly what Microsoft is forced to do.

This leaves competent administrators to bridge the gap and test patches, and indeed upgrades, in their own environments before deploying them widely.  However as we have seen from the problems arising from MS08-037 this doesn't always happen.

Schedule patching

There are very few occasions on which immediate patching will be either necessary or desirable.  Given many organisations now publish patches on a schedule of their own you can use this as a basic for yours.

User Transparency

Whilst it is generally considered best practice to inform users of impending changes, patches are potentially one exception to this rule.  Where patches are expected to make changes to user interface or require user interaction it's best to warn users.  However a difficulty can arise when users attribute problems they are experiencing to patches without foundation.  So whilst this possibility should not prevent you from informing users, consider carefully how much information to provide.

Patch Testing

While vendors will do everything they can to ensure patches work as intended, only you can confirm they work in your environment so testing before deployment is essential.  If you have a standard desktop build then you can test against this, either using a spare PC or virtually using one of the many virtualization tools available.

Even when patches have passed tests, it is still a good idea to apply them in waves.  If possible recruit a small number of users, preferably confident experienced users, to act as a last line of defence for patch issues.  Then you can push updates to these users first and gauge the response, if these users don't report problems then you're as safe as you can be to push patches to all users.

Above all rushing to patch may well cause more problems than it solves, that said don't fall too far behind the curve.

     

It's well known that the Japanese consider paper-folding to be a supremely calming activity.  So why not indulge in a little officebound origami courtesy of the Canon 3d papercraft site.  We think it's probably the most creative way of selling lots of that profit laden colour ink, or toner for that matter, we've ever seen.  Why not start with your very own Code Primate, Jonathan Coulton would surely appropve (even though it's not a monkey!)

     

"Retro arcade games remade in Flash".  Always a winner

     

We're frankly somewhat hesistant to see this as a legacy issue, but from a strict definition point of view it is.  If you find yourself with the same problem that we did, that is connecting to a Windows 2008 server via RDP from a Windows XP machine, then you'll be pleased to discover that Mark Empson's Blog has the answer.

To enable legacy support, make the following registry edit (all the usual warnings about making changes to the registry apply) :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp
Data Type: DWORD
Value Name: UserAuthentication
Value: 1