Windows

Why you need to be planning for Windows 10

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , ,

A longtime friend asked me at church on Sunday about Windows 10. My answer was fairly succinct: Windows 7 has five years left in it, so we’ll probably all end up running it at some point.

Microsoft made a number of announcements last week, so here’s what you need to know about it.

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Don’t wait for Service Pack 1

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , , ,

I was on a conference call discussing the Microsoft product lifecycle with several coworkers and our Microsoft-assigned support engineers when someone asked if a server version of Windows 10 was going to come out.

The Microsoft rep said no comment. Then I chimed in.

“We need to assume they will release a server version, probably about six months after the desktop version, and we need to start testing and preparing to deploy it when it comes out,” I said.

“Shouldn’t we wait for Service Pack 1?”

I went in for the kill. Read more

What is Winshock?

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

So the other day I got blindsided with a question at work: What are we doing about Winshock. Winshock, I asked? I had to go look it up, and I found that’s what they dubbed what I’ve been calling MS14-066, the vulnerability in Schannel, which is Microsoft’s implementation of SSL/TLS for Windows.

Based on that, I’d argue it has more in common with Heartbleed than Shellshock, but I guess “Winshock” is catchier than “Winbleed.”

Then the lead of another team asked me to brief his team on Winshock. I actually managed to anticipate all but three of the questions they asked, too, which was better than I expected. Some of what I shared with them is probably worth sharing further.

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Fixing the .NET Framework

Dave Farquhar Windows
Fixing the .NET Framework

The bane of my existence as a sysadmin was .NET. It would corrupt itself randomly, sometimes taking with it this awful now-defunct product written in .NET that nobody else wanted anything to do with. Those were the bad old days. These days, there’s a better way to go about fixing the .NET Framework when it goes bad.

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Getting fewer tech support scam calls lately?

Dave Farquhar scams, Windows

Last week, the FTC shut down a major operator of tech support scam cold-callers. I’m heartbroken.

So I imagine you’re getting fewer of those calls lately. I know I am, but they seem to come in waves anyway. I don’t expect them to completely stop, at least not for a while, though. Read more

How to rebuild a PC in a hurry

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , ,

Sometimes rebuilding a PC is faster than trying to fix it, and if you’re dealing with a virus infection, it’s better to rebuild than try to clean. It’s impossible to know if the system is 100% clean after infection–unless you rebuild.

If you’re the family CIO, here’s how you can go about rebuilding a Windows PC in a hurry.

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Predicting the future, circa 2003

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , , , , , ,

In the heat of the moment, I searched my blog this weekend for quotes that could potentially be taken out of context and found something rather prophetic that I wrote in the heat of the moment 11 1/2 years ago:

Keeping up on Microsoft security patches is becoming a full-time job. I don’t know if we can afford a full-time employee who does nothing but read Microsoft security bulletins and regression-test patches to make sure they can be safely deployed. I also don’t know who would want that job.

Who ended up with that job? Me, about a year after I left that gig. It actually turned out I was pretty good at it, once I landed in a shop that realized it needed someone to do that job, and utilized that position as part of an overall IT governance model.

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Don’t like paying for software? There’s an answer but old software isn’t it.

Dave Farquhar Linux, security, Windows , , ,

Corporations are in business to make money. That’s the premise of the classic business book The Goal, and the point of The Goal is that a lot of companies forget that.

That also means they’re not exactly happy to spend money unless there’s an obvious reason why spending that money is going to help them make more money. So that’s why you see 30-year-old minicomputers in data centers. That old system is still making the company money and with no clear financial benefit to replacing it, most businesses are perfectly happy to run the machine until the minute before it will no longer power up anymore.

That’s what makes quitting Windows XP so difficult for businesses. At this point, Windows XP and that 30-year-old minicomputer are both about as sexy as a Plymouth Volare station wagon. But they get the job done, and they’re much better than what they replaced, so the business leaders are content to just keep right on using what’s already paid for. Read more

Revisiting Microsoft/Sysinternals Du as a batch file

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , ,

My tips for using Sysinternals’ Du.exe were well received last week, and my former coworker Charlie mentioned a GUI tool called Windirstat that I had completely forgotten about. For the command-line averse, it’s an incredibly useful tool.

But there’s one thing that Du.exe does that makes the CLI worthwhile. It will output to CSV files for further analysis. Here’s the trick.

DU -L 1 -Q -C \\SERVERNAME\C$\ >> servers.csv

Sub in the name of your server for servername. You have to have admin rights on the server to run this, of course.

For even more power, run this in a batch file containing multiple commands to query multiple servers, say, in your runup to Patch Tuesday. Open the file in your favorite spreadsheet, sort on Directory Size, and you can find candidates for cleanup.

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Windows 9 rumors

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

I picked up some various Windows 9 rumors from across the Web yesterday.

In no particular order: Read more