Not sure how I missed this, not only on Friday night, but throughout the weekend. But, the PSH product team finally decided to release the CTP2 to the public. The release notes are kinda of long... but it looks like there are a number of changes from CTP1. Considering that I'm on the Feedback program, I will be playing with the CTP. If I think something is interesting, I will try to post my thoughts.
Sadly, while I'm happy that things are rolling forward... I now need to go back and make numerous updates to the chapters I have been working on. For example:
Updated Type Adapters
The member lookup algorithm of type adapters has been updated to include Base members. The members of the base object for adapted types are now directly accessible on the object, so you do not need to use the PSBASE property to access base members.
I'm guessing by that statement that I need to update my section that discussed how PSH interacted with Active Directory.
p>Ah! It's the weekend, which means the time has come for yet another post. My first topic deals with EV SSL Certs. A short definition about EV SSL Certs can be found on everyone's favorite site, WikiPedia:
"Extended Validation Certificates (EV) are a special type of X.509 certificate which require more extensive investigation of the requesting entity by the Certificate Authority before being issued."
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Ah... CTP2... I've been waiting for it since hearing that it was slowing but surely making its way into the public arena. Well, per Jeffrey's posting early today, CTP2 will be formerly shown to the public at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS). While he posted some CTP2 related information from the ReadMe earlier this week. The wording in his post from today, infers that Bruce and Jeffrey are going to be showing CTP2 "stuff" that is geared at making automation scripts more productive:
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It isn't often that I get surprised. But, when an MS person replied to my posting on Sunday and suggested that I contact another person at MS (Paul), I was intrigued. So, I sent Paul and email, and to my surprise, he replied wanting to better understand the issue that I encountered. Since then we have exchanged emails, several times, and hopefully he now has the info he needs to figure what is going on.
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This might be a strange post. But, I felt the need to vent about the many little things that seem to always eat up my time. For example, the other day I was installing Exchange Server 2007 on a Windows Server 2008 machine. And, for some reason the installation kept bombing. Looking through the event logs, I kept getting some nifty LDAP errors:
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A very interesting Mozilla discussion thread + bug was pointed out to me the other day. Basically, the guys/girls over at WISeKey are attempting to get their root CA included in Mozilla's built-in trusted CA list. Here is the link to the bug that was filed: Link.
The bug was originally submitted on 02-23-2007. If you read through the bug and the associated discussion you can basically see the handlers going back and forth with WISeKey about some items. Basically, the handlers are attempting to ensure that WISeKey's ducks are in a row for the submission, gathering any additional needed information, and shoring up any assurance and mutual trust concerns.
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The other night, or was it early morning, I started a series about my day at the RSA Conference. In part one, I gave a brief overview about Microsoft's Sterling announcement, and posted some pictures. In this post, I want give more insight into what I thought about the conference and review some of companies/technologies that I saw.
The Conference
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As I mentioned last week... yesterday I went to the RSA Conference. Believe it or not, this was my first time. Hard to image considering, I'm kind of into security, and I happen to live in the SF Bay area. Anyhow, this blog is the first of a series of blogs that I plan on writing about my experience at the conference. I would have kicked this off yesterday evening, but I got home a bit late (free boozes does that), and I made it a point not to bring my notebook, and I had a PKI thingy today. So... let's get this show on the road.
Sterling
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That sure is a long title for a blog post. Anyhow, I seem to hear the following question a lot: "In Active Directory, how do I figure out which account objects are valid?" Well, first off, if you don't have a really good process in place for managing accounts within your directory. Then I suggest that you try to get a better handle on managing these objects. I can't tell you how many environments I've seen where any of the following statements are true:
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No... this isn't an April fool's joke. Instead this is an actual news item that hit the ticker today. Link
To me this announcement is a little funny. After all, Microsoft first started integrating Kerberos support into their operating systems with Windows 2000. That version of Windows was released over 8 years ago! So, in my opinion, this move by Microsoft is a little late.
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Why, hello there... I'm not sure why I didn't blog about this sooner. But, as I mentioned several months ago, VMWare was working on a PowerShell based VI toolkit. Needless to say, an CCO internal newsletter entry that was written by Pete (an author on the V2 version of our book) reminded me that I should yet again talk about the toolkit.
Anyhow... VMWare announced several weeks ago that the beta release of their VI Toolkit (for Windows) 1.0 was available for download: Link With 102 cmdlets, which allow you to manage VMware ESX or VMware VirtualCenter, this toolkit is a nice addition to the growing PowerShell portfolio of cool stuff.
I.E. take a VM snapshot using the following command:
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Well, I'm sure you have all seen the news - "OpenSocial Foundation launches with Google, Yahoo, MySpace". But, did anyone also catch this headline - "Microsoft Partners with Top Social Networks to Put Users at the Center of their Data"? Before giving my opinion... lets got over the roster for each announcement:
In the OpenSocial corner we have:
In the other corner we have:
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I've always wondered how YouTube was able to keep such a tight ship. And, yesterday, I stumbled upon the truth. Apparently, like the ancient Chinese and their trained army of monkeys that pick tea: Monkey Picked Oolong Tea. YouTube also has also trained an army of monkeys that tend to their servers as shown in this error message I encountered:
A couple days ago, I stumbled upon some screen shots from an internal Milestone release of Windows 7 (Link). It doesn't look like much given the fact that these are just screenshots of an OS build that looks like Vista. While looking at the images some gears started moving within my head and I decided to come up with a short list of my own desires:
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My friend Monil recently told me a very humorous story about an application administrator that was attempting to troubleshoot his application. To paraphrase... the application administrator had approached him explaining that the DNS server was down. When Monil asked him to explain, the Administrator showed him that a distinguished name that was defined in the application's LDAP configuration was not resolving correctly. Apparently, DNS meant Distinguished Name Server to the Application Administrator.
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Here is something that just hasn't sat right in my stomach for a long time now. In general, I have always failed to see how or why we needed to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which provided a perfectly good process for the government to conduct surveillance of US citizens. So... when I continue to see headlines that state things like:
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Windows and Windows Live settings on a USB stick = StartKey. News about this development was originally posted on ZDNet and again on NetworkWorld. Considering, I've been posting my thoughts about SaaS related topics; I thought this little new maker might make a good discussion point. So with in this mind, let's first review a couple of items:
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Office Live Workspace, here is a beta that I've been struggling to love for some time now...
The offering is part of Microsoft's answer to the gauntlet thrown down by Google Apps. And, if you have been watching the wires for the past couple of weeks, Microsoft has a brought forth a number of offerings geared towards subverting Google's direct challenge to their cash cow Office + Exchange. So, if anyone is interested in looking at this service, MS just opened up the private beta to the public: Link.
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With more than nine years of experience in IT, Tyson Kopczynski has become a specialist in Active Directory, Group Policy, Windows scripting, Windows Rights Management Services, PKI, and IT security practices. Tyson is the author of the new book Windows PowerShell Unleashed (read a sample chapter and learn about the drawing for a free copy here). Tyson has been a contributing author for such books as Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004 Unleashed and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Unleashed (R2 Edition). He has also written detailed technical papers and guides covering various technologies. As a consultant at Convergent Computing, Tyson has worked with next generation Microsoft technologies since their inception and played a key role in expanding scripting and development practices. Tyson also holds the SANS Security Essentials Certification, Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer Security certification, CompTIA Security+ certification and SANS Certified Incident Handler certification.
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