War Stories If in doubt, reboot........ the train........ My journey into work is normally quite uneventful. Since the move out to Kent it generally takes 20 minutes longer but the journey is actually fairly pleasant. Today was the exception. About 20
Technical FSMO Confusion in multiple domains When I teach classes on Active Directory I will cover various domain models including the empty root domain model, this model has several security,delegation and political based benefits that I will cover
Technical Creating a Default User Profile One of the things that annoys me about windows is the Default User profile. This is the profile that a new user who logs onto a machine (or server will get). The way
Security Kensington Laptop Locks (2) As per the comment on my previous entry the issue of the Kensington laptop lock being pickable is actually an old one. I admit that I never realised this as it was only
Security Kensington Laptop Locks Earlier this week I was sent a link to a video on how to pick a Kensington laptop lock using nothing but a toilet roll. It works. After about 20 minutes practice it
Idle Ramblings Project time Analysis After last weeks fun and games with project management and changing deadlines I've come to the conclusion that I really don't like MS Project. Maybe this is because I don't really know how
War Stories Bad Project Management Sometimes this industry makes me want to scream. My old favourite the artificially tight deadline has been back in force this week with a project due to finish at the end of the
Security Security Industry Commentary Last night I watched the "Diana: Last Days of a Princess" documentary. I admit that I largely watched it just to moan about how much the British media is still concentrating
Security Careful when testing security I was amused to read that two Daily Mirror journalists where arrested when 'testing' security procedures on London Underground. Whilst it they say that they have a 'journalistic right' to expose security holes
Security Careful when testing security I was amused to read that two Daily Mirror journalists where arrested when 'testing' security procedures on London Underground. Whilst it they say that they have a 'journalistic right' to expose security holes
Security Is it time to scrap the password? As password protection gets more secure the actual passwords for users get weaker. A paradox? Not so, let me explain. A few years back the biggest problem was a password going 'over the
Security Increase in eCard scams A few weeks ago I got a fairly genuine looking ecard email but something about it triggered my suspicious so I did some further checking of the mail message and spotted that the
Security Reporting new spyware When setting up the network at the new house I fired up each machine to test out connectivity and other behaviour before putting it back on the network. One of the laptops was
Security Information Leakage via social networking I frequent the website and someone recently asked 'what constitutes an identity?'. I found this an interesting question because there are several ways to answer it ranging from philosophical to technical but
Administrivia Moving house Well, that was fun! The move is over. The computers are almost all in place but there is a lot of little jobs that need doing, lots of rewiring for the computers -
Administrivia Blog Updates for the next two weeks Blog updates for the next two weeks make be a little sporadic as I'm moving house and will have limited net access. Once I'm up and running I've got a series of blog
Security Profiting from Security vulnerabilities A new company is offering security researchers the chance to profit from discovering and coming up with innovative fixes for Security Vulnerabilities in products. There web page (linked above) contains the following ominous
Annoyed at Symantec 'Trialware' I just tried to download a copy of Symantec Sygate 5.1 from Symantec's website. I've used and earlier version of the product and wanted to test out the current version just to
Tips The power of the human mind........ to fail. The human brain is an amazing computer. It can store almost infinite quantities of data, it has near instant recollection to enable you to recognise people, places and perform the essential day to
Active Directory Death of a Domain Controller My home network has just a single domain controller on it. This domain controller runs a few other servers such as spam checking email and so on. A few weeks back when the
War Stories The week from hell Ok, so it's more nine days than a week but you know how people say trouble comes in three's? Well, I've almost had three lots of three over the past nine days. I'll
Personal Roving Mars This Sunday I had the pleasure of visiting the IMAX to see the Roving Mars presentation. Whilst this is not in 3D the movie is pretty spectacular on the huge screen at the
Security Nimda, Slammer and the like Now that Microsoft have released a patch for the recent DNS RPC vulnerbility IT Admins should be deploying it as quickly as possible - I was talking to a friend about this today
Tips 3,000 test users Do you ever have need of a few hundred to a few thousand random names to populate your Active Directory in order to test something? This is the requirement I had a few
Security Rejoice for it's patch Tuesday Once again patch Tuesday rolls around and this time we have a total of 18 patches released across five security updates. It's good to see that is the much anticipated fix for the
