Plate full of Password Problems

Every week or so something fun gets tossed onto my brimming plate, and today it's the turn of password management. It's a pain in the ass, full stop, and now I'm to look at smoothing troubled waters by implementing some kind of solution that'll enable our users to reset their own passwords: memorable question kind of thing. It's the kind of thing that even a year ago would have had me in a cold sweat, thinking of all the possible security horrors. I seem to have undergone some kind of transformation though - if it adds to the user experience, makes students and the helpdesk's lives easier, then I'm all for it, and I'll deal with the security horror if it appears. Quest's Password Manager looks like it might do the do. How easy it'll be to implement is, of course, entirely another matter.

So Microsoft's officially cutting jobs. And they can't even bring themselves to issue a revenue / profit forecast. Share price fell nigh on 10%. Not a good week for them.

Fun with Outlook Address books; Cisco looking for a fight.

I'm having fun with Outlook Address Books this morning. A couple of weeks ago I built and introduced an Exchange 2007 server, looking towards migrating our accounts over from Exchange 2003. I created connectors between the two servers, and they're seeing each other fine. I pulled over a test mailbox, which seemed to go smoothly although I haven't been able to fully check that out yet because I need to update the ACL's on our PIX firewalls to include the new server.

So far, so good, until it was pointed out to me that somehow, mysteriously, the behaviour of my users address books in Outlook has changed. One set of users defaulted to one address list, another to another - both stored below the Global Address list. Now, those lists aren't visible from outlook, even though they both still work as email distribution lists. Confused yet? I am.

So I've populated two address lists above the GAL and they work fine, only problem being I haven't yet sussed if I can push our users to these via Group Policy, which would be ideal. So for now, the helpdesk are going to have to sort it - if someone complains, which as yet, they haven't. I know they will though, and probably before I fix it.

On another note, it looks as though Cisco are wading into the Blade-Server market. Coming hot on the heels of news that they're planning on wading into the virtualization market too, and in the face of HP's switch/routing challenge in the shape of Procurve, it's beginning to look more than a little like the day when KFC peddled their first burger and Ronald McDonald deep-fried his first chicken bollock. Hopefully, like that happy day, this ends up as good news for the customer, but with no sickly aftertaste, clogged arteries, or lingering sense of guilt attached.

Opera slings mud at Microsoft, sticks.

So the antitrust thing's back. The EU says Microsoft's violated competition laws by continuing to include Internet Explorer with versions of Windows. Opera, the original re-complainant, is understandably delighted.

So where's Microsoft go from here, other than back into the courtroom? Given that the fine dished out by the EU last time was 899 million Euros, it's a fair bet that someone's going to be digging into their pockets, deeply.

And with Microsoft feeling the pinch - its share price this morning stood at $19.71, down from over $35; and with persistent murmurs of impending cutbacks - now represents perhaps the EU's best chance to get the software giant to sit up and listen, properly.

Yes, the last antitrust issue before the EU was different - that was to do with Microsoft getting in the way - as the commission saw it - of other vendor's attempts to get their software to work properly on Microsoft operating systems.

But the EU budget's not getting any smaller, and member countries are raising less tax revenue than six months ago, thanks to the recession. Milking the Redmond cash cow might, in the once-removed eyes of European ministers, go down an absolute storm.

Replacing Altiris with Configuration Manager

Altiris has been around for a while now. It hasn't changed much since I first used it, in terms of functionality at least. It's under the Symantec jackboot now, and it'll be mildly interesting to see what becomes of it. I've got to admit to not always being the world's biggest fan of Symantec: my experiences with Norton AV haven't ever left me with anything approaching joy, and on the few occasions I've had to use them, the Symantec product support mechanism has frequently left me at entirely the other end of the spectrum of joy, to the point where I've wanted to chew my own hand off.

But that's by-the-bye. My point is that Altiris is, for us at least, now approaching the point where we're looking round for a replacement. As an educational institute we get really good deals from Microsoft under our campus agreement, so I've been looking at Systems Center Configuration Manager. From reading the blurb, it looks like there's nothing that this won't do.

What it can tie in with and what it needs in order to run effectively are confusing me right now. I already know that it speaks to our WSUS server and imports some of the stuff from there. How the software packaging side of things works is a mystery to be solved.

The biggest mystery at the moment though, is how to get the client software to install. From within Configuration Manager there's about five different options for pushing it out. Configuration manager can see my clients - it imports them from AD - but I'm not getting any joy with any of the installations. There's just nothing happening, and the thin, dusty trail in the logs is proving to be fruitless.

I have no doubt I'll solve it eventually, but right now Altiris lives. And that's important because it's this time of year we re-image all our desktops and push out all our software for the upcoming academic year. So far, it's been totally trouble free.

And right there you see our difficulty. There's so much we can potentially do by becoming a one-stop, Microsoft shop. What we're seeing already though, is that the costs we save are going to be offset by an increase in the difficulty of replacing 3rd-party systems like Altiris, like VMWare, that became popular because they work.

That doesn't mean the challenge isn't a valid one. Once all those clients are out there for this year; once all our students are in and settled; I'll be bringing more and more of these projects forward from the back burner, looking towards the future.

More casualties

The downturn's hitting hardware makers too. AMD have just announced 1100 job cuts - 9% of its workforce. The pain's even reaching to the boardroom - AMD's CEO and executive chairman are each going to take a temporary 20% cut in their base salary, and other employees at the chip-maker will also have their wages cut by between 5 and 15%.

That comes hard on the back of job losses at the number one hard drive manufacturer Seagate looking at slashing 10% of its workforce. CEO Bill Watkins didn't survive that one to take a salary cut. Number two in the storge market, Western Digital, is ahead of the curve, having stated that it would slash 5% of its workforce way back in mid December. HDD head manufacturer TDK is letting 9000 go.

The mighty Intel can't be far behind. as yesterday it posted a 90% drop in profits and warned of even tougher times ahead.

With so little money going through the IT industry, it's a bad time for Microsoft to have the EU taking yet another look at it over the seemingly never-ending saga of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. Maybe this time Microsoft won't simply be able to pay, stall the EU with a flotilla of expensive lawyers, carry on like before. Stranger things are happening in the world right now.

Times like this can make a man nervous.

So, the seemingly impregnable Google's laying off workers. The guys and girls for the axe are 100 recruitment workers, so don't be hankering for that job at Mountain View any time soon. And the old company of new Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz (already labelled in some areas of the press as "foul mouthed", although personally, "friggin'" doesn't register on my radar unless it's uttered by a cheeky matelot with a glint in his eye), Autodesk, has also put the knife in today.

And now Microsoft's wielding the axe, according to some sources. Or not. Either way, it's a fair bet there'll be few requests for a pay rise at the software giant anytime soon.

Sign of the times? I did some crystal ball gazing for work this afternoon, trying to come up with a three-year plan. Practically an impossible task, given the pace in change of the world around us right now.

What did I come up with? Well, if we're going to upgrade from Server 2003 we'll be facing some pretty substantial hardware costs as 2008 R2 is 64 bit only. I'm sure there''ll be a few issues on the back of that one, given the number of legacy apps we're running. Virtualization will be something we'll make more of, although I suspect we'll be looking closely at other offerings beside VMWare.

The other thing that I feel I have a duty to look at is exactly what parts of our server estate could be candidates for moving into the Cloud. Now, my knowledge of the possibilites that Azure, Google and whatever it is that Amazon eventually comes up with is tiny. Nothing at all, in fact, beyond knowing that they're going to be there. But it seems a funny time, to be sure, to be leading the charge in a direction which could very well put me out of a job.

Expanding a Point

I thought I'd expand on one of yesterday's postings; that which alluded to Citrix's killer app status slipping as the competition have caught up.

I've always been a fan of the possibilities of thin-client computing. The picture that Citrix paint - and deliver, to be fair, in many places - of an IT infrastructure with a smaller TCO, a smaller carbon footprint and centralized administration: who isn't waiting to be converted?

So when I came here and found a legacy Citrix environment - Metaframe XP FR3, two years out of support but still happily chugging along, supporting a couple of hundred users quite happily - one of the first things I looked at was updating this and asking the questions: What else can I do with this? Can we expand our thin-client useage, save money on our clients and our power bill, reduce our carbon footprint and be responsible global citizens? And unfortunately, to all of those questions, the answers were not enough and no.

Citrix do quite a good job of pointing out the cost / benefits of a thin-client network. But who, I ask, can afford to chuck their existing fat clients in the bin, and start again? Who can afford to run two networks side-by-side - because that's what we found we would almost need to do. Yes, we could look to savings three years down the track, when our current desktop refresh cycle reached it's end. But for a public sector organisation, especially one in up to its neck in the financial mire - three years is forever.

The real killers though, are Microsoft and Procurve. Microsoft because their new Windows Server 2008 does everything XP FR3 did (albeit without the crap that no-one used, like application billing). Procurve have finally been unleashed by HP and allowed to compete with Cisco, who have started making grumbling noises sounding like Cisco are going to kcick off their own range of Blade Servers, but that's bye-the-bye. Net result: when our network infrastructure reached the end of its lease, we were able to deliver gigabit to the desktop at two-thirds the cost of the Cisco offering - which offered less.

So the extra bandwidth that Terminal Services - or whatever Microsoft are calling it now - is going to consume doesn't matter any more. Citrix is looking pretty dead.

The final nail in the coffin is the ability of the machines now reaching the end of their lives, ones which we traditionally stuck a Citrix client on and punted to the backroom staff, so they could still have a reasonable user experience on old hardware. With 2ghz P4's now coming into retirement - where's the need?

Linux speak...

Linux, the Operating System of choice if you're the kind of person who'd get a kick out of building your own television set. It seems that every year there'll always be someone trotting out the "This is the year when Linux takes it to Windows" line. It seems that this year, or this week at least, it's the turns of the good folk over at ZDnet.com

First up is their education guy, and I've got to admit he's the one that had my jaw on the floor. So, it's "far easier to justify installations in an educational setting than it was even a year ago", is it? Microsoft do a Campus program for educational institutions. We have site licenses for everything, often free upgrade rights. By any commercial standards, our Microsoft costs here are absolutely tiny. Try less than a hundred bucks a year for Systems Centre Configuration Manager. A hundred New Zealand bucks.

Now look at what it is that we use our computers to teach, what it is we want our students going out into the world able to use. Microsoft Office. Tick. On Linux? Fail. Adobe Creative Suite? Tick. On Linux? Fail. Autodesk. The list goes on. Fail all the way down.

And don't make me laugh by telling me it's free. Most of the costs over an operating system's life are going to come in supporting it. If it's easy to justify sending your entire IT staff away on a two-month training course while they get as competent on Linux as they are with Microsoft, I apologise.

And, of course, there's a guy with a beard, telling us Linux will survive. Of course it will. Netbooks are a comin'. But here? On the desktop? No case to answer.

Where next for Apple?

Steve Jobs is taking time out, as you probably know. I wonder where that leaves Apple? Even more so than Microsoft when Bill Gates was in charge, Apple is Steve Jobs. Apple's shortcomings and strengths are also, therefore, tied up in him. So what might be on the cards for Apple if the new hand on the tiller keeps their own lookout and doesn't simply use Steve's binoculars?

I said yesterday that Apple's server offerings are awful, and I meant it. Microsoft's building all sorts of fun stuff into the Windows Server family these days - virtualization, remote application delivery with Terminal Server 2008, CRM; loads of good stuff. Plus of course, all the tried and tested backoffice stuff that we've been using for years.

Someone else is getting into virtualization now - Citrix are finally looking serious about gettnig into the game, and about time too, given that Terminal Server 2008 does everything that the Presentation Server releases of only a couple of years ago did. Whether it does enough to distinguish itslef from either the ubiquitous VMWare or Microsoft's own offerings is another matter. Citrix is looking like a company in need of a space.

Have Apple got that? They've got the iPhone, and the iPod, and the Mac, and Citrix is all about accessing the same applications across different platforms. If the downturn goes on and domestic customers find themselves unable to justify that new Mac, Apple's going to need business customers. For that, it needs something to put on its servers...