Many bloggers invest a lot of time in their weblogs. Usually they don’t care much about backup because they think that their hosting company is responsible for this. This is a bit careless since there are many cases where this doesn’t help at all. Let’s say that you upgraded your weblog software or you installed a malfunctioning plug-in and then finding out, nothing works anymore afterwards. It could also happen that you want to go back to an earlier version of your configuration. Or maybe some bad guy got access to your site and deleted everything. This article describes how to backup your weblog or your website automatically without any kind of user intervention.

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Two years ago I blogged about a similar subject in my German blog. I discussed the advantages of Internet Explorer (IE) over Mozilla and other web browsers in a corporate environment. I concluded that IE is by far the better choice. Recently we deployed about 250 new computers and so I considered this question again. Now, Firefox is the main rival of IE. The decision was not so easy this time, but IE won again in the end.

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Nmap probably is the best network port scanner and a must have tool for any system administrator. nmap 4.0 has some new interesting features; however insecure.org still doesn’t offer a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for Windows. They have one for Linux which is a bit strange as many Linux sysops prefer the command line anyway. So I searched for a Windows GUI that uses the original nmap scanner. I found three tools: NMapWin, NmapGui and nmapGUI. One not only makes nmap easier to use, but an even more powerful tool: NmapGui.

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I am planning to write an article about ISA Server 2006 for a computer magazine The testing will be documented in this blog. I had written an article about the first version, ISA Server 2000, and also about ISA Server 2004. ISA Server 2000 didn’t convince me, especially the user interface. ISA Server 2004 certainly was a major improvement. We are using it now as a firewall and will soon install two ISA Servers as web proxies.

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According to Microsoft officials Windows Vista will have 2750 new features. There was a detailed discussion about the major features like WinFS and NGSCB which were planned for Windows Vista, but had to be cancelled due to time constraint. I always said that these major features, which seem to be so important because every journal talks about them, are not the part of an operating system that’s decisive for its success.

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I just read an interesting article in the German magazine Computerwoche about Open Source alternatives to Microsoft Exchange. These solutions are an interesting option especially for smaller companies which are still using Exchange 5.5.

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When Microsoft released the Intelligent Message Filter (IMF) for Exchange 2003 I wrote an article for a German magazine about it. IMF is quite impressive compared to other spam filters, that we began using it right away. We have relatively seldom false positives, but recently the IMF identified our own newsletter as spam. So I wanted to add the sender of the newsletter to the Safe Senders list of Outlook 2003 on all our machines using Group Policies.

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How do you secure your passwords? As a sys admin you probably have countless accounts and I hope you don’t use the same password for all of them. I use by far too many passwords to remember them all. Writing them down is the only solution.

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If you are old enough, you might remember the time when it was quite usual to work on the command line even on a Microsoft system. I am talking about the era of the good old MS DOS. My favourite file manager was the Norton Commander. When I switched to Windows this was the only tool I really missed. Nowadays, it is still usual to work on the command line on Linux boxes, especially when you log on over a WAN. Now, GNU Midnight Commander is one of my favourite tools under Linux. It looks exactly like the good old Norton Commander and has the same functionality plus some Linux specific features like browsing RPM files.
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Recently I was looking for a tool that tells me when a certain event was logged in the Windows eventlog on our servers. Those programs are usually called eventlog monitoring tools. So I searched at download.com, tried a couple of solutions and finally chose EventMeister.

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