Another year of blogging on 4sysops passed by. It was a good year. The number of page views doubled and so did the number of subscribers. So I say thank you to my loyal readers, especially to those who didn’t agree with me often. If you are a regular reader of my blog, you might be interested to know which articles have been read most often.

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Joe Wilcox from Microsoft Watch wrote a relatively long article trying to explain the negative public opinion on Vista. Basically, he thinks it has something to do with marketing failures. However, I think he didn’t mention the real reason why Vista bashing has become so popular. Joe Wilcox’s theory is that Microsoft made the mistake of giving free Vista notebooks to some influential bloggers. Some believed that Microsoft tried to bribe those bloggers and that’s where the ball had started rolling.

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Wireshark is the world’s foremost network protocol analyzer, and is the de facto (and often de jure) standard across many industries and educational institutions.

This is the modest description of its publisher. Wireshark, formerly called Ethereal, indeed has a long tradition and is certainly the most famous network packet sniffer. Administrators usually need such a tool for network troubleshooting. Wireshark supports hundreds of network protocols. Using its powerful filters, you can watch in detail how two applications communicate. The recently released new version 0.99.7 closes some severe security holes.

WireShark

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I compiled a short list of other free protocol analyzers some time ago. A newcomer in the league of sophisticated network sniffers is Microsoft’s Network Monitor.

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Larry Dignan from ZDNet compared the vulnerabilities of Mac OS X with Windows XP and Windows Vista in 2007. The results are devastating for Apple. According to Dignan, Mac OS X had five times more vulnerabilities than Windows (XP+Vista). It is even more surprising that OS X had 234 highly critical vulnerabilities whereas Windows had only 23. So, does this mean that Windows is five times as secure as Mac OS X? I’d say no.

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Windows Weekly has a nice webcast about Windows Server 2008. Paul Thurrott interviews Ward Ralston, group technical product manager for Windows Server 2008. The whole interview is about 50 minutes and gives a good overview for those who didn’t have time yet to deal with Microsoft’s new server OS. You can listen to it while playing with your Xmas presents. Merry Christmas to all Christians and a Merry Tuesday to the rest of the world!

AutoRuns is the most comprehensive auto startup monitor. There are many locations where applications can configure Windows to start automatically whenever the computer boots-up. The new version 9.0 shows some new locations for Vista computers such as Scheduled Tasks or the Sidebar gadgets. If I suspect that a computer has been infected with malware, AutoRuns is the first tool I start. However, in most cases I use it to get rid of auto start components of newly installed programs. Often they only slow down the computer without being really useful. The only disadvantage of AutoRuns is that its complexity. It displays so many different entries in numerous different locations that you easily lose track of things.

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Vnunet.com has an interesting article about the latest test results of Virus Bulletin. Major vendors such as Sophos, Trend Micro and Kapersky failed to protect against some of the viruses in their collection. I found it quite interesting that Microsoft, a newcomer in this field, passed their test.

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Nmap is probably the most powerful network security scanner. You can use this nifty Open Source tool for security auditing, network inventory, and network monitoring. Nmap is a command line tool, but Zenmap allows you to use it with a graphical user interface. The recently released version 4.5 has more detection signatures and many more new features. Windows admins should read this first and then download the binaries here.

Nmap + Zenmap

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SP3 RC for Windows XP is now publicly available at Microsoft Download. I linked to another build (3244) at BetaNews a couple of days ago. This new build is the official Release Candidate. If you plan to run tests, then I suggest using this one. The download was pretty fast. I downloaded the 336 MB file in 2:36 minutes. I don’t remember how long it took me to get SP1 for Vista, but it was much longer. It is obvious that the interest in this XP service pack is much smaller. Aaron Tiensivu reported that he has been working with SP3 already for some months without problems. According to Jonathan Schlaffer Vista SP1 is a bit more problematic.

The German print magazine C’t (26/2007, p.44) has some interesting information regarding Vista adoption in corporate environments. They cited market researchers from Forrester Research and King Research.

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