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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.
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.
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.
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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.
(13 votes, average: 4.77 out of 5)
Loading ...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.
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.
(8 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5) Loading ...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.
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.
(7 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5) Loading ...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.
mst IsUsedBy is a simple, but very useful free tool. It allows you determine what process opened a particular file. You only have to drag the file to the IsUsedBy window. This can be useful if Windows doesn’t allow you to move or delete a file.
(3 votes, average: 2.67 out of 5) Loading ...I am currently evaluating Virtual Server plus Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) because I am thinking of replacing our VMware Server installations with Microsoft’s virtualization solution. Since I am still undecided, I was curious to test the beta of VMware Server 2. I was hoping that they added the feature I was waiting for (VSS support). Unfortunately, my test results didn’t end as I expected. Even though VMM didn’t really convince me to move to Virtual Server, my test of VMware Server 2 did.
Microsoft finally offers SP1 RC for Vista as a public download. You can download it as standalone package or via Windows Update. It seems as if Microsoft just published that little trick that could be found on some blogs for some days now. Supposedly, this was just the way, the more privileged beta testers used to get this download. It changes some registry keys which lets Windows Update recognize if your computer is a valid target for this service pack.
You can now download an installation package of Service Pack 3 RC1 for Windows XP. It is a bit strange that it is only available thru download sites. Microsoft also released a white paper discussing the new features of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. If you compare this document with the information that Microsoft just released about Service Pack 1 for Vista, then it becomes more than obvious that Windows XP is a dying operating system from Microsoft’s perspective.
Office 2007 SP1 is now available for download. Microsoft says that this service pack improves stability, performance, and security. You could also say that it is just a collection of patches.
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