Some days ago I reviewed Smart UAC, a replacement for Vista’s UAC (User Account Control). Symantec is working on a similar tool, Norton Labs UAC (NUAC). The tool is currently in beta and I am not sure if this will be its final name. As with Smart UAC, the main feature of NUAC is its ability to suppress future prompts from the same action.

NUAC’s setup asks you if you want to submit UAC prompts. This means that NUAC will send metadata about your actions to Symantec. This metadata contains information such as the filenames and the hashes of the executables and the DLLs involved in the action. Symantec intends to build a white and a black list for UAC prompts. I think this is an interesting idea. This technique works very well for SPAM and I believe it could improve security significantly on Windows PCs. If people know that a UAC alert has never shown up somewhere else, they will be extra careful. Moreover, UAC will be less likely to get on our nerves. Note that the current beta doesn’t use these lists yet.

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Smart UAC is a free tool that replaces Vista’s UAC (User Account Control). It allows you to mark certain programs as safe, so you won’t be bothered with UAC prompts anymore in the future. You can also add applications to a deny list which will prevent them from being executed. Furthermore, Smart UAC has a built-in malware scanner.

One of the features that’s missing with Vista’s UAC is the ability to disable UAC prompts for particular applications. Sometimes you have to configure a Vista feature that requires admin privileges several times because you want to try out something. That’s when UAC can really get on your nerves. Even more annoying are auto-starting apps that initiate a UAC prompt whenever you boot up. Why should I need to confirm that a program is trustworthy more than once?

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CoreConfigurator was the first GUI-based management tool for Windows Server 2008 Server Core. It was still a free tool when I first blogged about it. Later, the publisher, SmartX, removed the tool. Now a new version is available that is only free for non-commercial use. I had a quick look at it today.

Installation of the tool is easy. Just copy coreconfigurator.msi to a local drive and launch it from the command line. The setup will copy CoreConfigurator by default to C:\Program Files\SmartX\Smart-X CoreConfigurator . To start the tool you have to navigate to this folder and launch “CoreConfigurator.”

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• GFI WebMonitor Voted ISAserver.org Readers’ Choice Award Winner – Content Security
• MaxPowerSoft announces Active Directory Reports 4.2.4.1
• EventSentry v2.90: Compliance Tracking for SOX, PCI, GLBA, HIPAA, FISMA, COBIT – Discusses the new features of EventSentry v2.90
• Veeam Monitor 3.0, a free VMware monitoring solution.
• Windows PowerShell V2 Community Technology Preview 3 (CTP3) – new release
• Windows crushing Linux in netbook market: Acer – I am waiting for Windows 7 until I buy a netbook.
• Mac sales slow, Windows PC sales grow, says NPD – Is the Mac hype already over?
• Announcing December Cumulative Update for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
• Microsoft launches new forum: Microsoft Answers: http://answers.microsoft.com/ At the moment it is only about Vista.

As an IT pro, you probably know that deleting data from a hard drive doesn’t ensure that it can’t be recovered with an undelete utility even though you emptied the Windows Recycle Bin. Even if you format a hard disk data it can be recovered. Thus if you take old PCs out of service, you have to wipe all data from the hard disk with an erase tool such as Active@ Kill Disk to ensure that nobody is able to access sensitive data. In particular, PCs that have been used by admins can contain stored passwords or hash codes of passwords which might be in danger once a bad guy gets physical access to the hard drive.

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There are many great monitoring solutions that inform you whenever a server goes down. My favorite free monitoring tool is The Dude. The problem with these tools is that you have to run them on one of your corporate servers. Therefore, you won’t realize whether your website is unavailable on the Internet because of a faulty firewall configuration or external networking problems.

To make sure that your website is available not only on the intranet but also on the Internet, your monitoring solution has to be outside your organization’s network. This is where web monitoring services come in. They are not expensive, and some of them even have free plans. In this post I compare three free website monitoring services: SiteUptime, HostTracker, and BasicState.

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Windows Mobile 6.1 was released this year when Microsoft introduced Mobile Device Manager 2008 (MDM 2008). You might wonder why they didn’t just add more functionality to Configuration Manager. I think the reason is that mobile devices and PCs require different management features. Perhaps more functionality would have bloated Configuration Manager.

Microsoft just released MDM 2008 SP1. The main new features are:

• Multiple Instances: More than one instance of Mobile Device Manager
• PIN Reset
• Enrollment Auto Discovery: Matches the user with the correct MDM instance
• Scalability: MDM 2008 SP1 supports up to 40,000 users
• Windows Server 2008 support

You can download the evaluation edition here. There are also some downloads related to MDM SP1, for example, the Resource Kit tools. Marco Nielsen has all the links.

Microsoft acquired Whale Communications in 2006. Its SLL-based VPN appliance became Intelligent Application Gateway (IAG) 2007. Wikipedia gives a good overview of this product. Basically, it is a Web application firewall and endpoint security management solution offering more sophisticated features than the ISA Server. According to Microsoft, the new features of IAG 2007 SP2 are simplified deployment, interoperability for environments not running Windows, enhanced application support, improved user experience, and improved performance. You can download IAG 2007 SP2 or try it in a virtual machine.

SP1 for DPM 2007 has some interesting features. Most important is probably Hyper-V support. It is now available for download:

DPM 2007 SP1 (32bit)

DPM 2007 SP1 (64bit)

And here some more useful links:

What’s New in DPM 2007 Service Pack 1

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• Windows 7 6956 Preview – Nice video but a bit blurred.
• Firefox is most vulnerable Windows software in 2008 and most popular too.
• Microsoft sees ‘huge increase’ in IE attacks – Well, Firefox is not really better.
• Microsoft sends out Windows 7 Beta 1 invites – I am also a Windows 7 beta tester. I will have a look at it soon.
• Paul Thurrott thinks that Microsoft will release Windows Beta 1 today.
• KezNews.com has other information. They believe that Windows 7 Beta 1 will be available on Jan 5.
• Microsoft Windows 7 blog: Continuing our discussion on performance
• Google releases browser security handbook – quite comprehensive
• Working with Active Directory Snapshots in Windows Server 2008 – Comprehensive article by Daniel Petri.

Superscan is one of the oldest utilities in my toolbox. I still use it every now and then, even though nmap with Zenmap is a much more powerful network scanner. The main advantage of SuperScan is that it is very easy to set up and use. Whenever I am working on another desktop other than my own, and I need a tcp/udp scanner, I always download SuperScan.

If you want to try SuperScan, I recommend changing two of its default settings after you launch it: Disable “Host discovery” and set the “Scan type” to “connect”.

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^I have stumbled across quite a few articles discussing the security of cloud computing lately. Opponents of cloud computing usually put forward that many organizations won’t outsource their IT infrastructure to the cloud because of security concerns. Cloud supporters often downplay these concerns and some even believe that cloud computing is more secure than on-premise computing. I think that both sides have good arguments. In this post, I have summarized all of the arguments that I am aware of.

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Brian Madden wrote an interesting article about offline VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). However, I strongly disagree with the main point of his article; i.e., that we need a bare-metal client hypervisor for desktop management.

One of the major disadvantages of desktop virtualization is that that the end user’s device requires a permanent connection to the backend where the virtual desktop is running. Furthermore, display protocols such as RDP and ICA still have problems with many applications. Brian acknowledges these problems and speculates that bare-metal client hypervisors might solve these problems in the future.

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In my last article about Amazon EC2 I outlined how a Windows server is installed in the cloud. The result of my efforts was quite unspectacular. It was a Windows Server 2003 machine with a Dual-Core AMD 2.60 GHz CPU, 1.6GB RAM and about 150GB of available disk space. I downloaded software through Internet Explorer and started it just like on an ordinary server. I also tried to install IIS, but my server wasn’t able to find a Windows CD in the cloud. I guess one needs another image for this. Apart from that it was just a common Windows machine, i.e., you won’t have a special cloud feeling when you work on it.

When people think about cloud computing, they imagine large data centers with big number crunchers having sheer unlimited computational power. The computation is mysteriously distributed over the cloud. However, in practice you just end up with a virtual server that could also run on an ordinary 500-dollar notebook. Of course, Amazon has bigger servers to offer. My point is just that the term “cloud” gives the whole thing a mysterious and gigantic touch. But the reality is that this you just run a virtual server on single host with a Xen-based hypervisor.

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• Windows 7 Performance seems to be much better than Vista’s
• Windows 7 Feature Focus Aero Peek – Interesting new feature
• Microsoft Service Manager Beta 1 Now Available for Download – Microsoft’s new help desk tool
• BETA: Identity Lifecycle Manager “2″ Release Candidate
• How to use Eventtriggers.exe to send e-mail based on Event IDs – I must admit I didn’t know about this Windows tool.
• Is network acceleration useful for VDI? Interesting article about WAN acceleration for RDP.
• HP reorganizes its VDI offering, enhances RDP through Provision Networks technology – “The product can score up to 8x compression for RDP sessions”; hard to believe.
• Amazon EC2 Now Available In Europe – C2 in Europe is more expensive than in the US. Strange! Usually server hosting is much cheaper in Europe.
• Interesting Cloud OS: Good OS – It seems to me that there is a new cloud OS almost every week.
• Wireshark 1.0.5 Released – Security-related and other bug fixes