• European Commission accepts Microsoft commitments to give users browser choice
• RemoteApp for Hyper-V Allows users to access a specific hosted application remotely, as opposed to the entire desktop.
• Getting to Know Hyper-V: A Walkthrough from Initial Setup to Common Scenarios New Microsoft paper (32 pages)
• New Microsoft press book: Windows PowerShell 2.0 Best Practices
• Windows 7 leaving Redmond’s help desk less busy

One of the interesting features of the new Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 is the possibility of performing an offline domain join of computers with the command line tool djoin.exe. Here, offline means that there is no network connection to the Active Directory at the time when the client joins the domain. I tried the tool and was a little disappointed because its handling in large environments seems to be a bit cumbersome to me. In this post, I will give you a short introduction into djoin’s usage and in my next post, I will discuss possible usage scenarios.

Requirements

Djoin comes with every Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 installation. You don’t have to raise the functional level of the Active Directory domain to Windows Server R2, and you don’t need an R2 domain controller since djoin also works with earlier domain controller versions. Because Djoin requires administrator privileges, you have to use the tool on an elevated command prompt. Of course, you also need an account that has sufficient rights to create domain computer accounts.

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• Gartner: 75 Percent of Corporate PCs Will Run 64-Bit Windows by 2014
• Hyper-V Protection with DPM 2010 Beta – How to automatically protect new Virtual Machines
• 31% of Windows 7 issues are related to OS installation Interesting statistics about Windows 7 problems
• Adobe warns of Reader, Acrobat attack in the wild
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Opens Up It is a VPN solution that allows you to connect your IT to Amazon’s cloud
• Hyper-V R2 sizing tool now available from HP

Recently I wanted to check the performance of some of our servers. I was especially interested in the speed of the built-in hard disks versus the speed of our SAN. A quick Google search revealed a few free benchmarking tools. The data I was looking for is not supposed to hold any scientific standards, so I didn’t care much about which one I should choose and I just downloaded the first one.

After the download had finished I unzipped the archive, started the program, and immediately got an error (CrystalDiskMark). I didn’t want to waste time figuring out what the problem was, so I just downloaded another tool from the Google result list from my previous search. This application (hdtune) did execute without any problems but after all tests were run an average transfer speed of 1419 Mb/sec was displayed. Quite impressive for a SAN with SATA drives.

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• System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 R2 Documentation
• Amazon Auctions Off Cloud Capacity
• Microsoft Creates Server and Cloud Division

NetSpeedMonitor is a very simple freeware tool that allows you to monitor the network speed and the amount of data transferred. The utility comes with a systray icon that displays the current up and downstream speed. If you click on the icon, NetSpeedMonitor will show you the amount of data that has been transferred in this session, on that day, and in this month. The tool also supports monthly and daily data transfer logging. If you have servers running in the cloud, this could be useful, if you have doubts that your provider logs the transferred data correctly.

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• Save 40% on all Microsoft Press books and 50% on e-books
• How Organizations Get Hacked – Detailed report about top 15 threats

Who says that WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS doesn’t run on Windows 7 x64? I was tempted to write this blog post with WordPefect, because I once was a great fan of this text processing software. Well, of course it doesn’t run natively on a 64-bit Windows. I used the free DOS emulator DOSBox. I suppose, its main purpose is to run old games on modern operating systems. However, I am pretty sure that there are quite a few legacy DOS programs in productive environments out there. Since Windows XP, the built-in DOS emulator has only limited capabilities. And on 64-bit Windows, you can’t even run 16-bit Windows apps, let alone DOS programs.

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• Free Microsoft Press e-book: “First Look: Microsoft Office 2010”
• Windows team blog about recent BitLocker attacks: Also read this: and this:
• Seven fail Virus Bulletin’s first Windows 7 tests
• Amazon EC2 Running Microsoft Windows Server 2008
• Microsoft Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool v2.1
• Symantec Jumps Into Amazon’s Cloud

At Tech.Ed Australia 2009 I caught up with Rocky Heckman, Senior Security Architect at Microsoft Australia with the ACE (Assessment, Consulting & Engineering) Team and the Security track owner for Tech.Ed 2009 in Australia and New Zealand. We had a long chat about the latest security features in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 which were of greatest interest to business customers and IT pros, and what are the latest trends in the security industry.

Check out the ACE Team’s website here, and Rocky’s blog here.

Disclaimer: I attended Tech.Ed Australia 2009 as a guest of Microsoft.

JB: As a security guy, your perspective on newly-released products is always going to different from the typical product spiel. What are the things about Windows 7 and particularly Server 2008 R2 that interest you and you are pleased with from a security perspective?

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ServiWin is a freeware tool that allows you to manage Windows services and drivers. The utility has a few useful features that the corresponding Windows tools lack. Since ServiWin is a portable application, you can easily launch it from your flash drive when you are working on a user’s computer.

The tool has two different displays, one for the drivers and one for the services. The operations you can perform are similar to those for Windows tools. For example, you can start or stop services or change their start type. ServiWin also supports starting and stopping of drivers, but this won’t work with most system drivers. The main benefit of ServiWin is that you can gather information about services and drivers more easily than with the Windows tools. This is the list of additional ServiWin features:

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Submitted by Neill Turner – Blog: EC2Dream

• EC2Dream is the first Open Source Graphical System Administration tool for Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus.
• It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.
• Supports Multiple environments based on access key, region and keypair.
• A tree view of your servers.
• One click SSH, SCP and Remote Desktop access.
• One click Launch and terminate Servers
• One click bundling process
• Save Launch profile
• Ability to build and run remote scripts.
• Many more features

EC2Dream

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You’ve probably noticed the coverage of Internet Explorer’s inexorable slide at several new sites. In Germany (the country that issued my passport), Firefox overtook IE for the first time. I find this news interesting because it is not that easy to explain why Microsoft can’t stop users from moving to Firefox.

However, the fact that Germany is leading in this development is no surprise for me. It is often claimed that security-aware Germans avoid Microsoft’s allegedly unsecure browser. But that’s only half of the truth considering that Firefox has now become the most vulnerable browser. Of course, most people don’t know this yet, and it will certainly take a while until Firefox’s reputation as a secure browser will be destroyed for good.

Firefox as a political statement

But this won’t really help IE in Germany and in other European countries because the main reason for IE’s bad reputation on the old continent is mostly of a political nature. The European Commission pushes this anti-IE and anti-Microsoft stance because they know that many Europeans will applaud simply out of enjoyment if one of the big animals is cut down to size. And I can tell you that the EC really needs this applause because they are bashed heavily for the bureaucracy they have created in EU countries in the last decade.

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• Attack on Windows BitLocker It appears BitLocker is not that much better than TrueCrypt as I’ve claimed before.
• Microsoft begins presales of Office 2010 (20% discount)
• Microsoft denies blame for ‘black screens of death
• Office 2010 Tool: Office Environment Assessment Tool
• Office 2010 Tool: Compatibility Inspector
• Mark Russinovich on MinWin, the new core of Windows Best article about MinWin I’ve read so far.
• Microsoft: No Exchange 2007 on Windows Server 2008 R2 until SP3
• Get Free Windows Server 2008 R2 Training
• Why Hyper-V cannot boot off of SCSI disks (and why you should not care)
• Microsoft wants your Windows 7 tips & tricks
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Feature Components poster
• Windows Server 2008 R2 BranchCache Design Guide (29 pages)
• Microsoft Changes Browser Ballot Screen As EU Deal Nears
• Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 DirectAccess IT Infrastructure Compatibility
• Microsoft releases next two pieces of Forefront security suite (TMG 2010, UAG 2010)
• Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Client and Windows XP SP2 Support Ends July 2010
• Cardiff University researchers found that pop-ups impact efficiency How much economic damage was caused by UAC already?

If you have to attach /mount VHDs (virtual hard disks) frequently and are looking for a tool to make this task more convenient, give VHD Attach a try. This freeware tool allows you to attach VHDs from the context menu in Windows Explorer (Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 only) without having to use the Windows Disk Management applet.

VHD Attach can also display information about a VHD without mounting it. For example, you can access information such as virtual and physical size or vendor ID (see screenshot).

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