1. EDITORS CORNER 
2. TECH BRIEFING
* HOW (MUCH) DOES FRAGMENTATION IMPACT PERFORMANCE?
3. NT RELATED NEWS
* COMPAQ DROPS ALPHA NT DEVELOPMENT
* MS ADMITS A MAJOR SECURITY FLAW IN SP4 AND 5
* MICROSOFT SECURITY ADVISOR WEBSITE HAS NEW WHITEPAPER
4. NT THIRD PARTY NEWS
* BRAND NEW PRODUCT: SUNBELT DOMAIN REPORTER
* FEATURE SHOOTOUT BETWEEN DISKEEPER AND SPEED DISK
5. HINTS AND TIPS
6. THE NT STOCK WATCH
7. BOOK OF THE MONTH - Integrating NetWare 5 and NT
8. HOW TO USE THE MAILING LIST
Instructions on how to subscribe, sign off or change your address.

***************************SPONSOR*********************************

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****************WHAT IS NTOOLS E-NEWS?******************************
Sunbelt Windows NTools E-News is the World's first and largest 
E-Newsletter designed for NT System Managers that have the job to 
get and keep NT up & running in a production environment. Sunbelt 
launched this electronic newsletter early 1996. Every two weeks we
keep the Windows NT community informed and aware of new developments
of NT and 3-rd party NT System Management Tools. You get hints and
tips that will enable you to better utilize and understand Windows 
NT/2000 and help you to pass your certification exams.

Via (separate) NTools E-NewsFlashes we will send you important 
breaking news like new service packs, killer viruses, etc) Sunbelt 
Software is the first and largest distributor worldwide of Third 
Party System Management Tools for Windows NT.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

1. "EDITORS CORNER" 

Hi NT-ers,

If this is the first issue you received, welcome! Treat it as a
sample. You are in the good company of now 400,000 colleagues that
trust us to get all the relevant NT-news every two weeks. You can
unsub at any time but I suggest you wait until you have received
a few issues, you'll like what you see :-)

In this issue we are looking at two brand new versions of the main
competitors in the defragmentation arena: Diskeeper V5.0 and Norton
Speed Disk V5.0. We have a compared the features of both these new 
releases and have them in a grid on our website for you. Very
interesting, there are some major technical breakthroughs on both
sides.

And, we are introducing an exciting new product for you larger sites:
Sunbelt Domain Reporter. It's something you have been asking for and
we're very happy to be finally able to get you a 'top of the line'
tool. Keep on reading!

Warm regards,

Stu Sjouwerman

PS: All the back issues of NTools E-News are available with just 
your email address as the key to get in, searchable by keyword at:
http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/scripts/lyris.pl?enter=nt-list&text_mode=0
BOOK MARK THIS URL - YOU MAY NEED IT SOME TIME.

********************************************************************

2. "TECH BRIEFING"

* HOW (MUCH) DOES FRAGMENTATION IMPACT PERFORMANCE?

FRAGMENTATION DEFINITION: Every file is represented by clusters 
on an NT disk. As files are modified they can become larger and 
outgrow the original number of clusters allocated to that file 
on the hard drive. The NT File System (NTFS) must then find 
somewhere else to save the overflow parts. 
Over time, fragments of a file may be scattered in many places on 
the disk. Fragmentation of files also causes the free space on an 
NT disk to become fragmented, and the Master File Table and NTFS
Directories do not escape this problem either.

Everyone agrees that NT disks need to be defragged on a regular
basis to keep performance at peak levels. There is also another
attempt to further increase performance but this is more contro-
versial. Optimizing disks by better file placement. This has been 
discussed by experts for many years and whole wars have been 
fought over it. Executive Software's Diskeeper does not do any
optimization as they say it makes no sense what so ever. But 
Symantec that produces the Norton Speed Disk defragger claims 
it _does_ speed things up. What is optimization?

OPTIMIZATION DEFINITION: Disk optimization can include the process 
of defragmentation; however, it goes further. In addition to the 
rearranging of file clusters into contiguous sectors, optimization 
further claims to minimizes head movement by intelligently arranging 
data on the disk surface based on information type and frequency 
of access or use. 

Symantec's position about optimization is as follows: 'The process 
of disk optimization places the most frequently accessed files 
on the outermost tracks of the disk, closest to the rest position 
of the head. In this way, the head can quickly move to those files 
from its rest position. For example, NT stores info about every 
file on the drive in the MFT (Master File Table). When a user 
requests a file, NT reads the MFT first, and then reads the file. 
As a result, the MFT is one of the most frequently accessed files 
on the disk. To achieve the best performance, the MFT should be 
stored on track 0, the outermost tack. This ensures that NT can 
read the MFT immediately, with minimum head movement'. 

Files are stored on disk in segments called clusters. As people 
work with files, adding and deleting information, these clusters 
quickly become scattered across the drive. Fragmentation means 
that opening and saving files is slower because the disk read/
write head must move back and forth across the disk surface, 
gathering all the clusters that make up a file and pulling them 
together for the user. The larger the file and the more scattered 
the clusters, the longer this process takes. 

Defragmentation tools rearrange a drive?s clusters on a hard disk 
so that the clusters that comprise each file are stored contiguously. 
As a result, reading and writing files involves less head movement, 
so it is faster. It is clear that this is the case. Recent tests
at NSTL showed this conclusively:

(NSTL is the leading independent hardware and software testing 
organization in the microcomputer industry. They provide high 
quality services and test tools to the PC community. NSTL has 
extensive experience developing and conducting objective tests to 
assess new and existing products. Check out the full report at:
http://www.nstl.com/html/nstl_lab_reports.html

Windows NT 4.0 Defragmentation Performance Results Summary:

NSTL's results show that a system that was defragmented would 
perform benchmarks quicker than a system that was fragmented.
- The results showed that the workstation in Configuration #1, 
running Excel and Outlook, showed an increase in performance 
of 80.6% after defragmentation.
- The server in Configuration #1, running Exchange and SQL Server 
7.0, showed an increase in performance of 56.1% after a defrag.
- The workstation in Configuration #2, running Excel and Outlook, 
showed an increase in performance of 74.4% after defragmentation.
- The server in Configuration #2, running Exchange and SQL Server 
7.0, showed an increase in performance of 19.6% after defragging.

So in short, depending on the configuration you are looking at a
20% to 80% improvement in performance after defragmentation of
your disks. That is not to be sneezed at. Now, which tool to use?
Read the FEATURE SHOOTOUT BETWEEN DISKEEPER AND SPEED DISK below.

********************************************************************

3. "NT RELATED NEWS" 

* COMPAQ DROPS ALPHA NT DEVELOPMENT

In a stunning move, Compaq recently gave the pink slip to over 100 
developers working in the Redmond labs. These people worked on 
porting NT to the Alpha platform. This means Compaq basically 
stopped support for NT on Alpha, something that is hard to believe.

It looks like Compaq is going to focus on Linux, Tru64 Unix, and
Open VMS for the Alpha platform. This creates a problem for MS. 
What are they going to do with the hundreds of Alpha boxes they
are using to beta test 64-bit versions of Win2K?

It looks like a small team is being requested to stay on until the
completion of Service Pack 6 for Windows NT 4.0. The reason for
the pull-out is likely that there is a low percentage of NT-on-Alpha 
users. Sunbelt Software's market analysis estimates that it is no 
more than 5-7% of the total NT users, and mainly a high-end niche 
product.

It was clear that Microsoft did not expect NT on Alpha to make them
a lot of money, but that it would allow them to show off NT on a
large architecture such as Microsoft's Scalability Day. With the
release of the new 8-way Intel based servers this might not be such
a big issue anymore. We will keep you up to date on the developments.
Background and history at Win NT Magazine. Click your way to:
http://www.winntmag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=7153&Key=Alpha

-------------------------------

* MS ADMITS A MAJOR SECURITY FLAW IN SP4 AND 5

After a few weeks of looking at the problem, MS indeed admitted
there still is a hole in SP4 and also in SP5. It's 'Predictable 
IP Sequence Numbering'. What is it? Normally systems that are 
secure are configured so that only trusted hosts can send commands. 
This scheme prevents that hackers from breaking in. The way secure 
systems are set up is that they are responding to every command 
with a sequence number. These same sequence numbers must be quoted 
in the next command. 

A hacker cannot capture these responses because they're directed at 
the trusted host (and not the machine they use to hack into the system). 
This means the hacker has to guess what the next sequence number might
be. If that number is in any way predictable (as in 100, 101, 103, 103)
hackers can send in a whole string of commands to the secure server 
using a known 'IP Spoofing' hack. This kind of vulnerability was 
identified and fixed in Unix systems several years ago.

Sunil Gopal, a technical specialist at Microsoft, acknowledged the 
problem and said the flaw has been eliminated in Windows 2000 and 
"will be back-ported to NT 4.0 in a future SP release. We are trying 
to escalate this further and get it into the Hot Fix schedule," 
Gopal adds. That means it is not fixed in SP5 either.

Here is the original KB article that mentions the flaw in NT4
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q192/2/92.ASP
Comment from MS that it still is a problem, and is being fixed.
http://www.nta-monitor.com/news/NT4-SP4/MS-admit.htm

We'll let you know via a NewsFlash the moment the hotfix is available!
-------------------------------

* MICROSOFT SECURITY ADVISOR WEBSITE HAS NEW WHITEPAPER

Making sure your NT domains are secures isn't the easiest task in
the world. And NT security is kind of new to many of us. Microsoft
has a new white paper online that might help you out. It is called
Security Basics and offers a broad overview of information security 
and includes details on how to handle NT security problems. The 
white paper was written for NT Professionals that need a broad, 
conceptual overview on information security. Check over here:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/default.asp


********************************************************************

4. NT THIRD PARTY NEWS

* BRAND NEW PRODUCT: SUNBELT DOMAIN REPORTER

You're the King. But the natives are getting restless.
The last few years you asked Sunbelt the same question over 
and over again: "Don't you have a tool that will tell me 
what is on my domains? It changes so fast I have no idea 
what's out there!"

You basically needed a reporting tool that would tell you 
in detail about a whole slew of things like users, groups, 
security, policies, domain trusts, Exchange, printers, and 
_so_ much more. Something that would allow you to whip out 
in 5 minutes that report your security guys asked for. Like 
when each user logged on last, and more fun like that.

Sunbelt has been looking for over a year for a product that 
would live up to your (pretty demanding) feature set, but we 
finally found something! We are happy to release a great new 
Domain Reporter. We call this the Sunbelt Domain Reporter, 
in short SDR.

One major feature that you found necessary for audit purposes 
was to have a historic database of reports so at any moment 
you can go 'back in time' to find the actual cause for problems 
after you put out the fire. SDR actually accomplishes this 
unique feat. Most other reporting tools cannot do this and are 
limited to real-time reports only.

SDR generates a whopping 175 automated reports f a s t, using 
both historic and real-time data from multiple, enterprise-wide
NT domains AND from MS Exchange directories. To show you in 
a nutshell what SDR can do for you, check these:

* Tighten your network security on both NT and Exchange
so you can pass security audits. 
* Proactively report on all your network objects and dramatically
reduce your time spent on doing your regular full inventory
* Enable enforcement of your naming conventions and standards
so 1) administration and 2) your Win2K migration is easier
* Find out who has full Domain Admin Rights
* Create a historic database of reports (so you actually _can_ 
go 'back in time')
* Schedule your favorite reports to run during 'off peak' hours
* Have current and reliable data on all domain settings
* Track changes on all your domains
* You can scale it to _very_ large environments 
* Have all the reports your security guys are asking for,
* And next month in V2.5, Exception Condition Reporting!

The last one is a biggie. It allows you to find out easily who 
is doing something that they should not.

So the problem is clear. You have been hit by all kinds of 
people that demand reports they need to fulfill their job 
responsibilities. Many different people have varied information 
needs about the domain and network. And you were the one that 
needed to pull it all together out of the most unlikely places!

You may have been looking around for tools like this, and maybe
checked out BindView that was originally developed for Netware.
But SDR was built from the ground up for NT and goes deeper than 
anything out there because of its unique NT-specific reporting 
engine. SDR's licensing is user-based, extremely simple and a 
great value.

So with your powerful SDR you can immediately run and print 
the more than 175 preconfigured reports using the built-in 
Crystal Reports Engine. But since SDR supports both Access
and SQL, you can dump all the data in there and create your own 
reports with any report generator you might already have, or
export to for instance Excel, Text, HTML, and more.

SDR will give you an unexpected wealth of data that very soon
you will find you cannot live without. The canned reports were
created after researching the reporting needs of hundreds of
system admins like you in both small and superlarge environments.
But we can add new reports at popular demand so let us know
what you would like and you will have a strong influence.

We have three 'Product in Action' White-papers on our new SDR-
webpage that I'd like you to have a look at. They are Word-
documents and less than 10 pages each.

* Preparing for Windows 2000
* Exchange Deployment and Management
* Report Usage in the Enterprise

They all will give you a summary of the reporting functionality
of SDR in that area and the relevance of these reports to 
respectively 1) Win2K Migration, 2) Exchange Management and 3) 
Security, setting standards & enforcing conformance and general 
admin issues. 

Keep in mind, without the correct data you cannot take correct 
action. Managing an NT Domain cannot be done with guesswork or 
'gut feel'. Up to now, in many cases you were forced to do so 
due to a lack of tools. This increases the stress level of your
job significantly.

Making NT administration easier all starts with reporting! Pull 
down a 30-day eval copy of SDR from the Sunbelt website. This is 
a FULL working copy and you will be able to run ALL the reports. 
You'll be amazed at the amount of data you suddenly have access 
to. And you'll also see how fast it can change. Basically a month 
worth of reporting for FREE. 

Of course I hope you'll get hooked and then buy it . OK, 
OK, OK, I know that your next question is how much it costs. Well
I have some good news, it's a great value! It start with only 
6 bucks per user and then drops even lower with volume. If you 
compare that with for instance BindView you will understand what 
I mean when I say it is 'CHEAP'!

The installation is less than 5 minutes work. Downloading the eval
(biggish) and trying out SDR is worth it just to flush out anyone 
with Domain Admin rights! Here you go for the white papers and 
download. http://www.sunbelt-software.com/sbdomrep.htm
-------------------------------

* FEATURE SHOOTOUT BETWEEN DISKEEPER AND SPEED DISK

Defraggers have been in the market for a long time, for many
different operating systems. The ability to fragment files is
a feature of modern OS-es, not a bug. It allows the disk to be
used much more efficiently.

From the beginning it was clear that NT needed defragmentation
as well, however the developers have made an effort to keep it
as low as possible. Still, a whole bunch of things get worse
while using a disk: files, free space, the Master File Table,
the Directories and the Page File to mention a few .

Diskeeper was the first product to market, and their V1.0 began
to sell in 1995 for NT V3.51. Much has changed in the mean 
time and they are now at V5.0. Symantec's Norton Speed Disk
came a year or so later. Their market penetration is lower
than Diskeeper that has a (non-scientific) estimated 80% market 
share at the moment. Microsoft decided to include a stripped
down version of Diskeeper with Win2000. 

But the war is not won yet. Symantec came out with their new
V5.0 at pretty much the same time that Diskeeper V5 came out.
(Looks like Symantec conveniently skipped their versions 2,3
and 4 by the way, I'm sure to catch up with Diskeeper).

The rule of thumb is that you want to keep disk fragmentation
as low as 10% or better 5% for optimum performance. But when
a brand new machine with NT installed comes into your site,
the fragmentation level might already be 40% right from the
get go! And especially graphic files and multimedia files are
significantly affected if they are not contiguous. More over,
a fragmented page file may slow down the overall boot time of 
your server as well.

There are whole slews of features that are important when
you start looking at defraggers. These are things like:
- Does it require reboots?
- How much free space is needed to get the job done?
- Does it do it in one pass or several passes on the disk?
- Is it reliable?
- Are new versions needed when a service pack comes out?
- Does it defragment page files, directories, free space, MFT?
- Can it defrag open files?
- Does it support RAID, and FAT, NTFS, and mirrored drives?
- Can it perhaps even prevent fragmentation?

We have a brand new feature comparison that no one else has
published up to now. Some extremely interesting new developments
on both sides!
- Diskeeper has the new Frag Guard that prevents fragmentation
of the page file and MFT.
- But Speed Disk does it all on-line and does not need reboots.

If you are running DK4, you will certainly like DK5. Both DK5 and
Speed Disk 5 are coming out in the next few weeks. There is much 
more. Check out the full grid on our website, tons of features are
compared: http://www.sunbelt-software.com/nsdkcomp.htm

********************************************************************

5. "HINTS AND TIPS - TIME SAVERS AND OTHER GOODIES...

When you have LARGE volumes with millions of files, watch this! 
This came out August 23-rd from Microsoft:

TITLE: File Corruption on an NTFS Volume with More Than 4 Million Files
DOCUMENT: Q229607. The hotfix is downloadable here: (URL broken up)
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-public/fixes/usa/nt40/
Hotfixes-PostSP5/NTFS-fix/

If you do not install this particular hotfix, you can cause file 
corruption if you create or delete files on an NTFS volume that 
holds more than 4 million (!) files. The bug is an error in 
NTFS.SYS. One thing the KB article doesn't mention regarding this 
problem is that you can check to see if you're running into this 
problem by checking the size of the MFT by typing:
dir /a $mft
at the root of a volume.

********************************************************************

6. "THE NT STOCK WATCH" Closing Friday Aug 27, 1999
52 WK 52 WK P/E WEEK
SECURITY CLOSE HIGH LOW RATIO CHNG
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Advanced Micro Devices... 19 11/16 33 12 3/4 +7.8%
BMC Software............. 54 7/8 64 7/8 30 43 -0.1%
Citrix Systems Inc....... 56 3/8 65 1/4 23 1/8 57 +9.6%
Compaq Computer.......... 23 1/2 51 1/4 20 42 -3.5%
Computer Associates...... 51 3/4 58 26 43 +3.6%
Data General Corp........ 18 11/16 21 13/16 7 78 -0.9%
Dell Computer............ 47 1/16 55 20 3/8 75 +8.8%
Electronic Data Systems C 56 13/16 67 3/8 30 7/16 51 +0.8%
Gateway Inc.............. 96 3/16 100 3/8 36 1/8 38 +6.2%
Hewlett Packard Co....... 104 5/8 118 7/16 47 1/16 32 -0.2%
Intergraph Corp.......... 5 11/16 10 1/4 4 3/8 +10.9%
International Business Ma 124 139 3/16 55 1/2 31 +1.8%
Legato Systems Inc....... 44 7/16 44 13 3/4 +12.3%
Micron Electronics Inc... 9 5/8 24 3/4 9 24 -3.7%
Microsoft Corp........... 93 1/4 100 3/4 43 7/8 65 +11.8%
Mission Critical Software 37 3/4 44 1/2 16 +26.8%
NCR Corp................. 43 5/8 55 3/4 23 1/2 37 -1.1%
NetIQ Corporation........ 26 1/8 26 1/4 14 3/4 +7.7%
Network Associates Inc... 15 9/16 67 11/16 10 1/16 -4.5%
Novell Inc............... 23 5/16 31 3/16 9 1/2 51 -9.2%
Oracle Corp.............. 37 41 1/8 12 1/8 43 0.0%
Qualcomm Incorporated.... 183 3/4 198 5/8 18 7/8 +5.0%
Seagate Technology....... 32 7/8 44 1/4 16 1/8 7 +1.3%
Silicon Graphics......... 11 7/16 20 7/8 7 3/8 41 -5.6%
Sun Microsystems Inc..... 76 3/16 77 15/16 19 1/4 48 +2.6%
Sybase Inc............... 12 3/4 13 3/8 4 1/2 +12.7%
Symantec Corp............ 28 3/4 32 1/4 8 11/16 22 +2.6%
Unisys Corp.............. 44 5/8 46 3/16 17 5/8 32 +1.5%
Veritas Software Corp.... 59 1/8 63 7/16 11 7/8 +0.5%
Dow Jones 30 Industrials. 11,090.17 -0.0%


********************************************************************

7. "BOOK OF THE MONTH" Integrating NetWare 5 and NT

Livin' in a mixed environment? Your challenge is to make these 
systems work together seamlessly for your users. You find a 
welcome ally in Novell's Guide to Integrating NetWare 5 and NT. 
Written by a team of networking experts and authorized by Novell
the book helps administrators combine the speed, performance 
and scalability of NetWare with NT's BackOffice applications.

Novell's Guide to Integrating NetWare 5 and NT addresses the 
issues encountered with utilizing both systems. Starting with 
the basics on both operating systems, the authors tackle step-
by-step projects such as integrating NT workstations, synching 
network directories, utilizing NDS(TM) for NT, ZENworks(TM)and 
troubleshooting solutions. You'll find stuff like application 
sharing, multiple directories and single user logins and deploying 
emulator services like Microsoft's' s file & print services for 
NetWare. More about this months pick:

Novell's Guide to Integrating NetWare 5 and NT By J.D. Marymee, 
Sandy Stevens and Gary Hein ISBN: 0-7645-4580-9 Price: US$44.99

********************************************************************


8. "HOW TO USE THE MAILING LIST"
Instructions on how to subscribe, 
sign off 
or change your email address


TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE LIST (Tell your friends!) 

Click: 
http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/scripts/lyris.pl?join=nt-list
and fill out the form, simple & easy: 1 minute work.

Or by email, send a blank message to the following address:
[email protected]

_____________________________________________________

TO QUIT THE LIST

1) The Web Way:
http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/scripts/lyris.pl?
choose the NT-List, use your email address that is at 
the bottom of each newsletter and leave the list via 
the web interface.

2) The Email Way: Simply follow the personalized 
instructions at the very end of this newsletter.
_____________________________________________________

TO CHANGE YOUR ADDRESS

First unsubscribe and then resubscribe as per the
procedure above.

********************************************************************

FOR MORE INFORMATION

On the World Wide Web point your browser to:

For the newsletter and our website:
USA: http://www.sunbelt-software.com

For Tech Support on Sunbelt products mentioned:
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/scripts/rightnow.exe

Email for US sales information to:
[email protected]
Email for US Tech support to:
[email protected]
Email to the US Editor:
[email protected]

Email for European Sales to:
[email protected]
Email for European Tech support to:
[email protected]

At the time of this newsletter's release, all links were checked 
to verify their accuracy and validity. However, due to the ever-
changing pages of various sites, some links may later prove to be 
invalid. We regret any inconvenience should you be unable to open 
any of these links.
********************************************************************

Things Our Lawyers Make Us Say:

This document is provided for informational purposes only. 
The information contained in this document represents the

current view of Sunbelt Software Distribution on the issues
discussed as of the date of publication. Because Sunbelt
must respond to changes in market conditions, it should not
be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Sunbelt
and Sunbelt cannot guarantee the accuracy of any informa-
tion presented after the date of publication.

INFORMATION PROVIDED IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED "AS IS"
WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
FREEDOM FROM INFRINGEMENT.

The user assumes the entire risk as to the accuracy and the
use of this document. This document may be copied and
distributed subject to the following conditions: 1) All text
must be copied without modification and all pages must be
included; 2) All copies must contain Sunbelt's copyright
notice and any other notices provided therein; and 3) This
document may not be distributed for profit. All trademarks
acknowledged. Copyright Sunbelt Software Distribution, Inc.
1996-1999.

(email me with feedback: [email protected])