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WServerNews (formerly W2Knews)
Vol. 12, #29 - Jul 30, 2007 - Issue #635
Thin Client Writing On Wall

  1. Editor's Corner
    • Thin Client Writing On Wall
    • Yearly Yankee Hardware Reliability Survey
    • Learn about New Antispam Features in Ninja Email Security
    • Liberty Quotes Of The Week
  2. Admin Toolbox
    • Admin Tools We Think You Shouldn't Be Without
  3. Tech Briefing
    • Visit Us At The VB2007 Conference in Vienna, Austria
    • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Stuff
    • Expert Tip: Disaster Recovery Plan Testing
    • Top 7 Exchange Server 2003 Tips And Tricks
    • Performance Analysis Tools For SQL Server
    • System Center Configuration Manager 2007: A First Look
    • Resellers Exchange Server 2007 Upgrade Guide: Prep Your Customers
    • Balancing Virtual PC 2007 Resource Utilization
  4. Windows Server News
    • Microsoft Sees Stronger XP Sales In FY08 -- Yes, XP
    • Gap In PC Procedure Causes Corporate Crisis
  5. WServer Third Party News
    • New Features: Ninja Email Security for Exchange 2000-2007
    • SNSI Update: More Vulnerabilities
    • The Ex-Aelita Team Does It Again
  6. WServerNews FAVE Links
    • This Week's Links We Like. Tips, Hints And Fun Stuff.
  7. WServerNews - Product of the Week
    • The #1 Selling FISMA Book
PDF Battle Royale II: Ninja vs Symantec Brightmail & Security for Exchange

Many of you are trying to get rid of old, first- or second generation
'AV for Exchange' products, and look for alternatives. We decided to
make your life a little easier and come up with some solid product
comparisons, that really focus on the important features. You can find
the next fresh PDF in a new section called 'Product Comparisons'
on the Ninja Documents page. This one compares Ninja to Symantec's
products. Please be sure to read the "Making Sense of it All" sections
- these help compare the products even better (PDF):
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-Ninja-vs-Symantec

Editor's Corner

Thin Client Writing On Wall

HP just acquired Neoware, Inc, a maker of terminal-style computing devices which we know as thin clients. They must see a future in that direction. Another development is that virtualization is taking server rooms by storm, which allows apps to run on the servers. I think I see something coming down the pike. With me anyone?

Sounds like laptops and handhelds will increase in numbers, but we are finally getting ready to have a critical look at the desktop PC and see if we should not give it the old heave-ho, at least mostly in larger sites. Oh, we heard about this for a long time of course. Remember Larry Ellison talking about this? But now we have a new buzzword: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), which obviously means thin clients on a virtual server.

Think about the cost savings, a two-way quad core VDI server can easily handle more than 50 users, running cheap thin-clients. And then you need to ask yourself, what client OS is going to -run- on those desktops? Well there is where you need to scratch your head for a sec and do some math. The answer may surprise you.

Yearly Yankee Hardware Reliability Survey

Yankee Group and Sunbelt Software would like to invite you to participate in a 10 minute survey that quantifies the reliability of some of the top printer and network infrastructure devices and over one dozen server operating systems. The intent of this survey is to poll user experience and identify the reliability of these respective hardware devices and server OS platforms and highlight user patch management trends and the impact on productivity to the organization. This is an independent survey. There are no vendor sponsors and no vendors had input into the questions. All responses will be kept confidential. As our way of saying "Thank You" for your participation, anyone who completes the survey is eligible for a free copy of the full Yankee Group Report once it is published by sending an Email to: ldidio@yankeegroup.com. Link:
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-Hardware-Survey


Learn about New Antispam Features in Ninja Email Security

Live Product Demo and Technical Overview. Join Alex Eckelberry, President and Greg Kras, VP of Product Management for Sunbelt Software on Tuesday August 7th at 2:00pm EDT for an overview of the new antispam features of Sunbelt's Ninja Email Security for MS Exchange 2000, 2003 and 2007.

Learn about the Ninja versions that now have a number of spam detection improvements, including:
  • Sunbelt Advanced Spam Filter: This new filter replaces the existing Sunbelt Antispam Engine. This new detection engine is dramatically improved over the prior, designed to recognize the latest spammer tricks and techniques with a low rate of false positives.
  • Sunbelt Dedicated Image-Spam Engine: One of the industry's only dedicated image-spam engines, this new functionality uses proprietary technology to add an extra layer of detection of spam images embedded inside of emails.
  • SURBL: Ninja now supports SURBL (surbl.org) with a dedicated SURBL engine that checks email content against spam real-time URL lists of known spammer domains.
  • Enhanced Cloudmark(tm) Engine: Ninja includes an updated version of the Cloudmark Authority antispam engine, which provides enhancements to further improve the detection of the latest spam variants, like image and pdf spam.
When: Tuesday, August 7, 2007 2:00 PM (EDT). Register here:
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-Ninja-Demo


Liberty Quotes Of The Week

"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him." -- Robert Heinlein

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." -- Thomas Jefferson

Thank you for being a WServerNews subscriber.

Hope you enjoy this issue of WServerNews! Warm regards, Stu  |   Email me: feedback@wservernews.com


Admin Toolbox

Admin Tools We Think You Shouldn't Be Without

USB flash drives become more popular. The Flash Memory Toolkit includes tools for troubleshooting and repairing USB flash drives.
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-USB-Flash-Tools

A minor release of Mark Russinovich's Process Monitor version 1.2 gives you more features for tracking unusual system activity:
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-Process-Monitor

You may not know this, but the Community Edition is actually free, so download rDirectory and webify your Active Directory.
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-rDirectory

The Mozy Online Backup has a 2Gig Freebie, which is very useful sometimes:
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-Mozy


Tech Briefing

Visit Us At The VB2007 Conference in Vienna, Austria

VB2007 will take place 19-21 September 2007 at the Hilton Vienna, Austria. Over its 17-year history, the VB conference has become a major highlight of the anti-malware calendar, with many of its regular attendees citing it as the anti-malware event of the year. The VB conference provides a focus for the anti-malware industry, representing an opportunity for experts in the anti-malware arena to share their research interests, discuss methods and technologies and set new standards, as well as meet with - and learn from - those who put their technologies into practice in the real world. Sunbelt Software will be a silver sponsor, visit us at booth # 6. Here's the link to the conference:
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-VB2007-Vienna


Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Stuff

You know that SQL 2008 will come out with its second Community Technology Preview by month's end. You can look for improvements and many more items over here at this page:
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-SQL-Server-2008


Expert Tip: Disaster Recovery Plan Testing

In this tip, expert Russell Olsen addresses the importance of IT disaster recovery plan tests. He also describes how to perform them with minimal impact to your budget and operations. If you run a tool like Double-Take, plans like these allow you to really make that product shine: (registration required)
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-Disaster-Recovery-Testing


Top 7 Exchange Server 2003 Tips And Tricks

In this excerpt from "Exchange Server 2003 Distilled," author Scott Schnoll shares tuning tips and tricks for Exchange Server 2003, Outlook Web Access 2003, and Microsoft Outlook 2003 that will improve the performance, security and usability of your email applications. (registration required)
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-Exchange-2003-Tips


Performance Analysis Tools For SQL Server

It's something of a truism that a complex SQL Server setup needs to be tuned to run properly. The good news is that most of the SQL Server tools you can pick up to accomplish that job are either already available in your backyard, or can be downloaded for nothing. In this expert tip, you'll gain a solid understanding of what these tools will and will not do for you, and how to get the most out of them even though they may seem to have a fairly limited scope. (registration required)
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-SQL-Analysis-Tools


System Center Configuration Manager 2007: A First Look

Though yet in beta, System Center Configuration Manager '07 is far easier to use than earlier versions of SMS Server. But what's best is how it works with other Microsoft products.
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-SCCM-2007


Resellers Exchange Server 2007 Upgrade Guide: Prep Your Customers

If you are a reseller offering Exchange 2007 as one of the services in your package of goodies, you don't want to make your customers the guinea pigs: you should have a good grip on deploying Exchange 2007 long before you ever offer it to anyone. Get the tips and best practices you need to make the jump to Exchange 2007 in this guide on SearchSystemsChannel.com:
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-Exchange-2007-Prep


Balancing Virtual PC 2007 Resource Utilization

Good Q&A at the MCPmag site. The question was: "When I run an installation in a Virtual PC, I usually just walk away from my system, because trying to run other applications or virtual PCs is very slow. I like to demo things like RIS installs using Virtual PC, but when I do, the RIS installation will slow down all of my other VMs. Granted, I don't have the fastest laptop. Besides getting better hardware, is there anything else I can do?" -- Thomas Answer at:
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-Virtual-PC-2007


Windows Server News

Microsoft Sees Stronger XP Sales In FY08 -- Yes, XP

ComputerWorld and many others reported that Microsoft has revised its forecast for sales of Windows XP during fiscal year 2008, indicating stronger sales of the operating system than it had earlier projected.

Windows XP, the operating system supposedly made moot by Windows Vista, is to make up a significantly larger part of sales in the coming year. During a conference call with analysts following the earnings results release yesterday afternoon, Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said the company has changed its fiscal year 2008 forecast from an 85/15 split in sales between Vista and XP to a 78/22 split. Windows XP sales will, in other words, be nearly 50% higher in the next 12 months than Microsoft had estimated earlier.

"We fine-tuned the Vista/XP mix for next year" during the company's usual budgeting last month, said Liddell. "We changed it from 85% to 78%. Now, it's a lower number [for Vista], but it's still a very high number overall from our perspective, so 78% Vista mix in terms of sales next year." Link:
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-XP-Sales


Gap In PC Procedure Causes Corporate Crisis

We found this blog entry and decided to share it with you. "Some years back, a colleague in another organization came to me for help. In this international organization and U.S. public company, the finance department was unable to close its quarterly financial books in time to meet a S.E.C. filing deadline. It had missed the deadline for several days, and the matter had reached the CEO and the boardroom as an uproar. The cause: an overseas subsidiary was unable to close its books. The reason: one of the steps to the overseas subsidiary's completing its month and quarter-end financial was a procedure wherein a financial report was downloaded to a PC's spreadsheet program, where a spreadsheet macro would perform some calculations that would be used in the subsidiary's financial results. This time, there was a problem: the macro had become corrupted and would not run. There were no backups. A contractor had created the macro and was nowhere to be found. No one in the finance department knew what the macro did or how it worked. It was an undocumented step in this critical business process; the original software was gone, and none of this was documented. Be certain to avoid having this kind of a scenario occurring in your organization. -- from a disaster recovery planning project
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-Corporate-Crisis


WServer Third Party News

New Features: Ninja Email Security for Exchange 2000-2007

Ninja delivers multiple new antispam engines including a dedicated image-spam engine. Sunbelt announced new upgrades to Ninja Email Security version 2.1, a comprehensive and robust best-of-breed email security product for Exchange. New features include the addition of several new and improved spam detection engines including a new dedicated image-spam engine, two new spam detection engines, and enhancements to the existing Cloudmark(tm) engine, delivering superior detection and defense against the latest variants of spam, including image- and PDF spam.

Sunbelt Dedicated Image-Spam Engine

With the one of the industry's only dedicated image-spam engines, Ninja provides a second layer of protection for image spam detection. Ninja uses advanced heuristics to identify if a message's image should be scanned. If it does, then Ninja analyzes the message to determine if email is image spam - identified by text within the image using proprietary technology. It is designed to protect against newer and emerging image spam threats and kills newer variants of existing image spam.

Sunbelt Advanced Spam Filter

Ninja now includes the Sunbelt Advanced Spam Filter, a new antispam filtering engine designed to recognize the latest spammer tricks and techniques by recognizing suspicious misspellings and other unique spam-identifying characteristics. The filter is tuned to detect specific spammer tricks allowing it to catch new types of spam, such as embedded content, HTML and foreign language spam, while ignoring general factors that can generate false positives. The filter leverages a unique database of signatures based on a combination of message attributes unique to particular spammers. To ensure that newly identified spam signatures are added to the database, signatures are added by human intervention and not automatically, ensuring that signatures are valid and catch not only a specific spam message, but a wide range of future spam messages.

New SURBL Engines

Ninja now supports SURBL with a dedicated SURBL engine that checks email content against spam URL real-time blacklists of known spammer domains. Additionally, key enhancements to the latest version of Cloudmark's antispam engine are included to further improve the detection of the latest spam variants including image and pdf spam.

Pricing and availability

Ninja Email Security is priced aggressively for all corporate environments running Microsoft Exchange 2000, 2003, and 2007 and includes one year of support, updates and upgrades. New customers can purchase Ninja on a per-mailbox basis. Pricing includes the first year maintenance and starts at $184.95 for 5 mailboxes with a sliding scale discount based on number of mailboxes. A 30-day trial version of Ninja is available on Sunbelt Software's website:
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-Ninja-Email-Security


SNSI Update: More Vulnerabilities

The Sunbelt Network Security Inspector (SNSI) version 1.6.72.0 was released July 26, 2007). Sunbelt Software recommends you download the new SNSI version 1.6.72.0 and scan and patch your machines today! To update from within the SNSI console, select Settings, enter your full registration key and click on Check Now button. To Purchase NOW, visit:
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-SNSI-Purchase

New vulnerability updates for this release include: 
W3160  Oracle Enterprise Manager Vulnerabilities (July 2007)
W3159  Oracle E-Business Suite Vulnerabilities (July 2007)
W3158  Oracle Collaboration Suite Vulnerabilities (July 2007)
W3157  Oracle Application Server Vulnerabilities (July 2007)
W3156  Oracle Database Vulnerabilities (July 2007)
S478   SHA-1 Module Floating Point Interaction Vulnerability - Solaris 10
SNSI uses the latest Mitre Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) list of computer incidents. It also contains the latest SANS/FBI top 20 vulnerability list. SNSI also uses the latest CERT, CIAC Microsoft and FedCIRC (Department of Homeland Security) advisories. To get the latest SNSI version, visit:
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-SNSI


The Ex-Aelita Team Does It Again

The very smart Russian guys that that built Aelita (and then sold it to Quest) have created a new outfit, and chose server management as their new 'play'. It's called Veeam Software, and last week they intro'd their first, fresh V1.0 of the Veeam Configurator. It has a Windows GUI and a series of what they call expert knowledge packs designed to streamline virtual server configs. The V1.0 code works with VMware VirtualCenter but Veeam announced that MS Virtual Server - and perhaps later XEN 9for Linux) will be covered. Keep an eye on these guys. They are good.
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-Veeam-Software


WServerNews FAVE Links

This Week's Links We Like. Tips, Hints And Fun Stuff.



WServerNews - Product of the Week

The #1 Selling FISMA Book

Are you confused about how the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) affects your IT infrastructure? The FISMA Certification & Accreditation Handbook takes you through the C&A process from start to finish. While this book will especially appeal to U.S. Federal Agencies, any organization can apply the security concepts described within it when performing a security audit on mission critical apps or networks. Many security experts new to C&A don't know where to start to get their C&A projects off the ground, and seasoned experts continue to look for fresh ideas on how to best analyze, evaluate, and document security controls. The FISMA Certification and Accreditation Handbook is really for everyone: novices, experts, federal agencies, and private companies.
http://www.wservernews.com/070730-FISMA