Ah, a much needed break from technology and teaching. It was just what the Dr. ordered. Me and a few friends took a trip down to the Savannah Wild Life Refuge. It was a great trip, well if you find spending three days in a swamp fun.

He is a map of the section that we hunted.

If your looking at this map we put in at the landing dock in the south west corner. We then traveled about five miles up the creeks. We started out on Abercorn Cr. which was a good two mile stretch and at 6 miles an hour with a 3.5 hp motor, we had plenty of time to watch the alligators and hope they left us alone. As you follow the creek you see the fork at Raccoon Cr. we pretty much stayed to the right and followed it up to Bear Cr. to the dotted 2 line. This line was the East/West indicator and consisted of trees marked in blue. This was provided for lost souls trying to get their bearings, and trust me it’s easy to get lost.

Lost you say, yes I say it’s easy to get lost because we did. The first day out we only had a compas and didn’t do a very good job keeping our bearings. We were able to successfully navigate back to the creek, but were unsure if the boats were north or south of our location. You see these are tidal waters that rise and fall with…well the tides. So not only does everything look the same it all looks different from when you start. I’m talking there is a six foot difference in the water. Anyhow this lead to the purchase of two GPS units.

The rest of the trip was great and was a success. We saw a lot of wildlife and met our quote of meat on the ground. The terrain was tough. We were constintly in about shin high muck and about every third step we’d sink even deeper. You had to be careful out there. We all had such a good trip we are planning another in March. Below are some pictures I took from my phone standing in about eight inches of water. I didn’t want to take the camera out there till next time with out a waterproof case.

Sure, I run it in a VM on a Mac and using Bootcamp. I still use it just as much. You see I train on Microsoft technologies, so it behooves me to know this stuff. Being that as it may, I’ve crashed it just as I’ve done with XP. I had minimal struggles finding things just as I did with XP when it first hit the scene. Overall I like it. Sure I had to get a new printer that supported it and yadda yadda yadda…but that’s ok it was cheaper than buying new toner. Anyhow to the point, I caught this in Infoworld today…

—The signee said “Vista is too different to be useful.”

But here’s the rub, my friends: All we’ve heard from Microsoft about Windows 7 suggests that the user experience will bear a close resemblance to that of Vista. It will most definitely look a whole lot more like Vista than it will look like XP. Third-party developers will still have to rearchitect their applications and drivers to work with Windows 7 (unless they’ve already made those changes in order to work nicely with Vista, in which case they’ll be a-OK for 7). The bigger changes will be happening in the OS’s innards to make it easier to make updates and changes to its components. As Microsoft told me, “While these changes will increase engineering agility, they will not impact the user experience or reduce application compatibility.”

So basically if your waiting for Windows 7 you’re going to be dealing with many of the same issues. Is that a reason to move to Vista? That’s up to you, but I’m sure it’s not the only argument to not to…

Read the full article here.

“How dare they will do that.”

Well, it’s getting kick-off time for the Atlanta chapter of the National Information Security Group. I’ve got a great team of guys working with me on making this a success. I will be posting an announcement to the list this week giving the details. I’ve not gotten all of my ducks in a row yet, but it’s coming together. By the November Meeting we should have a permanent location and a couple of sponsors. There will be more to come…

I was just voting against Obama, but I am starting to re think it… I may windup voting for McCain.

But Cochran said he observed McCain engage in a physical confrontation with a Sandinista while participating in a diplomatic mission led by Sen. Bob Dole and others in the fall of 1987. Cochran, McCain - who had won election to the Senate that year - and other members of a bipartisan committee of lawmakers called the Central American Negotiations Observer Group - met with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, head of the left-wing political party known as Sandinistas, about tensions in the region.

The atmosphere was tense, as the U.S. was pressing “pretty hard.” Cochran noticed a disturbance at the meeting table in a room lined with armed personnel.

“McCain was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the guerilla group here at this end of the table and I don’t know what attracted my attention,” Cochran said. “But I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever. I don’t know what he was telling him but I thought, good grief, everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission. I don’t know what had happened to provoke John but he obviously got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him.”

-SunHerald.com

Again, April has been a busy month. I’ve gotten my MCSE:Security certification, MCTS in Vista and ISA, CTT+ and MCT, Deployed Exchange 2007, System Center Configuration Manger, Worked on a project team to install a Hotsite (secondary fail over for exchange, SQL, and AD), thought a class on deploying Office 2007, changed the breaks on both my cars and Finished up my Project based information systems class at UMass and made an A.

Besides that I’ve started running; I haven’t smoked in like forever. I’m looking into getting back into martial arts…as if I don’t have enough going on. Yes I’ve found time to spend with the wife…we’ve been out on a couple of dates. We’ve taken Bree to the park a few times and she made a new friend in the back yard.

I’ve been having a blast…

Wow, May has been great for me too. More certs, which is going to be a normal thing. I am looking at a couple certs that aren’t M$ and more security related for next month. I have also had the chance to help out a regional ISP. A web server, a DNS server and a file server all got pretty hosed. I was able to get them up after identifying who, what, when, where…why who knows. It’s in their hands now how to pursue the incident. I also had a really awesome experiance at a power plant.

Anyhow, nothing is slowing down — just the contrary.

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That’s right folks I’ve chosen SCCM to deploy vista clients at the training center. I decided this for a few reasons least of which has to do with the fact that we are a Microsoft Training Solution Provider. I am going to be deploying this at a client in the near future and it fits what we are trying to do. I’ve used ghost in the past. Everything from the Enterprise Solution Suite to just floppy’s with a script to run Ghost off a network share. I’ve also been a fan of SMS since version 2.0 when I used it to deploy apps to about 900 workstations. I have not had the pleasure of using SCCM yet till now and its pretty intuitive. I’ve been going by the book (BDD) for my “lab” environment. I’ll post some updates on how it goes and what my struggles were. And yes I will be getting this cert in the near future as well…

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This week i deployed Exchange 2007 for a client. I setup an Edge and a Hub/Client Access/Mailbox server. I deployed them pretty much in parallel. The Edge went on a locked down member server of the clients perimeter domain. The Hub/Client/Mailbox server went into the production domain. All in all it took a couple of hours. This was a new install not an upgrade so there wasn’t much to it. I found Microsoft’s approach pretty interesting and think they are making some headway by way of security. Anyhow, I suppose I will go after that cert after I finish my others…

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After you enable an Edge server and configure EdgeSync the message routing changes in the exchange organization (obviously).

Outbound Messages

• User to Mailbox server
• Hub scoops it up from mailbox server and determines its heading to the internet
• Hub to Edge
• Edge uses the edgesync - sitename (internet send connector) to send to internet

Inbound messages

• Sending Server to Edge using the Default internal receive connector server name
• Edgesync-inbound to sitename connector to Hub
• Hub uses the Default Server name connector to receive
• Hub to mailbox server

Just a brief overview…for more info: Google

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Zero touch installs have always fascinated me, but spending big bucks to do it isn’t always an option. I’m not out to provide away of doing this, but I am developing some ideas. Some of my posts may contain information that will not be used, but I’ve found it relevant. Providing a base profile for users can be accomplished numerous ways. This is just one of them…

Create a profile and configure it how you want it setup. Then under the Advanced tab in the System applet select User Profiles. Select the user profile you just setup and select Copy to (set the appropriate permissions) the netlogon share. Then rename the folder to Default User.

ref: 168475

If you want to setup Mandatory profiles, copy the profile in the same way to a folder called Mandatory. Rename Ntuser.dat to Ntuser.man. In AD Users and Computers select the users properties and set the Profile Path to the “Mandatory” folder.

ref: 323368

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