Yesterday, Microsoft announced a release candidate of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 to members of the TechNet community. While it isn't the final service pack, this release candidate is a great way for net admins to get a feel for the service pack before its official release sometime in the coming weeks.
Updates in the service pack include changes to security features, promises of greater reliability and performance, and tweaks to administration tools that should be of interest to any net admin whose network includes Vista PCs. Of particular interest will be changes to the group policy management tools, which promise to simplify the process of managing large groups of Vista users.
You can download the SP1 RC either as a stand-alone installation or via Windows Update.
Downloading the SP1 release candidate via Windows Update involves running a script that will allow the PC to receive the service pack as an update within the next few days. Alternatively, you can force the install to run manually by running the script, and then clicking Start, Control Panel, Windows Update and choose the Check for Updates option in the left pane. This should give you the option to install Update for Windows Vista, which in turn will give you the option to install another Update for Windows Vista after a reboot, and then install the actual service pack. Along the way, you'll need to keep manually clicking Check for Updates. It's a convoluted process, even by Microsoft standards, but it beats waiting several days just to take a gander at the service pack's features.
As with any prerelease software, this SP1 release candidate should only be installed on a handful of non-critical test systems, and isn't recommended for non-technical users. However, net admins would do well to get a feel for the update before its final release, so they can better prepare for deploying the final SP1 when it arrives.
Even the best managers can't be everywhere at once. So, for those times when you have to be away from your business, wireless surveillance can be an easy way to keep an eye on the shop. And when you aren't away, it's still pretty handy, too. This week, Linksys announced the new WVC2300 Wireless-G Business Internet Video Camera with Audio, which not only lets you keep watch over your business, but lets you listen in and talk back whenever you like.
Apart from its obvious Orwellian implications, the WVC2300 is bound to find all sorts of uses around the workplace. Place one in the reception area so you can see who's coming and going. Stick one in the server room and you can talk with your IT staff for tag-team troubleshooting. Or put one outside the building entrance to screen after-hours visitors.
The WVC2300 offers simultaneous streaming of both MPEG-4 and MJPEG codecs, which makes it versatile enough to stream over the web using its built-in web server, or record to a NAS for more serious security monitoring. IP multicast allows several viewers to monitor the feed at the same time.
With an MSRP of $399.99, the WVC2300 is modestly priced for a full-featured, wireless, audio-enabled surveillance camera, and it works with a variety of add-ins, including remote zoom lenses and remote-controlled pan-and-tilt mounting bases that let you adjust your view on the fly.
Making the transition from a one-person home business to a growing company with multiple emloyees and several PCs can be as frustrating as it is exciting. Along the way, you're bound to outgrow the capabilities of your old hardware. So if you can put off buying new, network-ready printers for another fiscal year, all the better. Fortunately, making your old printers accessible to your team over the network is as easy as plugging in a little plastic box.
Mini print servers such as Netgear's PS121 ($60) act as a bridge between otherwise-unnetworkable printers and your router. Simply connect the mini print server to your USB printer, plug it into a power outlet, and then connect it to your router. Most include a browser interface so you can customize settings over the network at any time. Once the print server is up and running, you can use it to print from any PC, anywhere on the network, whether wired or wireless.
If you've got really old parallel printers, it's still possible to connect them. Netgear's PS101 ($70) supports parallel printers in exactly the same way as its USB counterpart, letting you squeeze more life out of your aging hardware so you can focus on building your business instead of adding to your electronics recycling costs.
For their simple setup and reliability, the Netgear print servers above have won my trust, but they're not the only game in town. Other good options include the parallel D-Link DP-301P+ and the Linksys PSUS4. With each of these devices priced under $70, setting up a mini print server is a smart, simple way to save hundreds -- even thousands -- on a network-ready printer.
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If your business is big enough to benefit from the remote access features of a VPN, then it's big enough to care about protecting, too. ZyXEL's new ZyWALL Unified Security Gateway 300 packs hybrid VPN features and enterprise-grade security into a small, simple package that's both affordable and easy to manage.
With support for both IPSec VPN and SSL VPN technologies, the USG 300 offers user-aware access control and quality of service features that give you detailed control over user activity and bandwidth management, so your network resources don't go to waste. It also includes anti-virus protection from Kaspersky Labs to stop malware from reaching your network through infected remote machines. And because the security is managed by a built-in security coprocessor, scanning for viruses doesn't have to slow down your data traffic.
While the ZyWALL USG 300 is priced at $2,000, we found it online for a budget-friendly $1,300 online, which makes it a lot more palatable to medium-sized companies than other enterprise class VPN gateways, which can cost thousands more for the same set of features. While not robust enough for large remote workforces, this small rack-mountable gateway is perfect for smaller offices with a handful of telecommuters.
While large enterprise networks have no shortage of options for safely interacting with the outside world, smaller companies sometimes have to be a little more creative. Fortunately, with a little planning, it?s not all that hard for even the smallest companies to run their own public-facing servers from their own computers?and their own offices?without making the entire network vulnerable.
Even the most run-of-the-mill home routers now include support for a DMZ. Short for, you guessed it, demilitarized zone, a DMZ lets you set one or more computers outside the protection of the router?s firewall so it can have unfettered access to Net. This feature is commonly available on all sorts of routers from D-Link, Netgear, Linksys, and others, and takes only a moment to configure.
The hardest part of setting up a DMZ is deciding whether this is really the best option for you in the first place. Some reasons to do this might include running your own Web servers, your own FTP servers, or getting around firewall restrictions that interfere with some communications programs. Typically, a DMZ only makes good sense if you need to allow several applications to function outside the firewall and it?s not practical to rely on simple port forwarding. But you should be aware that, by setting a computer outside the router?s firewall, you expose it to additional threats that can quickly bring an unprotected computer to its knees and expose its data to interlopers. For this reason, if you do decide to set up a DMZ, it?s vitally important to run a software firewall on each of the PCs in the DMZ and keep them vigilantly updated.
On most home routers, setting up a DMZ is as easy as opening up the router?s admin interface in a web browser and selecting which of the connected computers you?d like to place outside the router and assigning an IP address to the DMZ host.
The benefit of a DMZ is that it isolates public-facing machines outside your network, preventing threats that may affect those machines from reaching the rest of your PCs. For this reason, it?s important to carefully monitor the systems on your DMZ for viruses and other malware regularly, and diligently back up those systems.
The specific configuration steps for a DMZ vary greatly from router to router. So be sure to check the company's website for detailed information and advice before altering the DMZ settings in your router.
Last month, Sprint announced that it would roll out a long-anticipated wireless broadband network using an eagerly anticipated -- but scarcely seen -- technology known as WiMAX. And even more surprising than the announcement itself was the expectation that we'd actually see the new network before the end of 2007. With Thanksgiving upon us and no WiMAX in sight, is Sprint likely to live up to its promise?
Last week, Sprint terminated its partnership with Clearwire, which had been signed on to help deploy the new WiMAX network, citing an inability to "resolve complexities associated with the [letter of intent]," which could mean a major setback in the WiMAX rollout. Even so, Sprint remains resolute that it will deploy WiMAX under the brand name Xohm in Chicago and Baltimore/Washington before 2007 fades into history.
If Xohm does come to market by 2008, it could ring in an era of more ubiquitous connectivity for businesses of all stripes. By covering vast metro areas with easily accessible, high-speed wireless, WiMAX might just live up to the hopes its creators have pinned to it since the dawn of this decade. And that could spell cheap connections for your business before 2009 rolls around.
But in the years we've been waiting for WiMAX to come around, high-speed cellular broadband has become nearly ubiquitous in metropolitan regions, with major vendors like Dell and HP building wireless broadband support into their business laptops. All this readily available internet connectivity may ultimately have stolen whatever thunder WiMAX had left. So, what do you think? Is it too little, too late for Sprint's WiMAX effort? Let us know in the comments section.
As the data transfer speed is about 4 times to that of 3G, So a delay of 3-4 months is not a big deal. But Sprint should be careful not to delay more, else the complementary products for WiMax like for mobile chips would get delayed and the vendors would be hesistant to invest in WiMax technology. Once WiMax is deployed as being said by Sprint that it would reach 10million people at the end of 2008, then this advanced and the better technology would outcompete 3G for sure. What do yiou think???
IBM and Google have both announced high-flying research projects in cloud computing -- creating virtual supercomputers to power distributed applications that customers like you can access over the Web. This idea isn?t new, but it appears to be different this time. Today?s blend of high-speed networks and fast servers have already led to the rise of the Web app, and end users are getting accustomed to running apps over the Internet.
Still, ordinary businesses will have to wait a while if they want access to these computing clouds, because IBM is grooming its services for the larges business, research, and government usage models and Google is currently only working with universities on its cloud. Eventually, though, cloud computing will trickle into the mainstream. Here?s what it could do for you.
Mobile Business
Distributed computing means you never have to say you?re stranded. Because cloud computing makes large server clusters available over the Net, you?ll eventually be able to access intensely powerful customer service and commerce apps from the road, without compromising security. Your sales reps will be able to perform high-level business analysis from their cars, rather than waiting for leads from the home office. This will make smaller businesses more agile than ever before.
Data Mining
For the largest companies, sifting through the endless stream of online activity for meaningful user trends is an expensive ? but rewarding ? challenge that gives them an edge in understanding the markets. In the coming year, cloud computing will likely make it easier for them. And once computing clouds fall into the hands of regular folks, we?ll all have that power.
Easy Virtualization
Large businesses are rapidly awakening to the power of virtualization, cutting hardware costs while making a more diverse application set available to their users. Cloud computing will make it easy for the very smallest companies to leverage virtualization just like the big kids.
Social Butterflies
Last year, every business in America decided it was hip to jump into MySpace. But, despite what a few companies? PR firms have claimed, most of the hipsters they went there to court were unimpressed by the effort, largely because the static tools of the social network made for a bland customer experience. Cloud computing will enable more sophisticated social apps, giving businesses the tools to attract customers in dynamic, entertaining ways.
Virtual Worlds
Second Life, while interesting, has done even less for the businesses that have hopped into it than MySpace has. But once cloud clusters go mainstream, they?ll enable more immersive VR environments and, just maybe, draw more credible numbers of users into the virtual world. That could finally activate some real commerce in virtual places like Second Life.
Some small business owners who invested in a little cheap storage may find themselves in a panic today, as Maxtor has announced that some of its drives shipped with a data-compromising virus. The affected drives are part of the Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 line, particularly those sold after August 2007.
Fortunately for those who bought the drives strictly for business use, the virus -- namely Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah -- is designed to attack gamers by stealing game login information for World of Warcraft accounts. For more on this virus and the products affected, click HERE.
At the time of this writing, major antivirus vendors such as McAfee, Symantec, and Kaspersky have all included detection support for this virus, so if you own one of these drives and haven't run a virus scan on it, now would be a good time to do so.
For the rest of us, this incident is just a friendly reminder that any peripherals we add to our networks -- no matter how seemingly benign -- have the potential to impact the security of our entire network. So before adding any new drive or system to the network, it's a sensible idea to scan it first.
London-based SoftScan announced this week that 96.10% of the e-mail its customers received in October of this year was spam. If that number is even remotely representative of global messaging trend -- and, based on the load of junk that hits my own spam filter each day, I see no reason to suspect otherwise -- it raises serious questions about the future of electronic messaging as we now know it. Of course, good ol' e-mail isn't going away anytime soon, so holding back the tide remains one of the most important jobs of IT managers everywhere.
The lowest levels of spam reported by SoftScan in the month of October, found during the early part of the month, still topped 93%. Of the nefarious messages received, 66.16% were phishing e-mails, which means businesses would do well to educate their users about the nature of phishing threats.
While properly updated anti-spam and anti-virus software can significantly reduce the number of threats that make it into end-user inboxes, any absent-minded intern (or CEO, for that matter) can compromise your network by following the links in some phishing messages.
For more on protecting your PCs from phishing and other threats, click HERE.
Thanks to technologies like VoIP, colocation, and virtualization, smaller companies can act a whole lot bigger than they are. But all that traffic flowing across a tiny network can mean big problems for companies on small budgets. That?s when makeshift IT managers have to turn their attention to network components they may have previously overlooked.
One of the most frequently forgotten components of any small business network is the switch. Quiet and unassuming though these simple little boxes may be, an aging switch can easily put your entire network in a chokehold as you add new devices and services, bringing a growing infrastructure to its knees. Fortunately, high-bandwidth gigabit switches are rapidly getting smaller, simpler, and more affordable.
3Com?s new OfficeConnect Managed Gigabit PoE Switch is small enough to sit on the corner of a desk, but powerful enough to keep up with daily VoIP traffic and the demands of a busy business network. The OfficeConnect is ready to run right out of the box, so business owners can put on their IT hats, connect it, and get back to their day jobs quickly. Once it?s up, routine management is easy through the web-based interface.
While the $400 OfficeConnect is small and simple, it also includes features that IT types look for, like Power over Ethernet (PoE) support, network traffic prioritization, a command line interface for quick over-the-network management, and support for SNMP management software.
