joeware - never stop exploring...

It has been a trifle warm lately… Feels like Las Vegas in the summer but in SE Michigan….
95 degrees (35 c) but with the heat index is 110 degrees (43.33333c). Supposed to be 96 degrees (35.5556c) tomorrow. Thursday it is supported to be 74 degrees (23.33333).
As I look at the weather for Las Vegas, 98 degrees [...]

Microsoft loses another relatively well known techie… this time from security
Jesper Johansson - Senior Security Strategist is going to Amazon.com…
http://blogs.technet.com/jesper_johansson/archive/2006/07/28/443888.aspx
This guy has truly had a lot to do with Microsoft’s overall security message the last 5 years. I haven’t agreed with everything he has said but overall he is a quite good and quite technical. He [...]

I was recently helping with an issue where someone was trying to set the security to allow some group to directly modify the title field in the Organization tab of Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) of users in a specific OU.
They followed the logical path of

Right click on OU
Select Properties
Select the Security tab
Click the Advanced button
Click Add
Type [...]

I saw Click this morning at the cinema… Best time to see movies at the cinema are Sunday morning prior to noon. Very few people there, the floor isn’t sticky and gross, there is more popcorn in the bag than in the seats, and did I say there are very few people there? Oh yeah, [...]

In a previous entry I spoke about some documentation on TechNet that was incorrect which stated that if the tombstonelifetime attribute wasn’t set on the Directory Service object in the configuration container of an Active Directory (or ADAM) that the tombstone lifetime (TSL) was either 60 days or 180 days depending on whether the forest [...]

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
  -Aristotle

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident [...]

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
  -Thomas Jefferson

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
 -Edward R. Murrow

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
  -Edward R. Murrow

Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.
 - Edward R. Murrow

Mike Kline frequent joeware blog commenter posted a comment for the article where I congratulated Mark and Bryce[1] for the sale of Sysinternals. I responded to his comment and ripped on my aquaintence Dean and realized that Dean isn’t ever going to go back and look at comments and actually see the rip, heck I [...]

I fielded a question today on the article at
http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/library/f3df8a52-81ea-4a1d-9823-4e51fbd3422a1033.mspx?mfr=true
 
Basically it incorrectly says:
 To determine the tombstone lifetime for the forest
 
 1.  On the Start menu, click Run, type adsiedit.msc, and then click OK.
 
2.  In the console tree, double-click Configuration [DomainControllerName], CN=Configuration,DC=[ForestRootDomain], CN=Services, and CN=Windows NT.
 
3.  Right-click CN=Directory Service, and then click Properties.
 
4.  In the Attribute column, click [...]

As you probably know, Virtual Server Software is making a huge splash. Anyone who has seen a Virtual Machine POST knew that was going to happen, that magic moment happened for me several years ago when I saw, I think, VMWARE 3.1 Workstation POST and I was seriously blurted out “Holy shit!” in the middle [...]

Here is proof I that I actually do respond to my “customers”, at least eventually, you will note that I was a little slow on this response but I try to scan all emails every day and respond to the “urgent” ones at least within a day or two, the others get back burnered for [...]

Look at me, I am link boy today… (catching up on emails)
http://www.gizmoproject.com/

http://www.primopdf.com/
 

Now this is cool info… Gas prices for local gas stations on line. You punch in your zip code and it shows you were the closest cheaper gas is…
http://autos.msn.com/everyday/gasstations.aspx?zip=&src=Netx
 

Well I received another email from the AFA claiming they are somehow impacting Ford Motor Company. They admit that they aren’t responsible for all of the loss Ford has had but feel they undoubtably are contributing. Interestingly the AFA doesn’t mention that Ford is actually doing better domestically than previously… Last year at this time [...]

I was looking over my download logs to see how many utility downloads that have occurred since I set up the new download system back in October 2004…
The count is at 198,712 downloads. Not bad for the site I think.
I wish I had stats for the downloads all the way back to 2001.
 
A popular [...]

“They didn’t want it good, they wanted it Wednesday.”
  - Robert Heinlein

“The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.”
 - Robert Heinlein

“A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.”
   - Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744)

“The more you love, the more you can love–and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of that majority who are decent and just.”
  -Robert Heinlein

“Sex without love is merely healthy exercise.”
  - Robert Heinlein

‘nuf said

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/278100_aidsvaccine19ww.html
Science \”as usual\” has become something of an obstacle in the search for an AIDS vaccine, so the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today announced it is awarding $287 million to 16 research teams — four of them in Seattle — that have agreed to collectively veer off the beaten path.
The most interesting aspect I thought [...]

I’m all for it. How about you?
I mean seriously, some days you really don’t want to go into the office, but if you have some nice sexual energy floating around you will probably be going into work early and staying late and working harder at keeping your job so you can keep going in right?
[...]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/19/china_mars/
China’s ambitious space exploration plans - already encompassing the Moon - also extend to Mars, the Xinhua news agency announced today….
The fastest way to get the US moving is for some other country to start pulling out ahead in some technical field. The whole space race was that way, if it weren’t for the Russians [...]

I finally went back to the Cingular site to look into ordering a new phone and this time succeeded. It seems the issue was a combination of things. My stupidity and Cingular’s stupidity.
Basically the site I go in through is to get our corporate discount on the Cingular phones. It is a special page that [...]

It is old news at this point but Microsoft has aquired Winternals and with it gets Sysinternals. This is both good and bad news from my viewpoint.
It is good news to hear that MSFT picked up two strong technical guys, I look forward to Mark adding considerable value to the platform group.
It is bad news [...]

So one year ago on July 18, 2005 I announced that Sanjay Tandon had left Microsoft. So what has happened in that year and are we now more secure as a result of it?
 
Well to start out…. let me first say that contrary to what some folks thought when they read my blog post from a year [...]

Today is focus on security day… The first entry here is a challenge to anyone who feels they are up to a security challenge. This is a great way to be known as someone who has some security chops…. It was posted to an internal MSFT/MVP security list but I got permission to bring it [...]

The coolest thing happened today… One of my MSFT PSS friends IM’ed me and said… “I hate you”.
 
My response of course was something snappy and intelligent like… “errr ok”.
Then he continued…. It seems that someone he was interviewing actually quoted my blog to him and told him to suck it up! I have to say [...]

I was peeking around at the blogosphere (eww I can’t believe I said that) and saw over at Mini-Microsoft that Intel is dropping 1000 managers…
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/07/intel-ligent-re-design.html
The poster at MiniMSFT is asking (with sugar on top) that MSFT not hire those managers. I concur. Might I recommend that to other companies with too many managers as well.
It [...]

I was pinged about two positions inside of Microsoft today…. I didn’t want either of the jobs but am willing to redirect others to the folks involved. 
The first is Microsoft looking for Rapid Response Engineers for Windows Server 2003 Migration and Directory Services. This is for the PSS teams in NYC, SF, and LA/Irving California. The positions require deep troubleshooting [...]

IBM is about to cede the descriptive moniker “world’s biggest computer company” to long-time rival Hewlett-Packard.
Within the next few months - maybe weeks - analysts say, HP will charge ahead of IBM in total revenue and grab the title that Big Blue has held since the mid-1960s, when the success of its Series 360 mainframe [...]

Hmmm, this could help with the blog spam…
http://www.hotcaptcha.com/
 
 

Hewlett-Packard unveiled a memory chip the size of a tomato seed on Monday in its Palo Alto laboratories. The tiny chip, called the Memory Spot, can be attached unobtrusively to any object and carry media or data.
The Memory Spot will rival RFID tags in carrying information on movable physical objects, but HP calls it the [...]

I was recently reading something where someone described a multi-tree forest as a forest with a disjoint namespace. This is not correct and since there seems to be quite a bit of confusion on what exactly a disjoint namespace and its supportability is I thought I would put some words out there about it since [...]

The Active Directory domain is not a security boundary; it is a policy and replication boundary.
The Active Directory domain is not a security boundary; it is a policy and replication boundary.
The Active Directory domain is not a security boundary; it is a policy and replication boundary.
The Active Directory domain is not a security boundary; it [...]

Ever see the error
This Active Directory installation requires domain configuration changes, but whether these changes have been made on the domain controller xxx.domain.com is undetermined. The installation process has quit.
“The system cannot find the file specified.”
when doing a DCPROMO?
I was going through my emails trying to clean up and hit one where someone had that [...]

Some of you may recall a post from a few months ago where I shared the funniest email I ever received. I received several emails asking me to share more funny emails because they like how I present things… I seem to have a quality that I can tell people a serious story and make [...]

I don’t really have anything to say about Defending Security Infrastructures at the moment. I am just looking to get the keywords Defending Security Infrastructures registered with Google and to also get the keywords Defending Security Infrastructures registered with Yahoo and to also get the keywords Defending Security Infrastructures registered with MSN Search[1].
I saw a [...]

I had an interesting day troubleshooting hard disk issues. The first problem was in a machine that hosts a bunch of my virtual machines I use for testing scenarios for work. It was running slower and slower as the last few days went by and boot times had doubled from the normal time frame on the [...]

It is patch Tuesday and there is at least one critical that folks should probably pay attention to if they just plain run Windows.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS06-035.mspx
Mailslots used to be used quite extensively on Windows and still are in use now. That messenger service, no not that MSN Messenger thing, the one that receives NET SEND messages uses [...]

My first run in with Gartner was with an analyst back in about 2000 or so at a conference who told me that over 60% of the production installations of Active Directory would have to be rebuilt from scratch because people didn’t know what they were doing. I told him whoever came up with that [...]

No more Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, and Windows ME support….
FINALLY!!!!!
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/support/endofsupport.mspx
 
I know it is probably just me but I hated Windows 95/98/ME. As soon as NT4 was available and I got a hold of it I was running that. Prior to that I worked on a lot of DEC RSTS/E and VMS stuff and OS/2 [...]

Well I just got a majority of the CSV import new object code into admod and debugged and just wanted to share how cool it is…
Check this out… The command being run is on the spot pulling all of the OUs in a domain (all 13160 of them…) and creating them in ADAM…. One command [...]

I have updated the LG program… Well actually I have cleaned up and released a private version of LG that allows you to specify SIDs instead of names to add/remove members. It also will let you clear all members from a local group in one command.
If you aren’t familiar with LG, it is a tool that [...]