In this month's Redmond Magazine, my Windows Insider column discusses the use of IPSec to create "Isolation Groups". Its a neat idea that was hard in previous versions, but with Vista (and soon-to-be Longhorn) it gets a lot easier. You can use an isolation group as a kind of extra ACL on the network to ensure that only certain computers have access to other computers. Its a potential protection against mistakenly opening up permissions.

Click below for the link to the article at Redmond Magazine...

 
Continue reading Isolation Automation Exploration: Part I...

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This month's Redmond Magazine also sports an article written by myself and Steve Kaplan that discusses the rather gnarly topic of whether its a good idea to run Citrix servers inside virtualization environments.

We talk about the problem both from the performance standpoint as well as from the idea of easy recoverability. Although, in the end, you're going to see a decrease in performance any time you squoosh servers together into virtualization environments -- you cannot change the laws of physics! But, the other benefits of virtualization sometimes outweigh that performance loss.

Click below for the link to the article. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it.

 
Continue reading Citrix & VMware: Oil & Water?...

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Looks like one for Excel, Word, Office, and Exchange, a cumulative IE one, a vulnerability in the Cryptographic API COM, and the DNS one we've been waiting for.

Click through for the detailed posting on Microsoft's web site:

 
Continue reading Microsoft Security Bulletin for May is Released...

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The Microsoft SBS Blog released a post last week with some excellent information about a known problem with networking that occurs after the installation of SP2 onto Small Business Server. A series of resolutions is also posted.

Some of the network problems being seen involve:

Unable to VPN to the Server ("Error 800: Unable to establish connection").
Unable to RDP to SBS server
Unable to connect to shares on SBS server from the LAN
Unable to join a client machine to the domain
Unable to connect to Exchange from Outlook
Unable to connect to SSL sites either on the SBS server or on the Internet (including CompanyWeb)
Slow network performance
Outgoing FTP connections fail
DHCP Server service crashes
Slow domain logins
Intermittent connection failures from NAT clients behind the server
Intermittent RPC communications failures

If you are experiencing any of these problems...

 
Continue reading Windows Server SP2 Causing Networking Problems on SBS Servers...

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About a month late and a dollar short, but sources are reporting that Microsoft will be releasing a patch for the DNS zero-day problem next Tuesday:

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