Wow, two more totally rocking books! I even actually own the Server Core book!
Windows Server 2008 Core Administrator’s Pocket Consultant
By Mitch Tulloch with the Windows Server Core Team at Microsoft
ISBN: 9780735626263
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services Step by Step
By Paul Turley, Joe Kasprzak, Scott Cameron, Satoshi Iizuka, and Pablo Guzman
ISBN: 9780735624054
You ever ask the question “Wow, I wish there were a consolidated place to find everything* there is to find about NetApp and Virtualization?”
I ask that question all the time. The following is a release of my internal notes I’d forward to people when they say “NetApp + Citrix?” “NetApp + VMware” or “NetApp + Hyper-V”
This way, both you AND I have a single place to go look and I don’t have to reinvent my wheel!
Everything you wanted to know about NetApp and Virtualization but were afraid to ask.
NetApp Virtualization Team Blog – Great resource of information and the definitive source on updates of new documents, TR’s, etc – It is where I’ll update new links like those above from.
VMware and NetApp
Microsoft and NetApp
Citrix and NetApp
Oracle and NetApp
And some definite –must- reads!
NetApp 50% Virtualization Guarantee* (Effective until December 31, 2009)
Top Must Read Knowledge Base Articles (Virt-KB!)
NetApp Virtualization and Twitter!
Yes! I was able to track down the folks at NetApp who are on Twitter, so follow them here!
NetApp Virtualization and YouTube!
NetApp Tools for Virtualization!
And last but not least!
Vaughn Stewart – Virtual Storage Evangelist and all around great VM Guy!
So, hopefully these resources will be useful to you, I know they’re pretty useful for me and I reference them often. Definitely read the Must Reads, regardless of Virt Solution!
What are our lessons learned so far from this little Twitter Phishing Scam?
First of all, this involved infecting a single or single groups of people.
Distribution consisted of Infect a person by sending them to a site to capture their credentials. Once those usernames and passwords were collected, they would then use those compromised credentials to send this same message (via DM) to their followers, and continue the spread.
If Joe has 10 followers and DM’s it to those 10, and those 10 have 10 followers and DM it to the next 10, shortly you’d have thousands who are redistributing this – So long as they’ve visited the site and entered their credentials to be captured.
I see a lot of anger “I’m going to get person ‘x’ who sent me this message!”
It’s not the fault of the sender, not entirely. They were compromised by a phishing scam, it happens, you should work towards educating them instead of castrating them. So next time it will be part of their sense to not transmit their username/password to an untrusted site.
How could this terrible thing have happened? Now I hate (BlogSpot, Twitter, Followers)
Don’t hate the player, just be glad that it WAS done this way (a semi-safe site with only a small portion of cookies which get added to your browser) Here is what could have happened if it were introduced in an effective ‘distribution manner’.
You visit the site, you are prompted for credentials. Perhaps you’re prompted for credentials, though the better payload would be in the form of Malware, Spyware, Phishing-ware, Password capturers, and a number of other infection mechanisms.
Once this would be done, you’d be able to compromised on a number of fronts and able to distribute this to millions instead of just the few followers you have – Infecting Facebook, your banking account, etc so on and so forth.
What can I do about this in the future?
The universal rule of communication, especially unsolicited is ask yourself a few questions. Would you visit this link if you were having a conversation with the person? Having established rapport with them while talking? Yes likely.
However the tip here is – Random “auto-dm’s” does not guarantee a reason to visit their link. Yes a lot of people DO send out auto-DM’s, to the bane of all of us (SocialToo/ChrisBrogan– Thanks for helping limit that exposure!) However, don’t bane all communication in the future. If you think someone seriously DID write a funny blogpost about you because the person knows you, definitely do check it out! But in all seriousness, if you’ve not had some kind of established communication with this person to justify it, and let alone it brings you to not a funny blogpost, but to a fake twitter login page – Be sure to question it and use your common sense here.
Oh, and be wary of ever entering your credentials – again unless you explicitly trust the source.
Hopefully this Post-Mortem helps you deal with this situation, I’m still waiting for my self-infected account to start tweeting out to me (Controlled infection) For every problem there will be people looking to exploit it, and others trying to solve and contain it. I’ll be there trying to find new solutions and rid the world of future exposure as well :)
Good luck, and feel free to follow me if you like :) @cxi
YES! Here on the Eve of the New Year, I am bring this super cool module to you!
Just a recap of the last Dashboard snapshot, the portion we’ll be addressing is Visualizations!
Once you click that little gem of a link you’ll be brought to a page which looks like this:
As usual I censored out the Filer name, Serial # and other things, but I did leave in some nice details. Note: based on latest loaded AutoSupport: 2008/12/27 06:00:00 PM -06:00
The reason I mention that is, you can run one Visualization report for say, December, and then pull one for November and then compare them for whatever reasons you need.
That single benefit alone makes it even more super cool ;)
At this point, click one of the objects in there (System, Disks, Raid, QTrees or Storage)
It will render the data and make it available to you: You can also export it to PDF of XLS
Time for a view of the System Tab:
This is the top portion of the System Tab. Notice how it breaks things down as if it were an actual system, giving you details. Something which you may not notice unless you hover are these cool popups (Popups do not function in Chrome)
System Options
Services
VIF3
And so on and so forth! You can hover over any object (Interfaces, Shelves, Loops) and it will provide you information which you’d normally spend your time scouring through sysconfig’s in order to find. That little bit right there is pretty damn sweet if you ask me!
Now when you go over to Disks you get a similar picture:
And hovering over one of our disks gives us information like this:
Details of a Disk
Now taking this journey along, we visit the Raid View of the Disks:
This one is fairly straight forward, same type of pop-up data – Very useful, but not really super exciting, unless you are looking forward to this specific data (I do at times, but at the moment, It feels anti-climactic with what is coming ahead! :))
Here is where it gets really cool (Part1) with Volume Logical Layout: QTrees and LUNS:
This is the first of the coolness! Below I’ve included something with LUN’s in it so you get that perspective as well.
And last but definitely not least Capacity View! *Cheer!* Err.. :
While there are so many things I can hover over and get details on (When you hover it will ofcourse tell you information about the volume, settings, etc) I want to make a special focus on the one with the yellow border!)
Notice the “See Recommendations” That is amazingly cool, if you ask me ;)
A little click on that and suddenly you see:
Remember as I’ve mentioned this before, this is a suggestion of discussing your state and that you ought to look at it. If it is part of your design to run something where you get a notice, that’s just fine! If you weren’t aware of it on a volume though, definitely worth investigating!
And that brings us to the end of the NetApp Premium AutoSupport Visualizations segment. I’d like to note the export to PDF and XLS are very cool, however you do not retain that same level of ‘interactive popups’ in PDF format that you do accessing it via WebGui. So, this is a pure case of What you See is What you Get – once you export out to PDF. And when you export to XLS You don’t get any pretty pictures, but you do get all of the raw data that you would see in the Popups, so they’re very complimentary to each other, and your ability to present and manipulate the data!
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this segment, I’ll be working on Configurations next so look forward to my next post!
It’s been asked – Hey what kind of features do you get when you use Google Apps in the Standard Edition?
For those of who you use Google Apps will realize it is free, so you can host your email (as I do) and have the rest of the apps controlled and assigned out there for the huge cost of $0.00
Let’s take a look at a few of the distinctive features.
By the looks of it, I have Webpages (I don’t use) Start Pages (Don’t use!) Email (Do use!) Chat (Use while in Email) Calendar (Don’t use) and Sites also not being used.
One cool feature of User Accounts is Contact Sharing!
A cool specific features for the Domain Settings happen to be some granular control, one feature of which Sarah was interested in knowing!
Another cool bit is Service Setting does allow you granular control over each of your Services that you have available. But those few things aside, this was just an extremely high level look at the Free offerings that Google has as part of Standard Edition