Joseph Hinkle at MyITForum.com

For those of you who support Macs connecting to VPN, Tiger looks like a bad idea.

From the link:

Cisco confirmed Thursday that the new operating system, Mac OS X version 10.4, aka Tiger, won't come with support for Cisco's VPN client. The networking company has been working with Apple to provide VPN support for Tiger but was unable to get things completed by Tiger's 29 April release date, said Mojgan Khalili, a Cisco spokeswoman.

Cisco is advising users of its VPN client to delay upgrading to the new operating system until support is ready. Support should be available sometime in May, she added.

(via Tiger incompatible with Cisco VPNs - ZDNet UK News)

ArsTechnica posted a very in-depth review of Tiger.  One of the keys for me is that Internet Explorer is no longer included, so we’re working on alternatives because of our SharePoint servers.

From the link:

So convinced was I of the inevitability of the Mac OS X yearly release juggernaut that I never even considered the possibility that relief from the $129-per-year Mac OS X tax might come in the form of an extra six-month wait for version 10.4. "Let's do this again next year" were my exact words at the end of the Panther review.

(via ArsTechnica)

It should be interesting to see what other widgets come out, but this one looks pretty cool.  It would be great to have if you travel a lot.

From the link:

JiWire, the leading provider of information and services to help people connect to the Internet without wires, today announced that its worldwide hotspot directory is now available for Apple’s new Mac OS X version 10.4 “Tiger” as a Dashboard widget.

With a single click, JiWire’s WiFi Hotspot Finder allows Tiger users to search from more than 63,000 hotspots in 99 countries worldwide. In addition to finding locations closest to search parameters, users can seamlessly access JiWire’s website for more detailed venue information such as connection details, area maps, and location amenities, verified by JiWire’s global staff.

(via MacDailyNews - Apple and Mac News - Welcome Home)

In the Netherlands, the old guard recording industry has managed to persuade the government that they ought to tax any storage device that could ever possibly harbor a pirated work, which means levies of up to $4.30 per gigabyte on all MP3 players sold — imagine adding $240 to the price of an already expensive 60GB iPod.

And its also going to be on the Imax for those with one close by.

From the link:

Batman Begins will open a couple of days earlier than originally planned: Wednesday, June 15, instead of Friday, June 17, Variety reported.

(via Sci Fi Wire -- The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel)

For the MMS crowd, this is the hotel that was being built near the Venetian.  It looked great from the monorail.  Two other keys from the article: it isn’t a themed hotel and the casino is separate from everything else.  Too bad we’re in San Diego next year.  :P

From the link:

Wynn Las Vegas, a $2.7 billion resort built by casino magnate Steve Wynn, opened its doors early on Thursday to hordes of visitors eager for a glimpse of the lavish gambling, hotel and shopping complex.

(via Entertainment News Article | Reuters.com)

I hope these are good, not just movies turned out too fast.

From the link:

Paramount has signed a lucrative, exclusive distribution deal with Marvel for films based on the comic book publisher's remaining characters, reports Variety.

According to a Dow Jones report Wednesday night, Marvel has already amassed a half-billion-dollar war chest to make a slate of movies with budgets as high as $180 million, drawing on its remaining 5,000 comic-book characters.

Among the first of its superheroes headed for the silver screen: Captain America and Nick Fury.

(via Coming Soon! - Latest News)

This is an awesome article about the GINA, the dell that drives the winlogon process, and how it works.  The coding side is in-depth if you want to know, but there is a lot of good general info on how it works too.

From the link:

GINA is the pluggable part of WinLogon that third parties may replace in order to customize the functionality or the UI of the logon experience in Windows®. By replacing GINA, you can choose the authentication mechanism Windows will use for interactive users. This is often useful for smartcard or biometric logons.

(via Security Briefs: Customizing GINA, Part 1 -- MSDN Magazine, May 2005, http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/05/SecurityBriefs/default.aspx)

Infinity plans to convert San Francisco's 1550 KYCY, an AM station, to listener-submitted content. The station, previously devoted to a talk-radio format, will be renamed KYOURadio.

Infinity, one of the country's largest radio operators with more than 183 stations around the country, will invite do-it-yourselfers to upload digital audio files for broadcast consideration by way of the KYOURadio.com website.

So I got a little frustrated in my search for ‘Blog This’ functionality.  From what I can tell, w.bloggar doesn’t do it in IE and I couldn’t find a plug-in for it so it would be enabled.

I remembered Rod talking (here) about how great BlogJet is and decided to look at it.  Lo and behold, it supports ‘Blog this’!  The downside is the price though.  At $39.99, its awfully expensive.  I wouldn’t have blinked at $19.99.  I would have been flying through my credit card number to order.  I really have to pause at $39.99 though.  I guess I’ll give it a try and see how I like it.

Any alternatives that aren’t tied to an aggregator?  I use Bloglines and am very happy with it. 

I just noticed Wise Package Studio 5.6 in the support center. After trying to download it all day, I finally got it downloaded and installed. The great news is that it fixed the WiseScript compiler issues that caused a compiled executable to be named and placed incorrectly.

Rod Kruetzfeld wrote an article that explained the original problem in detail here.

Happy downloading!

Nothing like the first day back after a week away to make you realize why you don't take vacations.  I hope everyone had a great time at the conference! 

I'm working on putting together some info on the Vintela SMS plugin from the MacOS perspective.  I'm going to start testing soon, so hopefully I'll have some good info for everyone.

Am I the only one who wishes that we could attend multiple sessions at the same time?  I've had lots of scheduling overlaps this year.  Maybe, sometime in the future, a video stream could be included in the MMS/Commnet site.  I would love to be able to catch up on sessions I missed out on over lunch or break.  Two months is a long wait for the DVD edition... :) 

I need a way to blog a link to a web page easily.  Anyone know a way to do this for .Text?

One last post about Ballmer's keynote...

One of the slides talked about some of the management capabilities Longhorn will have built in.  There is an improved health model with extended event info.  Some of this was referenced in the SQL 2005 Reporting services demo during the keynote as well.  This data will be stored as XML that can be drilled into from Reporting Services.

One of the big selling points is that Longhorn will be the OS platform for the next ten years.  I'm a bit skeptical about that, but it depends on how platform is defined.  I figure a .1 release will come out sometime in the 4-5 year window, but that's pure speculation.

Another improvement is that updates will require 70% fewer reboots over Windows XP.  Any improvement there is a good thing.  I'm tired of looking at our “Reboot pending” report.

The most exciting thing I saw in the Longhorn portion of the presentation was built-in Network Access Protection.  The NAP will be compliant with the Trusted Computing Group specification for network access protection, so there is hope that it won't be a proprietary system that only MS uses.

Also, there was the ever present promise to reduce the number of images necessary, though I've managed to cut the number of images in our environment down pretty well.  It is always good to make that portion of the admin function more streamlined, as it takes a significant amount of time to make a production-ready image.

More to come.  I'm catching up on my notes and I think I may swing by the Expo again to talk to the folks at Vintela.

Part of Steve Ballmer's keynote this morning was a demonstration of the WS-Management technology that Microsoft has been developing in conjunction with other vendors, including, but not limited to, Sun and Dell.

WS-Management is a hardware-based, agentless management processor that allows for remote access to basic functions.  The functions demonstrated today were remote startup, remote shutdown, inventory, and critical hardware failure, all reported without an agent.  Most of the demo was done without an OS even booted!

I'll post some more technical details as I have time to find them.  If you know of any good technical resources for WS-Management, feel free to let me know using the contact link. 

I've seen some great demonstrations before, but I don't think anything compares to Bill Anderson's “Wall of Fire” demo during Steve Ballmer's keynote this morning.  The basic scenario is a wall of one hundred PCs and monitors that display four Windows logos like any basic video wall. 

The awesome part is that the entire wall was reimaged using the OS Deployment Feature Pack.  The entire process, including user state preservation, took about ten minutes.  In the end, every machine was returned to a fully functional state and upgraded to Windows XP SP2 from Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP1.

Great job!

Continued from Part 1.

I'll keep this brief since I'm on my way to Steve Ballmer's keynote.

Pillars

Unified OS Deployment

            Disconnected/Remote deployment via CD/DVD

            Machine Replacement improved

            Combined with Automated Deployment Services

                        Unified PXE server

Security

            Vulnerability Reporting

            Machine quarantine based on patch level

            Asset management, patch management, software distribution over Inet

            Patch prioritization and selective download for poorly conneced clients

Simplicity

            Fully functional out of the box with a working MP/DP/Etc.

            Simplification of distribution – Using Workstations as DPs

            Task-based UI

            Install in a time window

Desired Configuration

            Regulatory compliance

            Create and edit custom configuration definitions

Sorry it took so long for me to sift through my notes.  Rod posted Ed's notes from the keynote yesterday.  Since he covered all of that, I'll focus on the SMS State of the Union address that Brad and Bill Anderson gave shortly after.  The State of the Union address has been the highlight of MMS for me since I began coming 4 years ago.

The first news item from the presentation was that Bill would in fact be moving to lead the SMS v5 product that will be in development in parallel with SMS v4.  The downside is that we won't be seeing him as much.  We'll miss you Bill!

PSS stats for SMS look good.  Call volume is down 33% since the release of SP1.  Only nine (NINE!) hotfixes have been released since the release of SP1.  The pre-SP1 number was somewhere around thirty-two, so it is a pretty big improvement.

The generic scan tool for patches MBSA doesn't handle was talked about briefly.  It encompasses the MS04-028 and the February patches.  It will dump the inventory in as normal patch status like the individual tools, but we will only need to maintain one scan tool instead of scripting a new one every month.  Releases will be coordinated with the general patch release.  One other note in that portion was that the SMS, SUS, and MBSA teams will need to sign off on a patch before it ships to ensure that it can be detected for Enterprise customers.  Very cool!

They talked at length about Vintela, but I'm saving it for another post.  I'm very excited about their product!

The Dell update scan tool was also mentioned at length, but the most interesting thing for me was the announcement that Microsoft is working with HP to develop a similar tool.  It should be out in the December/January time frame, but is subject to change as always.  It should detect the same things the Dell scan tool does, including drivers, firmware, bios updates, and application updates.

The scan tool for Microsoft Update will be available 30 days after the product ships, so probably in June.  This will give SMS access to the single catalog that we've all been looking forward to.

The Brothers Anderson also talked about System Center Reporting Manager.  As mentioned in Ed's notes, it looks very good.  I have some concerns about the migration path for all of our SMS 2003 reports that we've authored, but the technology is good.  It is all based on SQL Reporting Services, which my manager would be happy to hear.

My notes about SMS v4 will be in the post that follows.

I must say that I am very excited about the current and upcoming SMS/SC products, enhancements, and add-ons.  I just sat though the Bill and Brad Anderson's SMS State of the Union session and probably could write ten posts about all of the new and exciting changes that are forthcoming, not only in SMS 2003, but also in SMS v4.

I'm trying to collect my thoughts, but I'll be posting as I get something coherent together.  Everyone go learn SQL Reporting Services!

I had to turn commenting off because of comment spam.  If you have a comment on one of my posts, you can email me or post it to your blog and trackback to the article you are commenting on.  Sorry for any inconvenience!

Rod asks is anyone is blogging MMS 2005.  I will probably be posting things of interest, especially since I'll be testing cellular aircards for work.  Yeah, that's my excuse.

Anyone else?

P.S.: Sorry for the gigantic delay between posts.  I've been swamped with work and life alike.  I'll try harder next time.