In this week’s newsletter:
Think boring is bad? No, it’s good! Check out Editor’s Corner for details. Also a TIP on how to get the last reboot or shutdown reason and user from the Windows Event Log, a FACTOID about the rising tide of robocalls and other telephone scams, and some MAILBAG comments from our readers including news of an exciting development in computer networking: Cat 10 Ethernet? Or is that 10 cats? Meow!?
Anyways, enjoy this week’s issue of WServerNews and feel free to send us feedback on any of the topics we’ve covered as we love hearing from our readers. And don’t forget to check out the latest issue of FitITproNews as there’s an Ask Our Readers item that I put in there to see if any of you fitness-minded IT pros can help me learn how to properly perform a deadlift. Plus there’s lots of terrific articles in this issue by our regular columnists including one from new columnist Lana Khazari who is the first female IT professional and fitness enthusiast to join our stable of FitITproNews columnists. Plus we also have links to lotsa Black Friday Deals in the areas of fitness/exercise, health/nutrition, and general IT pro kind of stuff. Subscribe to FitITproNews today!
Editor’s Corner
Earlier last week I met with the usual gang of local IT pros where we exchange tips and share frustrations that plague our profession. A problem shared is a problem halved, right? Well, sometimes.
Anyways, one of the guys I ended up talking with was James who has worked in IT for almost two decades. He currently works as a part-time admin for several small companies and does some consulting on the side. James said something that had us all nodding wisely in agreement, and I’ve reproduced our discussion below with some colorization added. I’ll start off with the statement that got the discussion going.
JAMES: The problem with Windows is that it’s not boring anymore.
ME: Huh? Whaddaya mean?
JAMES: Windows used to be boring. When I started out in IT everyone was in love with the iMac, that luminescent green-blue wonderbox you found on people’s desks, proudly displayed.
ME: You mean translucent.
JAMES: Whatever. My point is that it was beautiful. And the operating system Apple introduced a few years later was even more beautiful. PCs running Windows were boring by comparison.
ME: Yeah but PCs took over the business world, every corporate cubicle ended up having one, plus a big fat monitor.
JAMES: And lots of wires connecting all the stuff. Like a cable competition.
ME: Well, I can agree that most people found Windows a boring operating system during its hayday. It’s not for nothing that they call them white box machines, those things we kept kicking under our desks.
JAMES: Unless you had the grey Hewlett-Packards.
ME: White and grey — doesn’t compete with tangerine, does it?
JAMES: Forget the box. Windows as an OS has a history of being boring. I mean now boring for admins, not consumers. Every bloody version of Windows since Windows 2000 has added new Group Policy settings layered upon layer until the whole thing is ready to blow up. The registry has become more complex to map out than Middle Earth. Service packs came out like clockwork on a regular schedule, except when they didn’t. In which case we had to patch and patch and patch. And each new tool for managing Active Directory has made it harder to do the same things we always need to do as admins.
ME: There’s PowerShell.
JAMES: Please, if I’d wanted to manage everything from the command line I would have learned UNIX instead.
ME: UNIX is dead, long live the Linux.
JAMES: Yeah, whatever.
ME: So tell me then, why was it good that Windows used to be boring? And is it less boring now under Windows 10? And isn’t that good?
JAMES: Noooo, you don’t understand. I *liked* boring. I liked being able to use the same tools each cycle to deploy Windows. I liked not having to find new registry tweaks or policy settings to control the same thing in the latest version of Windows. I liked being able to keep using batch scripts I wrote more than a decade ago and seeing them still work properly.
ME: ECHO that.
JAMES: I liked Microsoft’s commitment to supporting enterprises through always keeping some form of backward compatibility so we could still run that 12 year old accounting software even on Windows versions it was never intended to run on. I *loved* how they could make that stuff work so I didn’t have to always upgrade everything.
ME: But it was boring.
JAMES: Right. And boring meant less stress for me as an admin. I knew what I had to do to make things work. I had peace of mind in my job. I could do it blindfolded.
ME: But it’s different now?
JAMES: Completely! Everything changed with Windows 10 and it’s constant new versions, licensing updates, new locations for settings. What the h*ll was wrong with the Control Panel that they had to change everything? And why continue changing things? Windows is constantly changing now, but the business needs of the companies I support haven’t changed. They still need to run the same kinds of software, use the same kinds of equipment, do the same sort of business routine.
ME: Then there’s the cloud.
JAMES: Don’t get me started on that! [Orders another beer]
ME: So let me get this straight. You’re saying that Windows is no longer boring, and that’s bad?
JAMES: It’s bad for us, anyways. It’s bad for me. What’s happened is that Microsoft, the great copier of other companies’ inventions, has decided to imitate apple. Now Windows is supposed to be cool, look cool, feel cool. And it does to a certain extent — look at the Surface for example, great device. Can almost do anything with it.
ME: I’m happy with my iPad, I can’t afford a Surface.
JAMES: That’s right! The Surface is the great iPad imitator, a PC and tablet in one. But without all the cool Apple software you can find in the iTunes store.
ME: iTunes is mostly full of junk, you know.
JAMES: True. But the Microsoft Store is even worse in that regard. Remember UWP apps? There was a big push for Windows developers to get on board writing UWP versions of software they had already written for Win32 and .NET and which millions of people were already happy using. Now UWP is dead as Thurrott predicted [EDITOR’S NOTE: Maybe not.] and all that effort spent learning the new paradigm is wasted for many of us.
ME: PowerShell keeps growing though, it’s even available for Linux.
JAMES: I can run Linux servers on Azure too. Maybe I should do that.
ME: I need to go home soon. Tell me again why you want Windows to be boring.
JAMES: Bring back boring old Windows again, I say. Stop pushing me to upgrade versions twice a year. Do you think my business users need to see a new Start menu or another web browser? Nobody I know uses Cortana, yet Microsoft continues pushing it. And the settings, they’re always changing what they look like, how they’re worded. No one can find things anymore. It’s a nightmare. It’s like they’re rebuilding Windows piece by piece on the fly. And I have to administer it. It drives me crazy.
ME: You need a more boring job. Maybe work at checkout in a supermarket?
JAMES: [Sips beer.] Hmm…maybe.
…
So to conclude then, what do our readers think about this? Especially those of you who are sysadmins. Is Windows boring enough for you these days? Should it be more boring? Or should Microsoft keep trying to jazz it up by following Apple’s lead? Maybe by adding a translucent green Start menu?
Email me at [email protected]
Got more thoughts about anything in this newsletter?
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Tip of the Week
>> Got any IT pro tips you’d like to share with other readers of our newsletter? Email us at [email protected]
Get the last Reboot or Shutdown reason and user from the Windows Event Log
Check out these tip on what’s becoming one of my favorite blogs: A Windows System Admin’s Blog:
Admin Toolbox
>> Got any admin tools or software you’d like to recommend to our readers? Email us at [email protected]
Read best practices guide that covers Veeam Backup & Replication with Nutanix using for AHV, vSphere & Hyper-V. The document includes a checklist to help ensure you implement all recommendations.
http://www.wservernews.com/go/t3vxpvxr/
SpecuCheck is a Windows utility for checking the state of the software mitigations and hardware against CVE-2017-5754 (Meltdown), CVE-2017-5715 (Spectre v2), CVE-2018-3260 (Foreshadow), and CVE-2018-3639 (Spectre v4):
https://github.com/ionescu007/SpecuCheck
Keypirinha is a fast keystroke launcher for Windows:
https://github.com/Keypirinha/Keypirinha
Uncap lets you map Caps Lock to Escape, or any key to any key:
https://github.com/susam/uncap
Mailbag
Two weeks ago we mentioned in our newsletter that changing passwords often is so 80s and is no longer recommended by Microsoft. Or even by NIST. This drew the following response from reader Jon Hill who also had a comment on the banana monoculture problem we talked about in the Factoid of our November 4th newsletter:
I’m experiencing what might be an edge case that is tangentially related to password rotation, but one that might start cropping up more frequently: after we enabled ADFS it suddenly became possible for rogue actors to issue hundreds of logon attempts to any account for which the e-mail address was known. For a while some users were experiencing a lockout every day or so, though it doesn’t look like anyone was successfully hacked. We eventually discovered that we could set up a different max bad logon attempts value for ADFS than for AD, and after we set the ADFS value to be very low, the number of AD lockouts went back to normal. I’m sure we’re still getting probed multiple times a day; it’s just that those probes are getting generic errors rather than bad-password, so the malefactors can’t learn anything.
Obviously, a better mitigation would be two-factor auth, but until we can set that up, I do think a combination of password complexity (or at least length!) requirements and periodic (every three to six months, maybe?) password rotation is appropriate.
Also, we removed admin rights from all user accounts and gave the IT staff secondary accounts with admin rights and 2FA. We have to RDP into a locked-down server to use those admin accounts, which is a little annoying but significantly improves our risk profile.
Oh, and since I’m already writing to you, I thought I’d mention a recent podcast on the banana monoculture:
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/bananas/
It says that the Cavendish variety makes up 50% of the total volume of bananas grown and sold, but nearly 100% of the export market. Evidently the other varieties don’t travel well.
As long as I can still have my daily banana or two…
And the Factoid in the November 11th issue of WServerNews asked what readers thought about the recent trend to include Dark Mode or an equivalent in recent releases of popular software and even in some operating systems like iOS. This generated a couple more comments which we’re sharing with you here. First are these comments from reader Doug Helmick:
Personally I like [Dark Mode] but professionally they are dangerous. Many years ago (before the days of SharePoint) I had my own Intranet setup for our business. I made much of the background dark and the text light which looked great but annoyed my boss. After I “saw the light” – style gave over to job security.
Next comes this illuminating email from reader Bruce Millar. Or at least his cats may find it illuminating. Sorry Bruce, I know from your puns you have a great sense of humor so I decided to take advantage of that 😉
I’m just a user, not a developer, so my comments are just to let developers know what they may not realize. I am ok for dark mode on my phone for keeping light levels low in the evening though gmail and other apps get black on white with a dark keyboard which is a 50% solution. The photos and videos do not black out. It would be nice to override that background too.
What I find totally useless on some websites is yellow on blue and blue on black. I never go back to those sites. Those combos are also useless on PowerPoint projections.
It would possibly help astigmatics and also be useful to me to have dark mode with a gradient (gradient?) with a sliding scale like the brightness one.
It would also be nice to have an app that would swap media volume for brightness for the volume buttons on my Samsung A20 since I usually have the sound muted for nighttime use and having to swipe twice get to the slider is annoying. A dismissable always-on slider would be a useful app.
BTW we are a 10 cat household and two of them like to sleep on me. One of those two will leave if I lie in bed using my phone for more than a minute. I presume he does not like the light reflecting from my glasses since he likes to lie on my chest and face my face to get chin rubs. I will try dark mode to see if he will stay longer.
Great experiment to try out, hope it leads to quantifiable results. I actually did a double take when I read your email though as I thought “Cat 10? I only know about Cat 5e and Cat 6 and nothing beyond that.”
Bruce also had some other suggestions for any of you out there who develop apps or websites:
A couple of items off the light topic but for app and website developers:
– check your data entry boxes in landscape mode to see if your headers and the keyboard actually leave room to see the text box and or allow scrolling to see the cursor point.
– Button placement is critical. There is a first responder app I just started in trial use with a menu button and an ‘availability’ button tightly adjacent to each other in the upper right corner. With the screen sensitivity on my A20 and my fat fingers it is ridiculously easy to turn my availability off when trying to access menu or just because finger curl over the edge will trigger that button. This would be frustrating in an emergency for me and the incident command since the app messages command of the status changes. I have sent feedback to the app that the button might be better if it could be put in the top middle of the screen or be made repositionable and lockable across that line of the screen in settings.
If any other readers would like to comment on these items or make similar suggestions, email me at [email protected]
Factoid – The phone rings. Do you pick up?
Last week’s factoid and question was this:
Fact: I recently read on a board somewhere that “CS grads are guaranteed a six figure income: $000,000. All zeroes.”
Question: Is this true? Does a Computer Science degree have any usefulness nowadays when it comes to employment, career advancement, or earnings potential in the IT/dev fields?
So far we’ve only received one response and this comes from longtime reader of our newsletter Doug Helmick who is a Systems Administrator in Iowa, USA:
My son was a CS Grad 3 years ago. In school he got hired as a TA for computer classes he had already taken. He had internships during school and over the summer. He was offered permanent jobs from those companies but chose something else when he graduated. So it is hard to say if it was the degree or the experience. Anyway his entry level position pays more than mine and I have been doing this a long time. So it seemed to work out well for him.
If other readers would like to comment on this subject you can email me us at [email protected]
Now let’s move on to this week’s factoid:
Fact: A study in 2018 by Boston Consulting Group indicates that 88 per cent of business calls are going unanswered because they receive too many nuisance phone calls.
Question: How do you personally deal with this? For more on the seriousness of this growing problem and efforts by industry and government to mitigate it, check out these other recent news articles found on various sites:
The House and Senate finally agree on something: Robocalls (TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/15/the-house-and-senate-finally-agree-on-something-robocalls/
Robocalls hit record levels as phone carriers, lawmakers and start-ups fight back (CNBC)
Spoofed phone calls are also a big problem here in Canada as these news items illustrate:
Scammers spoofing more than a dozen federal government departments to defraud Canadians (CBC News)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/fraud-spoofing-canada-government-1.5348659
Telescammers not only want your money. They’re also after your phone number (CBC News)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/scam-cellphone-spoof-cra-1.5360162
‘Hang up’: RCMP intelligence officer weighs in on scam calls frustrating Canadians (CTV News)
Email your answer to [email protected]
Conference calendar
>> Got an IT conference or event happening that you’d like to promote in our newsletter? Email us at [email protected]
Microsoft Business Applications Summit
April 20-21, 2020 in Anaheim, California
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/BusinessApplicationsSummit
Microsoft Build
May 19-21, 2020 in Seattle, Washington
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/build
Microsoft Inspire
July 20-24, 2020 in Las Vegas, Nevada
https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/inspire
Other Microsoft events
Microsoft Licensing Boot Camps – Dec 9-10 in Seattle, Washington
https://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/training
Infosec conferences
Cyber Security Summit – Dec 5 in Los Angeles, California
https://cybersummitusa.com/losangeles19/
Other conferences
European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference – Dec 2-5 in Prague, Czech Republic
https://www.sharepointeurope.com/
SharePoint Fest – Dec 9-13 in Chicago, Illinois
https://www.sharepointfest.com/Chicago/
Podcast Corner
Keep your app close and your traffic faster (The T-Suite)
https://techgenix.com/podcast/the-t-suite/
Critical infrastructure security with Eric Rosenbach and Robert M Lee (Risky Business)
https://risky.biz/netcasts/risky-business/
The Quest for Inclusive Technology (Windows Insider)
https://insider.windows.com/en-us/podcasts/
Using Azure DevOps to Automate Azure Deployments with Steven Murawski (Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast)
https://www.msclouditpropodcast.com/
Microsoft 365 with Stephen Rose (RunAsRadio)
New on Techgenix.com
Microsoft announces general availability for Desktop Analytics
Desktop Analytics is generally available. Here’s more on this service to help IT pros manage endpoints with a data-driven approach and cloud-based tools.
https://techgenix.com/microsoft-desktop-analytics/
Microsoft Intune gets a new streamlined user experience
Microsoft Intune is getting a bunch of new updates that will streamline the administration experience for users of the popular enterprise mobility app.
https://techgenix.com/microsoft-intune-user-experience/
Review: Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365
As Microsoft Office 365 grows in popularity, users need solutions to back up Office 365 data. Here’s our review of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.
https://techgenix.com/veeam-backup-microsoft-office-365/
SD-WAN: Is this going to be your network of the future?
As businesses evolve into a SaaS/IaaS model for accessing applications, new network technology is crucial. SD-WAN is just such a technology.
https://techgenix.com/sd-wan-network-future/
Monitoring Exchange and the rest of your network to avert disasters
What you don’t know about Exchange and your network can come back to bite you. Monitoring Exchange is one way to ensure that your systems stay up.
https://techgenix.com/monitoring-exchange/
Fun videos from Flixxy
The Skyhook Spacetether
The Skyhook – a rotating cable with a counter weight that catapults spaceships from earth orbit into the depths of space:
https://www.flixxy.com/the-skyhook-spacetether.htm
Dinosaurs Roamed Earth On The Other Side Of The Milky Way
Did you know that dinosaurs lived on the other side of the Galaxy?
https://www.flixxy.com/dinosaurs-roamed-earth-on-the-other-side-of-the-milky-way.htm
Every Donald Trump Cameo Ever
Every single Donald Trump film and TV cameo ever:
https://www.flixxy.com/every-donald-trump-cameo-ever.htm
Perhaps Not Today
When you realize that you are a duck and not a penguin…
https://www.flixxy.com/perhaps-not-today.htm
More articles of interest
4 unforeseen challenges of running VDI in the cloud
VDI in the cloud is different than an on-premises deployment, even if you take the lift-and-shift route. Here’s what to expect during a transition to the cloud.
How to realize server virtualization energy savings
Virtualizing servers is one of the most effective steps to reduce energy consumption, especially when the hypervisor and VM placement are taken into account.
4 microservices stumbling blocks to avoid
The benefits of microservices come with a cost. Review four common ways breaking up a monolith can actually complicate routine application development and management tasks.
Compare VMware Horizon cloud vs. on-premises
VMware Horizon runs in on-premises, public cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Each scenario presents different drawbacks, benefits and costs for customers.
Send us your feedback!
Got feedback about anything in this issue of WServerNews? Email us at [email protected]