WServerNews: The Internet has reached middle age

In this week’s newsletter:

Celebrating (?) the Internet’s 50th birthday; costs of cloud lock-in; new cloud training program; Microsoft conferences for next year; and worst possible choice for username/password. Lots more including a TIP on Intune device management; some reader questions in our MAILBAG about Windows Virtual Desktop; a new ASK OUR READERS question about managing Firefox settings on client machines; and this week’s FACTOID which asks: Is milk the next banana?

Enjoy this week’s issue of WServerNews and feel free to send us feedback on any of the topics we’ve covered — we love hearing from our readers 🙂

Editor’s Corner

This week’s ruminations from Mitch Tulloch our Senior Editor…

The Internet’s 50th birthday

So apparently the Internet has now reached middle age:

50 years ago today, the internet was born in Room 3420 (Fast Company)

https://www.fastcompany.com/90423457/50-years-ago-today-the-internet-was-born-in-room-3420

The article is an interesting read and it prompted me to reflect briefly with my own first experience encountering the Internet. I remember clearly one day in 1995 when a colleague walked into my classroom demonstrating Netscape Navigator on his Windows 95 laptop computer. I had heard about FTP and USENET prior to that but as a Physics teacher I hadn’t found any real use for learning these technologies at the time. But seeing the World Wide Web in action that day made me go Wowee, despite how long it took to display web pages over the machine’s built-in 14.4k modem.

Fast forward a couple of years and I’m using Pico on a UNIX machine to code HTML pages for customers, and soon afterwards I’m managing the Web content production end for a fast-growing Internet Service Provider. Then a year or so after that I’m standing on a ladder stringing coaxial cable down a ventilation duct to get fractional T1 Internet access up and running at a training company I was working for. Shortly after that I’m teaching TCP/IP networking classes as a Microsoft Certified Trainer to a bunch of middle-aged system administrators trying to get up to speed on rapidly evolving computing and networking technologies.

I haven’t looked back ever since. But if I do stop for a moment and ask how the Internet has transformed my work and my life, the following thoughts quickly come to mind:

Email has changed the way I work. It lets me work effortlessly with a terrific company located many thousands of miles away.

Amazon has changed the way I shop. If I need to buy something in a hurry, I go there first before looking for a local source or outlet.

I hate Google but I don’t know what I’d do without it. It’s still the best approach for finding information about almost anything. But I miss the early days of Yahoo, Webcrawler, Altavista and so on — browsing the Internet was fun in those days.

The Internet promised us freedom. It made us imagine a world where everything was free. But it hasn’t turned out that way. Instead we now have a world where we no longer have any privacy.

Freedom on the Internet has also exposed the bad side of humanity in new ways. Zuck is probably Janus incarnate. Or Hephaestus if you prefer Greek mythology to Roman.

Finally, my ongoing passion for understanding all things related to computer network leads me to the conclusion that the Internet as we know it is fragile, very fragile. BGP was never meant to support such a huge and complex structure as the Internet has become. Lots and lots of workarounds are in place to try and keep everything from falling apart or blowing up. So love the techies who work at your ISP, you wouldn’t believe how hard their job is — the job of keeping the online world together.

What are your own thoughts and reflections concerning the Internet on the occasion of its 50th birthday? Is it good or evil? Has it benefitted your life or wrecked it? What’s your favorite — and least favorite — aspect about it?

Email me your thoughts: [email protected]

Costs of cloud lock-in

So maybe your company can save some money by moving your business data into the cloud. But what happens when you want to take your cloud-hosted data back and move it to some other cloud provider or simply move it back into your own datacenter? Read this article for some insight on this matter:

AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data (The Information)

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/aws-customers-rack-up-hefty-bills-for-moving-data

What do our readers think about this matter? And have any of you had any experience with it? Email us at [email protected]

New cloud training program

Ensono, a hybrid IT services provider in Chicago, recently announced the launch of its Cloud Academy program, which will aim to close the tech industry’s talent gap through a non-traditional educational path. IDC’s Worldwide CIO Agenda 2019 Predictions shows 30 percent of high-demand roles for emerging technologies will remain unfilled through 2022. The program is a two-year curriculum, and candidates choose whether they want to pursue AWS or Azure for their training. Courses are tailored to each of the platforms so candidates finish proficient in one of the two cloud leaders’ platforms. Gordon McKenna the CTO of public cloud at Ensono and who does not have a college degree himself says, “Working in cloud technology doesn’t mean you need a 4-year degree. Our goal with the Cloud Academy is to provide basic training to hard-working and capable individuals who want to pursue cloud careers.”

Microsoft conferences for next year

Be sure to check out the Conference Calendar section of this week’s newsletter for information about some Microsoft conferences coming up next year so you can mark them into your planner. And if you know of any other IT or dev conferences coming up that you feel our readers will want to know about, email us at [email protected]

Worst possible choice for username/password

And finally in the NAWWW THIS CAN’T BE TRUE department comes the following must-read article concerning the Equifax security breach scandal:

Equifax used ‘admin’ as username and password for sensitive data: lawsuit (Yahoo Finance)

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/equifax-password-username-admin-lawsuit-201118316.html

You’re kidding, right? Really??

Got more thoughts about anything in this newsletter?

Email us at [email protected]!

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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]

Intune Device Management: Removing Local Admins in Windows 10 Devices (Secure Infrastructure Blog)

A tip by the Secure Infrastructure team at Microsoft on removing the local user accounts from Administrators group to secure devices from unauthorized privileged access:

https://secureinfra.blog/2018/12/14/intune-device-management-removing-local-admins-in-windows-10-devices/

Admin Toolbox

>> Got any admin tools or software you’d like to recommend to our readers? Email us at [email protected]

Cerberus FTP Server is used by thousands of companies worldwide for secure, fully customizable file transfer to fit any environment. Download your free trial today!

https://www.cerberusftp.com/ad-techgenix/?utm_source=TechGenix&utm_medium=Banner&utm_campaign=Trial&utm_content=Secure

RedSnarf is a pen-testing / red-teaming tool for Windows environments:

https://github.com/nccgroup/redsnarf

This guide shows you how to write cross-platform Node.js code:

https://github.com/ehmicky/cross-platform-node-guide

Explorer++ is a lightweight and fast file manager for Windows:

https://github.com/derceg/explorerplusplus

Mailbag

Last week in our newsletter we asked the question, Why Windows Virtual Desktop? We mentioned that while WVD may be the best *virtual* desktop experience, can it also be the best *desktop* experience for businesses? Can it replace the desktop PC in general? And is it even meant to? Will it soon replace all legacy RDS and VDI deployments used in businesses today? Mark Milligan, an IT Manager working in Texas, responded by asking even more questions about it:

Mitch, I would be interested in WVD for replacing regular desktops, but what kind of hosts do I need to run them? Will the small form factor “terminals” be robust enough to handle the traffic across the network? What kind of network improvements would be needed to support all of the extra traffic? Will I need to upgrade to CAT6 cabling, more than 1GBs connections, WAN improvements to 100 GB or faster? These are some of the unknowns that as an administrator we are concerned with. The average user has no idea what happens on the back end to get to those cloud based devices. A manager is only concerned with the costs of the equipment, but the hidden upgrades needed are usually not considered until the invoice needs to get paid. Just my 2 cents.

What do other readers think about this? My own guess is that the business PC of the future is probably the Chromebook and we will likely see more of these deployed soon in enterprises since you can apparently run WVD on ChromeOS:

With Windows Virtual Desktop, the bad old days are coming back (ComputerWorld)

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3444606/with-windows-virtual-desktop-the-bad-old-days-are-coming-back.html

I haven’t tried this myself as I’ve resisted the move towards Chromebooks because of privacy concerns relating to Google, but I’d be interested to hear what readers who have tried this have to say about the subject. Also let us know if you have any comments regarding Mark’s above questions, or any other thoughts or concerns about WVD. Email me at [email protected]

We also reported in last week’s newsletter that the German Federal Office for Information Security recommends Mozilla Firefox as the most secure web browser. I then asked how many of our readers have Firefox deployed in their environment and whether they use Group Policy to manage it on client machines. John Dvorchak who is a Systems Administrator working for a company in Alberta, Canada responded with:

We use Firefox exclusively. We don’t use Group Policy but we have made some changes on all Workstations to the Firefox about:config settings.

Do other admins that have deployed Firefox in their environments use this approach or do you use Group Policy? Why or why not? And if you use about:config settings to manage Firefox on client machines, how do you update these settings across the PCs on your network? In fact let’s make this a new Ask Our Readers question:

Ask Our Readers: Managing Firefox about:config settings on client PCs (new question)

If you deploy Firefox on your organization’s client PCs and you need to update the about:config settings on these PCs, what method do you use for doing this?

Email your recommendations to us at [email protected]

Factoid – Is milk the next banana?

Last week’s factoid and question was this:

Fact: A recent survey indicated that 50 percent of young people in America don’t think college is worth it.

Question: Do you think a college education still has value for young people to pursue? I expect some of our readers thoughts on this matter may differ depending on which country they live in.

No readers from Canada or the USA responded to this one but we did receive an illuminating response from reader Wayne Hanks from down under in Australia:

Ah yes, We in the Antipodes laugh when we see your “College” education and how much it costs. I can see why many young people are swearing off it and going straight into the work force if they can. In Australia, we have k-12 and then a choice of going to a workplace and having an apprenticeship, backed with a TAFE (Technical and Further Education, basically a trade school) course, or doing technical courses through TAFE. For example my eldest boy at 21 is debt free, and did a Diploma at TAFE in Networking and has his CCNA . He paid for the courses up front and managed to win a scholarship to assist. He is now working full time for a MSP.

My younger boy has just finished year 12 and originally wanted to do University (equivalent to College, and just as expensive), however has backed away from that idea as he has realised that he can do a similar course at TAFE for 1/3 the price of the University degree. It still counts as a Tertiary qualification and gets them involved with industry much sooner.

I have also found that whilst a lot of employers are looking for tertiary degrees, it is actually strange when they employ someone with an arts degree in a management position. Just because someone can sit through 3-4 years of courses and regurgitate the required information on an exam, does not prove that they are a better fit for your company. All it proves is that they can regurgitate the information in a format that pleases their lecturers.

If any other readers would like to comment on this topic you can still email us at [email protected]

Now let’s move on to this week’s factoid:

Fact: Most U.S. Dairy Cows Are Descended From Just 2 Bulls. That’s Not Good (NPR)

Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/10/17/770696476/most-u-s-dairy-cows-are-descended-from-just-2-bulls-thats-not-good

Question: We all know about the looming disaster happening in the banana world because of monoculture. Is something similar going to happen soon with milk products? Can a monoculture ever be a good idea?

Email your answer to [email protected]