In this week’s newsletter
Interview with CoreView’s Doug Hazelman. Ask Our Readers – “Failed Disk on SATA Array” error message. The cloud can be trusted…right. On-premises Office not dead yet. Reducing the pain of servicing stack updates. Brave browser, cryptic crypto wallets, Daaps? Using WUA to Scan for Updates Offline. Just the fax, ma’am. Plus lots more — read it all, read it here on WServerNews!
Enjoy this week’s newsletter and feel free to send us feedback on any of the topics we’ve covered — we love hearing from our readers! And please tell others about WServerNews! It’s free and always will be free — and they can subscribe to it here. Thanks!!!
HOT!!! – Interview with CoreView’s Doug Hazelman.
Rushing deployment of Microsoft Teams can lead to security and governance issues. The good news is you don’t need to be a PowerShell expert to deal with the situation! For more info check out my interview with CoreView’s Doug Hazelman on the subject of automating MS Teams governance!
Ask Our Readers – “Failed Disk on SATA Array” error message. (new question)
Last week a reader named Ian who works as a Cloud / Network Engineer sent us the following question:
I have a Sony laptop which, since the latest Windows Features Update was installed, is showing an error message ‘ Failed Disk on SATA Array ‘. I’ve checked the drivers and they seem to be fine.
Do I need to check the physical drive connection?
How can I see the SATA drives configuration are correctly partitioned?
Any help offered would be appreciated!
Can any of our readers offer any suggestions to Ian? Email us at [email protected]
Got questions? Ask our readers!
WServerNews goes out each week to almost 200,000 IT pro subscribers worldwide! That’s a lot of expertise to tap into. Do you need help with some technical problem or are looking for expert advice on something IT-related? Ask Our Readers by emailing your problems and/or questions to us at [email protected]
Mailbag
Back in our September 7th newsletter we asked readers when the last time was that they used a floppy disk and whether they still had any kicking around at their workplace or in their home. This must have tripped the nostalgia alarm because responses have been flooding in on this subject. Here’s a sampling of the ones we’ve received to date:
Last time I used a floppy was about 12 years ago for an old product that had the license authentication tied to a “special” floppy.
I remember in the 80s being in Austin Texas and seeing that a store was selling a box of the new ultra high capacity product known as 1.2MB 5.25″ floppies. They were a box of ten for $100. I could not find these yet in St.Louis where I lived at the time. Me and my other IT friends were all on the phone calling our Managers to see if we could purchase these. I was one of the lucky ones to get a green light. Carrying that box out of the store, I had superiority oozing out of every pore. –Doug Helmick, Systems Administrator
I still have hundreds of 3.5″ floppies for use with my Amigas (which have been retired for years). I do have an Amiga emulator on one of my Windows systems, and a custom controller that allows me to read those disks using standard floppy disks (Amigas were able to store 880K on a standard floppy versus 720K for DOS, and 1.76MB vs 1.44 for DOS). I do still have 40 or 50 old DOS floppies, as well. The few times I need to read a DOS floppy, I use a USB floppy drive I have stored away for that purpose (mostly for specialized boot functions). I may actually still have a few packages of blank 3.5HD floppies still in their original boxes! –Jeffrey Harris
Last time Is used them was with my ESI-4000 — it even has a SCSI CD-ROM and a SCSI disk drive! –Martin Urwaleck from Austria
For years I’ve kept a floppy disk around, flayed open and held in place with packing tape, pinned to my wall as a tangible reminder to any misbehaving hardware I have. When a piece of hardware started to really push my patience, I would grab an adjustable wrench or hammer and shake it at the offending component, reminding it what I did to the floppy disc. It didn’t always rectify the problem, but it felt good. –Daniel Bragg, Senior Developer
If any other readers out there are floppy-aficionados (floppynistas?) feel free to send us your stories by emailing us at [email protected]
Editor’s Corner
This week’s observations and ruminations from Mitch Tulloch our Senior Editor…
The cloud can be trusted…right.
Some things happened in the last few weeks that might cause both business decision-makers and ordinary people like you and I to take a second look at the idea of moving all or most of our important data and/or IT infrastructure into the cloud in order to save money or just make life more convenient.
Tesla suffers complete network outage, internal systems and connectivity features down (electrek)
Right. If I can’t connect to the cloud I can’t drive my car, or at least its features/capabilities may be limited. Thanks Elon.
Microsoft 365 services are coming back after major outage (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/28/tech/microsoft-outage/index.html
Golly Microsoft, if someone as big as you can’t keep your cloud services always available, then who can?
Lightroom App Update Wipes Users’ Photos and Presets, Adobe Says they are ‘Not Recoverable’ (PetaPixel)
So I guess all those photos I took are lost forever all because I hadn’t had time yet to sync them to the cloud? Thanks a lot Adobe, great way to update your software.
And so on.
There seems to be definitely pullback afloat in some quarters to moving everything to the cloud. For instance, Jim Rapozza the IT Research Director at Hewlett-Packard said the following (PDF) in a recently published Aberdeen knowledge brief:
“Aberdeen research has shown that, over the last three years, organizations have actually increased their use of on-premises servers and infrastructure. This is even true of cutting-edge businesses leveraging containers and Kubernetes, who have increased their use of on-premises and doubled their use of private cloud.”
When Aberdeen surveyed business over the last three years about their application and workload deployment, they discovered that “deployments using private cloud and on-premises systems have nearly doubled” while “workloads on public cloud have gone down by 25%”.
And when I discussed this with some IT pro colleagues in Europe, they informed me that in some countries like Germany there is a general feeling among businesses, schools and governments that on-premises private-cloud solutions are the only kind of cloud they are willing to embrace.
What about you and the business or organization you work for? Is the trend at your workplace or with your clients to move more data/infrastructure into public cloud, or are they starting to shy away from doing this and prefer to keep things under their watchful eye on-premises?
Is your trust in the cloud growing or waning? Why or why not?
Email your comments to me at [email protected] and we’ll share them with our readers.
On-premises Office not dead yet.
I’m talking about Microsoft Office of course — working at the office seems pretty dead these days since most of us are working from home. What I’m referring to is the statement “Microsoft Office will also see a new perpetual release for both Windows and Mac, in the second half of 2021” which I read recently here:
Microsoft is releasing a non-subscription Office suite in 2021 (Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-non-subscription-office-suite-2021-072127104.html
Does this mean we’ll soon be able to get our hands on Office 2021? I wonder if they’ll still have the ribbon. Some people even hate the new simplified ribbon.
What’s with all these ribbon-haters anyways? I *love* the ribbon, I *hated* the legacy versions of Word where you often had eight or ten toolbars stacked one under another beneath the menu bar. The ribbon is *great*, it’s the *best”. Long live the ribbon! 🙂
Anyways, if you don’t the ribbon there are ways you can send feedback to MS Developers telling them what you want fixed or changed in their products/solutions — please use them. Thanks!
Reducing the pain of servicing stack updates.
Some good news from Microsoft for those of you who are in charge of patch management for your organization.
Simplifying on-premises deployment of servicing stack updates (Microsoft Tech Community)
And check out this article as well:
Changes to improve security for Windows devices scanning WSUS (Microsoft Tech Community)
Brave browser, cryptic crypto wallets, Daaps?
And finally a recent article on TechGenix by Yours Truly asks for some help concerning a confusing situation that arose one morning when I tried to look up an archived page of a website on the Internet Archiving using Brave web browser. I asked for some help from readers but so far no one has added any comments to my article. Maybe some of our WServerNews readers know something about these things? If you do please go to this article and add your comments:
Ask Our Readers: Brave browser, cryptic crypto wallets, Daaps — Help! (TechGenix)
https://techgenix.com/brave-browser-cryptic-crypto-wallets-daaps/
Thanks in advance! –EDITOR
Got more thoughts about anything in this newsletter?
Email us at [email protected]!
Tell all your friends about WServerNews!
Please let all your friends and colleagues in the IT profession know about our newsletter. Tell them our latest issues can be found at wservernews.com while older issues dating back to 1997 can be found in our archive. And let them know also that they can receive WServerNews each week in their inbox by subscribing to it here. Thank you!
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]
Using WUA to Scan for Updates Offline.
Did you know that Windows Update Agent (WUA) can be used to scan computers for security updates without connecting to Windows Update or to a Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) server? This enables computers that are not connected to the Internet to be scanned for security updates. Learn how here on Microsoft Docs:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wua_sdk/using-wua-to-scan-for-updates-offline
Admin Toolbox
>> Got any admin tools or software you’d like to recommend to our readers? Email us at [email protected]
Still having issues with mailbox quotas? Help is on the way! Try out the email archiving solution MailStore Server and automatically delete archived emails from your email server:
http://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-server
The officeatwork Template Chooser is an Office 365 add-in that helps cloud ready organizations wanting to empower their information workers to achieve more:
https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/office/WA104380050?src=office&tab=Overview
TestDisk is powerful free data recovery program designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
ConvertPOLtoDCM is a utility to convert Group Policy .pol files into Configuration Manager 2012 compliance configuration items:
Factoid – Just the fax, ma’am.
Several issues ago we did a factoid about floppy disks and that was quite popular with our readers, so let’s look at another obsolete technology that somehow refuses to die:
Fact: Japan’s government declares war on fax machines
Source: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/09/27/national/japan-taro-kono-fax-machine-hanko/
Question: Does your business or organization still have a dedicated fax machine lying around? Or is your multifunction printer/copier/fax machine connected to a phone line? When was the last time you actually used a fax machine, and why?
Email your answers to [email protected] but please don’t fax them to us! 😛
Subscribe to WServerNews!
Subscribe today to our WServerNews newsletter and join 200,000 other IT professionals around the world who receive our newsletter each week! Just go to this page and select WServerNews to receive our monthly newsletter in your inbox!
Conference Calendar
>> Got an IT conference or event happening that you’d like to promote in our newsletter? Email us at [email protected]
Midwest Management Summit – Oct 11-15 in San Diego, California
https://mmsmoa.com/registration/mms-2020-midway-edition.html
European Cloud Summit – Oct 20-22 in Frankfurt, Germany
https://www.cloudsummit.eu/en/
European Azure Conference – Oct 27-29 in Nice, France
https://www.europeanazureconference.com/
Infosecurity Netherlands – Oct 28-29 in Utrecht, Netherlands
European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference – Nov 9-12 in Amsterdam, Netherlands
https://www.sharepointeurope.com/
DevOpsCon – Nov 30 – Dec 3 in Munich, Germany
Podcast Corner
An Update On Free Range Routing (Heavy Networking)
https://packetpushers.net/series/weekly-show/
VMworld Discussions – Day 0 (Virtually Speaking)
https://www.vspeakingpodcast.com/
Google’s Orion WiFi (Clear To Send)
Identity as the new perimeter (Risky Business)
https://risky.biz/netcasts/risky-business/
Microsoft Ignite 2020 Ignouncements (Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast)
https://www.msclouditpropodcast.com/
Microsoft Ignite 2020 Review (Microsoft Cloud Show)
http://www.microsoftcloudshow.com/podcast
New on Techgenix.com
Full circle: On-premises Exchange to Microsoft 365 — and back again
Migration from on-premises Exchange to Microsoft 365 may not be a one-way street. What about the companies that went to the cloud but want to come back?
https://techgenix.com/on-premises-exchange-to-microsoft-365/
Have you really tested your disaster recovery plan?
How do you simulate a disaster to see whether your disaster recovery plan is ready to handle anything? It’s not easy, especially for a datacenter.
https://techgenix.com/tested-your-disaster-recovery-plan/
Azure Windows Virtual Desktop: Avoid the fresh hell of stale user sessions
This tutorial on Azure Windows Virtual Desktop and stale users can help you cut down on helpdesk calls as employees work from home.
https://techgenix.com/azure-windows-virtual-desktop-stale-user/
Removing Log Analytics with the soft-delete option
This Azure Quick Tip shows you how to take advantage of soft delete in Log Analytics just in case you want to restore something you recently deleted.
https://techgenix.com/removing-log-analytics-soft-delete/
Everything you need to know about DNS and how it works
Even experienced IT pros take DNS for granted because it just — works. Here’s an in-depth look into DNS — for the next time someone asks you about it!
https://techgenix.com/know-about-dns/
Fun videos from Flixxy
Worlds Longest Touchdown Catch
Watch a group of skydivers engaged in a game of in-flight football while descending at over 160 mph!
https://www.flixxy.com/worlds-longest-touchdown-catch.htm
Flying Bedroom
Paraglider Hasan Kaval takes to the skies over the Turkish Rivera in a bed – taking a nap and waking up just in time for a perfect landing.
https://www.flixxy.com/flying-bedroom.htm
DK Magician’s Most Original Close-Up Magic
This magic performance won the ‘Most Original Close-Up Act’ at the International Federation of Magic Societies 2018.
https://www.flixxy.com/dk-magicians-most-original-close-up-magic.htm
The Nicholas Brothers – ‘Down Argentine Way’ (1940)
One of the greatest dance performances in the history of cinema: The Nicholas brothers in the 1940 movie ‘Down Argentine Way.’
https://www.flixxy.com/the-nicholas-brothers-down-argentine-way-1940.htm
More articles of interest
Use Pulumi and Azure DevOps to deploy infrastructure as code
Follow this tutorial for an overview of Pulumi, an IaC tool, within the Azure DevOps toolchain, and how to use them together to define, build, test and deploy infrastructure.
Three VDI challenges that can derail any project
IT shops need to look out for complexity, cost and performance problems when they put a VDI implementation plan in place.
Shore up defenses with help from Office 365 logs
Logging on Microsoft’s productivity platform used in conjunction with other tools can form an effective shield from malicious actors looking to find a way into your organization.
Microsoft plugs 2 zero-days on August Patch Tuesday
In addition to the actively exploited flaws, IT workers must contend with a domain controller exploit that could give an attacker administrative access.
Send us your feedback!
Got feedback about anything in this issue of WServerNews? Email us at [email protected]