markwilson.it

Author: Mark Wilson

  • Symantec and Veritas to merge

    December seems to be the month for high-profile corporate takeovers in the IT world!

    A couple of weeks back IBM sold its PC business.

    Then last week Microsoft bought an anti-spyware company.

    Now I’ve read that Symantec and Veritas are to merge in a $13.5bn deal.

    I regularly recommend Veritas’ BackupExec suite of products to corporate clients because it is so well integrated with the Microsoft platform – indeed, the Backup utility for Windows (NTBackup) is actually a cut-down version of BackupExec. Let’s just hope that the new company will be as quick to embrace new Microsoft technologies as Veritas has been in the past.

  • Microsoft buys Giant Company

    Back in August I posted a blog entry about the what you should know about spyware article on the Microsoft website. The article has since been replaced but I was interested to read about Microsoft’s purchase of Giant Company – a leading provider of anti-spyware and anti-spam software.

    Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows includes some information on Giant AntiSpyware as well as comment on Microsoft’s plans for the product, but this is the clearest indication yet as to how Microsoft is planning to integrate anti-spyware capabilities into Windows – something that some industry commentators criticised Windows XP Service Pack 2 for not addressing.

  • Restoring data in Outlook Express

    I don’t use Outlook Express personally, but I recently rebuilt my father-in-law’s PC and imported his settings from the old disk. I didn’t have a clue where Outlook Express stored its data, but came across an article on the iOpus website about backing up Outlook Express. The old system was non-functional, so I didn’t follow the whole article, but it gave me the information I needed to find all the .DBX files with the mail data and the .WAB address book file.

  • Get Windows XP and Office 2003 in Welsh

    (I went to Uni’ in Wales, so I feel duty bound to publicise this for my Welsh-speaking friends!)

    Microsoft have worked with the Welsh Language Board to develop two new Welsh-language interface packs – one for Windows XP and another for Office 2003. They are free to download, and enable Welsh speakers to work more easily in their chosen language whether at home, in business or in education.

    To find out more, visit the Welsh pages on the Microsoft UK website.

  • Best practices for maintaining your computer at work

    A couple of years back, I worked as a Project Manager in the IT department for a major fashion design, marketing and retail company. My main project provided a standard desktop operating environment, along with replacement mail and directory services, across Europe, vastly improving the overall reliability of the IT platform and the resultant user experience.

    Being a retailer, our IT infrastructure budget was not huge, and it seemed that I was forever explaining why we “locked down” the desktop, and why we could not support users’ own devices on our network, be they notebooks, PDAs, or mobile phones (synchronising with our PCs). We had corporate standards, and they were set for good reasons (mainly supportability and reliability). It really didn’t help when senior executives started to buy Blackberry devices and expected them to work with our e-mail servers (and when the IT Director’s view was one of “just make it work”… but without an associated budget). Another bugbear was educating users not to open suspicious e-mails and attachments. On top of that, our users were spread across Europe, and there were cultural and legal differences which affected the way in which users considered “ownership” of their PCs and associated data (whether work PCs should be available for personal use, etc.).

    Now Microsoft has published a document which would have been a really useful summary for my users (8 ways to help maintain your computer and devices at work). It may be a bit “high level”, but it is written for end users and it raises some valid points.

    Actually, I think that the whole Microsoft At Work section of the Microsoft website is worth a look, with articles including:

    I recommend that anyone who uses a computer at home or work, or who is responsible for supporting users in their daily IT activities should take a look.

  • Windows Server 2003 SP1 RC1 has been released

    Back in July, I reported that Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) had been delayed until 2005.

    I’ve just read that, a couple of days back, Microsoft released the first release candidate (RC) build of Windows Server 2003 SP1. Windows 2003 SP1 RC1, is available to the public as a 316Mb download for 32-bit x86-based systems or as a 396Mb download for 64-bit Itanium systems.

    According to the Windows IT Pro magazine network WinInfo Daily Update, Microsoft expects to ship the final version of Windows 2003 SP1 in early 2005, reporting that:

    “Windows Server 2003 SP1 isn’t the huge architectural leap that Windows XP SP2 was [but it] includes an enhanced security infrastructure that borrows the pertinent low-level security features from XP SP2, including the data execution prevention (DEP) technology and Distributed COM (DCOM) restrictions; a new roles-based Security Configuration Wizard (SCW) that makes it easy to close unneeded services and ports given the tasks a server is assigned to perform; Windows Firewall, which provides boot-time and setup-based protection against electronic attacks; and the post-setup Security Update Wizard, which prevents client network access to the server until it’s properly configured.”

  • IBM sells its PC business

    Last night, on my way home, I heard BBC Radio 4 reporting on IBM’s sale of its PC business to Lenovo.

    So what! Another merger in the overcrowded PC manufacturing space. Well, absolutely, except that IBM invented the personal computer and were the third largest PC retailer in 2004!

    It will be interesting to see how HP (who are still trying to get to grips with their acquisition of Compaq) respond to this latest move in the market. IMHO, Dell should also be watching their backs, as although they have over twice Lenovo’s new market share, there is much talk about the strong growth of the Chinese economy which may well allow Lenovo to reduce the business’ cost base, providing opportunities for further reductions in PC prices, in a market that is already largely commoditised.

    Links
    BBC News report: Lenovo: The making of a legend?
    IBM press release
    Lenovo press release

  • Denying access to certain files on an Apache web server

    Under certain circumstances, it may be necessary to deny users access to various files on a web server.

    For example, some directives in an Apache .htaccess file may be considered a security risk and so access to the file may be prevented using the following directives:

    <files .htaccess>
    order deny,allow
    deny from all
    </files>

    The first line limits the directive to the .htaccess file (simply change the filename to limit access to other files), whilst the remaining code sets deny to have precedence over allow, denies access from all users and then terminates the directive.

  • Preventing listing the contents of a directory on an Apache web server

    When no default document is found on a web server, depending on the server configuration, users may be able to list the files in a given directory. For Apache servers, this may be prevented on a per-directory basis by adding add an IndexIgnore directive to an .htaccess file.

    The syntax is:

    IndexIgnore file [file] ...

    For example, IndexIgnore * will prevent listing of all files, or alternatively, individual files may be specified.

    Full details may be found in the Apache HTTP Server documentation.

  • Redirecting clients when websites change

    Whilst looking at the website statistics for my main website, I realised that many users were attempting to access pages that no longer exist on the server. Some may argue that old content should be left in place, but others will disagree and my preferred approach is to redirect requests to the new locations, or at least to provide a polite message that the document has been removed and a link to the home page! Fortunately on an Apache server, this may easily be achieved using an .htaccess directive.

    Various types of redirect are available through .htaccess, using the syntax:

    Redirect [status] URL-path URL

    The status argument can be used to return a number of HTTP status codes:

    • permanent returns a permanent redirect status (301) indicating that the resource has moved permanently.
    • temp returns a temporary redirect status (302). This is the default and is assumed if no status argument is given, indicating to the client that the resource has moved temporarily.
    • seeother returns a “See Other” status (303) indicating that the resource has been replaced.
    • gone returns a “Gone” status (410) indicating that the resource has been permanently removed. When this status is used the URL argument should be omitted.

    Other status codes can be returned by giving the numeric status code as the value of status. If the status is between 300 and 399, the URL argument must be present, otherwise it must be omitted.

    For example, a temporary redirection from old file or directory to new:

    Redirect /olddirectory/oldfile.html http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/newfile.html
    Redirect /olddirectory http://yoursite.com/newdirectory/

    or a permanent redirect:

    Redirect permanent /olddirectory http://www.yoursite.com/

    or redirect with error 410:

    Redirect gone /oldfile.html

    Full details for Apache users may be found in the Apache HTTP Server documentation.

    Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) users can find information on redirecting requests to files directories or programs in the IIS 6.0 Operations Guide.

    RFC 2616 details all HTTP status (including error) codes.