Windows on a Mac?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Ever since Apple announced last year that they will switch to using Intel processors, the industry has been alive with speculation as to which Mac model will switch first. My view is a bit different – Apple make fantastic-looking PCs, and if they have Intel hardware I ought to be able to run a version of Windows on one. Or, perhaps I could run Mac OS X in a Virtual PC on Windows (probably not, as I guess it will look for an Apple trusted platform module)?

On the way to work today, I was listening to episode 36 of the This Week in Tech podcast (incidentally, one of my favourite podcasts – even if it is a little US-centric) which briefly discusses the possibility of a new emulator for Windows applications on a Mac (not like Wine for Linux, which is API-based – you will need a copy of Windows in order to make this work, in a similar manner to running Linux applications on Solaris using BrandZ), so maybe I really can have the best of both worlds.

All I need to know now is, with the industry finally starting the push to 64-bit technology, will the new Intel Macs use cheap 32-bit processors (an early report from ThinkSecret suggested 3.6GHz Pentium 4s), or some new 64-bit dual-core beast? With CES taking place this week (Intel has already made some major announcements about its brand, identity and technology direction) and MacWorld next week (surely there must be some news there about Intel Macs), maybe we’ll get an answer soon.

Mini mouse (not the Disney variety)

Posted on By Mark Wilson

For some time now, I’ve been looking for a miniature mouse to take with me when I’m on the road and save my aching hands from the pain of trackpad/touchpoint. A former customer of mine has a fantastic IBM optical 3-button travel wheel mouse, but at the time I looked into getting one it was too expensive. Then, yesterday I was in PC World (sorry… it was an emergency) and I saw an optical 2-button mini-mouse which was both inexpensive and “different”. A £9.99 optical mouse coloured like a bee!

My son loves it (even though, at just over one-year old, he doesn’t understand what it is, he was soon holding it correctly and clicking). My wife thinks it is cute. I just like it and find it remarkably easy to use, despite its diminutive proportions.

Starting the new year with a competition

Posted on By Mark Wilson

For many of us who work closely with Microsoft, product launch dates are often a bit of a lottery (and a closely guarded secret) but Microsoft EMEA have taken it all a step further by running a competition to guess the launch date for Windows Vista!

1st Prize is to attend the Vista launch event in the USA: a full package with entry, flight and 3 nights in a 4-star hotel. 2nd–4th prize winners will each receive a new Xbox 360. 5th–10th prize winners will receive an Xbox core system.

I’ve gone for 8th December 2006, but also have a feeling that date might be a bit late in the Microsoft product launch season (apparently there was some marketing science behind why SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 had to be launched in early November last year).

Find out more at the Windows Vista and Office “12” Beta Experience website.

Securing my wireless network

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Last week I wrote about upgrading my wireless network. It’s been running well since then, so this afternoon I decided to go ahead with stage 3 – configuring wifi protected access (WPA). As I haven’t set up a RADIUS server here, and to be honest, it would be overkill for a small network like mine, I decided to implement WPA-PSK (pre-shared key), as detailed in Steve Lamb’s post (and blogcast) on the subject.

Initially, it all went well, simply setting the access point to use WPA-PSK and defining a passphrase. Within a few minutes, I had entered the passphrase on two of my notebook PCs and all was working well (one using a Compaq WLAN MultiPort W200 and one using an Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG network connection) but then I hit some real problems. My wife’s PC (the whole reason for us having a wireless network) and my server were refusing to play with the access point displaying the following message when I selected the wireless network and entered the network key:

Wireless configuration

The network password needs to be 40 bits or 104 bits depending on your network configuration.

This can be entered as 5 or 13 ASCII characters or 10 or 26 hexadecimal characters.

This seemed strange to me – there was no mention of any no such restrictions when I set up the WPA-PSK passphrase (the network key). With one machine running Windows XP SP2 and the other running Windows Server 2003 SP1, WPA support shouldn’t have been a problem (I double-checked the server with the D-Link AirPlus DWL-520+ wireless PCI adapter and once I’d manually switched the properties to WPA-PSK using TKIP, I was able to enter the network key and connect as normal).

It seems that for some reason, the D-Link card had defaulted to using WEP, and sure enough, once I set it to use WPA-PSK, the network description changed from security-enabled wireless network to security-enabled wireless network (WPA).

So, three machines working, one to go.

I read in Kathryn Tewson and Steve Riley’s security watch: a guide to wireless security article that WPA is “both more secure and easier to configure than WEP, but most network cards made before mid-2003 won’t support it unless the manufacturer has produced a firmware update”. The problem machine was using a Compaq WL110 Wireless PC Card, which I was given around 2002/3 (when we first put in the 802.11b network) so it sounded plausible that I might need a firmware update. A little more googling turned up the does/can the WL110 support WPA? thread on the HP IT Resource Center which gave me the answer. No, there is no firmware upgrade (card support was dropped before the WPA specification was finalised), but if you download the Agere version of the drivers, and tell Windows XP that the WL110 is a 2Wire Wireless PC Card, WPA is available and it works (even inside the WL210 PCI adapter)!

So, that’s all done – a working, (hopefully) secure, wireless network, all for the price of a new access point.

Didn’t get far with Linux so trying Solaris 10 now

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Sun SolarisLast year, I blogged about how I was starting to look at Linux… well, I installed SUSE Linux but never really got much further. I didn’t like the interface, I didn’t like that all the tools had weird or mis-spelt names, and it all felt a bit amateur (Linux zealots, please don’t flame me).

Still wanting to have a play with a Unix-based system and rebuild some long-lost skills, I had another go a few nights back and installed the x86 version of Sun Solaris 10 (the idea being that I’ll get used to a real Unix system and then maybe take another look at Linux later). It took an age to install, but I do now have a running system. I’m sure I’ve missed some essential configuration somewhere, but I’ll find my way through! First impressions are good, and I’m very proud of myself for managing to successfully install the Macromedia flash plug-in for Mozilla just by following the readme file (believe me, extracting files from an archive, finding out where Mozilla is installed, and then successfully running the installer is a big deal for a Unix newbie, even if it does sound trivial).

I still need to use Windows on my everyday systems, but maybe I’ll move my e-mail and browsing at home over onto the Solaris box once I feel comfortable with it all (after a couple of weeks’ use I’m not over-impressed with Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows XP so changing e-mail clients again won’t really upset me). In the meantime, if anyone out there has any Solaris hints and tips, good ‘net resources, etc., I’d be pleased to hear from you.

Dealing with winmail.dat files

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A few days back, a business contact e-mailed me a copy of a presentation as a .PDF file. No problems there, except that when it got to me (using the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client), it was called winmail.dat. I tried saving the file as a .PDF but Acrobat Reader didn’t like it so I had to do some googling to find out what to do with this strange file (I remember having problems with this during a migration from Pegasus mail to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook a few years back and we had to resort to using plain text e-mails until everyone had been migrated).

I found an article on the PC Hell website that not only explained the purpose of the winmail.dat file (used by Outlook Rich Text e-mails to carry the formatting information in transport-neutral encapsulation format), but also gave links to various programs that can process the winmail.dat file. One of these is Steve Beadle’s WMDecode utility, which successfully extracted my .PDF from the winmail.dat file.

Infrastructure essentials

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Anyone who reads this blog regularly will know that I keep a close eye on what the Microsoft UK IT professional technical evangelist team is up to and John Howard’s blog is one of many that I tend to watch. Since August, John has been posting a series of infrastructure essentials blogcasts to help administrators set up a well-managed infrastructure using Active Directory along with common Microsoft products like ISA Server 2004 and Exchange Server 2003. At the time of writing, John has reached 25 infrastructure essentials blog casts – watch out for more. John covers Windows (client and server), Virtual Server, Virtual PC and Identity Integration Server but it’s also worth checking out are Steve Lamb’s blog (security) and Eileen Brown’s blog (management, messaging, mobility and real time collaboration).

Securing your Windows computer with syskey

Posted on By Mark Wilson

At an event a few weeks back, Steve Lamb mentioned using the syskey utility to secure a Windows system. Even though it’s a standard Windows utility, I’d never heard of it before and Steve has now written about syskey on his blog, along with a follow up post on storing the keys on a USB token (think of it as a kind of ignition key for a Windows computer).

Handy KVM solution

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A few months ago I sold my KVM switch on eBay. Now I’m running out of desk-space again…

To be honest, the old one was too big, too noisy, and had 12 feet long KVM leads making it a bit over the top for a desktop solution but yesterday I picked up a Linksys integrated KVM 2-port switch at RL Supplies.

Linksys KVM2KITWith built-in cables, drawing power from the PS/2 port on one of the PCs, and no software required, this is an ideal solution for letting the port replicator for my work laptop and my desktop PC share the same keyboard, mouse and monitor (at resolutions up to 1920×1440). I just hit the Scroll Lock key twice to switch between PCs and my USB mouse even works with it (using a USB to PS/2 converter). Definitely worth considering by anyone who needs to find some extra desktop real estate.