Windows Tip: Do you LUA?

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

I've been running with a least-privileged user account (LUA) on my main Windows XP workstation now for over a year. In other words, the user account I use for checking email, browsing the web, writing reports and so on is an ordinary domain user account and is not a member of the local Administrators group on my computer. Why do I do this? Because running with an admin account results in a lot more damage when your machine gets compromised by some malware.

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Storage Tip: Why complete and correct backups are even more important

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

If you haven't lost the flexibility of occasionally missing a backup, you may soon. Missing a backup or deciding to bring an online system back up instead of rerunning a failed backup job are no longer options as compliance requirements and the changes in overall corporate governance intensify. That increases the burden on you to get backups done correctly and completely all of the time. Here's why.

Security Tip: Three Google searches you must know for security's sake

By Brent Huston, Microsolved, Inc.

There are three simple yet powerful Google searches that can help attackers virtually "case" your organization as a target for data theft. Try them. They should give you a bird's eye view of your Internet presence and just what the simplest Google-powered attackers will notice at first glance.

Unix Tip: Creating CDs for Unix or Windows

By Sandra Henry-Stocker, ITworld.com

Preparing a CD that displays proper file names whether it is mounted on a Unix system or on a Windows box requires little more than the proper set of arguments to the mkisofs command and software that knows how to work with ISO images. In this week's column, we look at a script that prepares a multi-use ISO image from files in a selected directory.

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Robocopy just got better

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

If you're an IT pro you probably have a few favorite tools that you always rely on. One of my favorites is Robocopy, which has been around at least since the Windows NT 4.0 Resource Kit and probably earlier (except my brain is too shot right now to remember -- occupational hazard of being in IT).

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Unix Tip: Comparing files with checksums

By Sandra Henry-Stocker

Unix systems provide numerous ways to compare files. The most common way to verify that you have received or downloaded the proper file is to compute a checksum and compare it against one computed by a reliable source. MD5 is frequently used to compute checksums because it is computationally unlikely that two different files will ever have the same checksum. Similar commands, such as sum and cksum, also compute checksums but not with as much reliability. Let's look at several checksums and see why.

Security Tip: When security through obscurity makes sense

By Brent Huston, MicroSolved, Inc.

For years you have been hearing how security through obscurity doesn't work. Pundits, auditors, security consultants and everyone else who has been through infosec 101 consistently hammer home the point that security through obscurity is a dangerous practice. But, with some of the recent things that have emerged, it just might be useful to your organization.

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Storage Tip: RAID 6 to Replace RAID 5

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

The introduction of RAID technology has been a boon that made the use of open systems storage for a wide range of business applications (including mission-critical) practical. To continue to harp on a subject that has been discussed previously, RAID is great, but only one failure can safely be tolerated. Enterprises run a risk during the time that it takes to rebuild an array after a disk failure. That risk is having a much longer downtime than can be tolerated with today’s 24X7 applications to rebuild from tape if a second disk fails. Multiple-parity RAID is the solution. RAID 6 is the currently most popular implementation of multiple-parity RAID.

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Windows Tip: Are cached credentials secure?

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

A reader recently contacted me concerning a previous tip Troubleshooting Cached Logons where I shared a script that could be used to query your event logs to determine whether your machine is currently logged on using cached credentials. When you try to log onto your domain and your Windows XP computer can't contact a domain controller, your computer uses cached credentials to authenticate. These credentials are cached locally on your machine from a previous successful domain authentication, and are designed to enable you to log onto domain members when domain controllers are unavailable.

The reader told me that he heard from "some security experts" that storing domain credentials locally on client machines like this poses a security vulnerability since anyone who can gain access to your computer can run a password cracker against these stored credentials and extract your domain username and password from them. But how serious a vulnerability is this? To find the answer, I cracked open one of my all-time favorite books, Protect Your Windows Network: From Perimeter To Data by Jesper M. Johansson and Steve Riley.

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Unix Tip: Automating Analog

By Sandra Henry-Stocker

For those of us who use Analog routinely to understand how well our web sites are doing, a little automation goes a long way. To prepare monthly reports, for example, you will want to rotate your log files, keeping each month's log data separately. Whether you retain old log files or only the Analog reports, you can set up for your sites in a way that lends itself to month by month comparisons.

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Storage Tip: The long tail of data storage

By David Hill, Mesabi Group

Thinking about how to approach the abundance of data caused by fixed content data isn't easy but thinking about how to create tiered storage and active archives to take advantage of the data "niches" of the "Long Tail" of storage is a start.

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Security Tip: Three steps toward enclave computing

By Brent Huston, MicroSolved, Inc.

Many organizations have identified the move to enclave computing as a viable and logical strategy for their future security architectures. To prepare for this transition, organizations and security teams must start by doing three things.

Outlook merge mail vs. DLs

By Mitch Tulloch, MTIT Enterprises

Ever needed to send an email out to a lot of contacts in your organization or customer base in a hurry? Here's a tip that may help if your mail client is Outlook 2003.

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Unix Tip: Filename completion

By Sandra Henry-Stocker

A number of readers have recently asked how they set up and use filename completion in a variety of Unix shells. Since file completion does not work the same in every shell, we will examine how you can use this great time saving feature in csh (tcsh), bash and ksh.

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http://open.itworld.com/5040/nlsunixfile061102/page_1.html

Planning VoIP deployments

By Barrie Dempster, WindowsNetworking.com

This article discusses management of the VoIP PBX, and proposes that it be treated as another service which should be comprehensively managed by the network administrator. It will demonstrate how Voice connectivity relates to data networks and how to effectively and securely implement a PBX within the context of a network infrastructure.

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