WindowsNetworking.com - Monthly Newsletter - December 2015

Welcome to the WindowsNetworking.com newsletter by Debra Littlejohn Shinder, MVP. Each month we will bring you interesting and helpful information on the world of Windows Networking. We want to know what all *you* are interested in hearing about. Please send your suggestions for future newsletter content to: dshinder@windowsnetworking.com

 

1. 2015 State of the Network Report

As another year draws to a close, it’s time once again to look back at how the IT landscape has changed and evolved over the past twelve months. This has always been a field where rapid developments keep you hopping to stay even, but the pace seems to have accelerated even more recently, and the cloud is creating a paradigm shift for many IT professionals that can be either exhilarating or devastating, depending on your circumstances, skill sets and attitude.

2015 has been declared the “year of …” a number of different things. The Year of the Cloud (a label that was also applied to 2013 and 2014 and will undoubtedly be slapped onto 2016 as well). The Year of the 3D Printer (which still didn’t really pan out, with prices still high and functionality still limited … maybe next year).

The Year of the Things (as in the Internet of Things). The Year of Ubiquitous Computing (a fancy way of saying computers everywhere). The Year of Wearable Technology. The Year our Houses Got Smart.  These three are really all about the same thing. Even as the headlines scream that PC sales are on a downhill trajectory and Gartner announcing a 9.5% decline in shipments as of mid-year, the sale of “smart” devices continues to rise.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that computers are in no danger of becoming obsolete; they’re merely shape-shifting from traditional desktops and laptops into new and varied forms.  Many of my friends and relatives outside the IT industry no longer own desktop systems, and some have even given up their laptops for tablets. Convertible form factors such as the Surface line and various other laptop-hybrid tablets are growing more and more popular as a “best of both worlds” solution for those who are information workers and need productivity applications.

Most of those friends now carry smart phones that do much of what they once used those desktops and laptops for – email, social networking, and web searches – can be handled by the miniature computers in their pockets. Many of them are starting to wear smart watches or at least “semi-smart” fitness bands such as the Fitbit Charge or Microsoft Band or Samsung Gear Fit. These devices can make the phones more user-friendly by providing quick previews of messages, notifications of phone calls and social media posts right on your wrist.

Meanwhile, the dream of a “smart” (automated) house that began in the minds of science fiction writers and entertained a generation of children in the Jetsons cartoons is gradually becoming a reality.  When Bill Gates built his technology-centric mansion in Washington in the 1990s, it incorporated amazing electronic wizardry that was far, far ahead of its time. Today many of the high-tech features that were the province of the very rich back then are becoming commonplace in middle class neighborhoods: Surveillance cameras, kitchen computers, remote controlled lighting and music systems, high definition TVs in every room that are connected to the home network and the Internet – all of this and more is now within the reach of persons of much more modest means.

Not so long ago, one of the few places where we were deprived of (or safe from, depending on your perspective) the online world was when you hit the road. Oh, you might be able to check your email on a slow cellular connection if you were lucky enough to get a signal inside your automobile, but there wasn’t much web surfing going on – until 3G and then 4G LTE hit the airwaves and made it possible to connect at speeds comparable to a home broadband connection while on the go.  The Big Thing this year was to build that Internet connectivity right into your automobile. Many of the major vehicle manufacturers offered 2015 cars with 4G radios and wi-fi access points.

The airlines have had wireless connections available on board some of their planes but for a long time, it was a rare treat. Gogo Inc. has been around since the 90s (initially making phone systems for private planes) and started providing Internet service for commercial airlines in the late 2000s. Coverage has expanded over the past year so that now American Airlines, for example, has wi-fi available on most domestic flights within the U.S., as well as on some international flights on select planes.

We’re getting to the point where it doesn’t matter whether you’re traveling by land, air or sea; you’ll be able to get online if you want. Cruise ships have been notorious for snail-slow satellite Internet connections that cost an arm and a leg, but this year cruise lines began rolling out new hybrid technologies that utilize land-based antennas combined with better satellite transceivers that have vastly improved the service while bringing prices down.  Carnival Cruise Line, for example, on many of its ships offers decent speed (average 2-4 Mbps) connections for the duration of a week-long cruise for $99, or a slower “social package” that’s limited to accessing Facebook, Twitter and a handful of other similar sites for $25. This is a far cry from the up to 75 cents per minute at a painful 128-256Kbps of a couple of years ago.

The common thread that weaves throughout all these examples of technology that became much more widespread in 2015 is the dependence on the network.  And this is the reason that networking skills will always be in demand – so long as those skills are geared to the current technologies such as cloud computing and IoT.  That’s the good news.

The bad news is that at the same time all these exciting and enabling trends exist in the technical realm, there are troubling trends occurring in the political realm that could put a tremendous damper on our ability to access and use all of the great new tech in the future. We can only hope that looking back one day, 2015 won’t be known as the year the Internet started to die.

In the wake of recent terrorist attacks, Dianne Feinstein and other legislators are attempting to pass laws that would require tech companies to report suspected “terrorist activity” to the government. It certainly sounds reasonable, but many are worried that it will bring further encroachment on freedom of speech and can be misused to silence political dissent. Meanwhile, on the other side of the partisan aisle, presidential candidate Donald Trump has talked about “closing up” the Internet.

Meanwhile, some fear that even if the government doesn’t destroy the Internet, it might be bringing about its own destruction. Prices for wired Internet connectivity on land have reached commodity level, but mobile data is getting more expensive, with wireless carriers dumping their unlimited plans and forcing customers into capped data allocations at the same time they’re pushing high bandwidth apps, streaming video and music. It’s not unusual for a family to pay several thousand dollars per year for their smart phone service.

At the same time, the web is becoming almost unusable due to the numerous ads that abound on most sites, popping up in front of the content (and sometimes on mobile devices, with no easy way to close the advertising windows) and slowing down the loading of other sites to such a crawl that most of us give up. Videos start playing on web sites without our permission and sometimes even manage to turn the volume up on our devices when we had them muted. As it gets more costly and more frustrating to use the Internet, will all but the most stalwart techies and those who need it for work abandon the web altogether?  There are in fact some consummate pessimists who believe that process has already begun, and will result within fifty years in a return to the pre-Internet world and conditions that our great grandparents knew.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-death-of-internet-pre-mortem.html

I’m more optimistic than that, but it’s a lot to think about, and 2015 definitely gets mixed reviews when it comes to changes in our online world.

‘Til next time,
Deb

dshinder@windowsnetworking.com

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Quote of the Month

The groundhog is like most other prophets; it delivers its prediction and then disappears. – Bill Vaughan

I try not to get involved in the business of prediction. It’s a quick way to look like an idiot. – Warren Ellis

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future. – Niels Bohr

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2. Windows Server 2012 Security from End to Edge and Beyond – Order Today!

Windows Server 2012 Security from End to Edge and Beyond By Thomas Shinder, Debra Littlejohn Shinder and Yuri Diogenes From architecture to deployment, this book takes you through the steps for securing a Windows Server 2012-based enterprise network in today’s highly mobile, BYOD, cloud-centric computing world. Includes test lab guides for trying out solutions in a non-production environment. Order your copy of Windows Server 2012 Security from End to Edge and Beyond. You'll be glad you did

Click here to Order your copy today

 

3. WindowsNetworking.com Articles of Interest

This month on WindowsNetworking.com, we introduce two brand new topics and continue with new installments for three popular article series.

Performing Windows 10 in-place upgrade with ConfigMgr 2012

Now that Windows 10 has been available for a few months and is proving itself to be a worthy successor to Windows 7 and a big improvement over Windows 8/8.1, which many businesses avoided deploying, you might be faced with upgrading existing machines to the new OS. In this new article, Mitch Tulloch demonstrates how to use System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) to perform an in-place upgrade of a Windows 7 or 8 computer to Windows 10.

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/windows-10/performing-windows-10-place-upgrades-configmgr-2012.html

Considerations for AWS

AWS makes computing in the cloud simple, cost effective and efficient to use. The way in which we utilize the resources available to us is so much easier compared to the traditional ways in which we previously computed and managed our IT infrastructure and resources. Sometimes the ease makes us take a more carefree approach to computing and our management of resource use or the control we have over what is running at any given time is not as it should be. When utilizing AWS there are a few things one should consider to side-step common blunders that are often made. In this article Ricky and Monique Magalhaes will look at the areas that should be given careful consideration, for these errors to be avoided, as best possible, and ultimately enhance the user experience of AWS.

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/cloud-computing/considerations-aws.html

PowerShell to the Rescue – Again

Brien Posey brings us new installments of a pair of PowerShell-related articles series that you may have already been following (if not, be sure to check out the earlier parts):

PowerShell for Storage and File System Management (Part 6)

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/netgeneral/powershell-storage-and-file-system-management-part6.html

Best Practices for PowerShell Scripting (Part 6)
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/netgeneral/best-practices-powershell-scripting-part6.html

Getting to Know the Enterprise Mobility Suite (Part 3)

In Part 1 of this series, Deb Shinder talked about how EMS – Microsoft’s new mobile device management solution – offers organizations a more mobile, cloud-centric way of doing business. We discussed the components of EMS: Microsoft Active Directory Premium, Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Azure Rights Management and provided an overview of what each one is and does and how it fits into the solution. In Part 2, we discussed some of the particulars of deploying Azure AD and InTune in your organization. In this, Part 3, we will continue this series by beginning to present an overview of how to deploy and manage my favorite part of EMS: the Azure Rights Management service.
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/cloud-computing/getting-know-enterprise-mobility-suite-part3.html

4. Administrator KB Tip of the Month

How to use Wbadmin.exe to back up virtual machines on a Hyper-V host
By Mitch Tulloch

You can use Wbadmin.exe (the command-line version of Windows Server Backup) running on the host to back up virtual machines on the host. This will work with the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) provided you first register Hyper-V as an application for Windows Server Backup. You can do this as follows:

1. Open Regedit on the host and navigate to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
2. Create a new registry key named WindowsServerBackup
3. Create a new registry key under the WindowsServerBackup key named Application Support
4. Create a new registry key under the Under the Application Support key named {66841CD4-6DED-4F4B-8F17-FD23F8DDC3DE}
5. Now select the {66841CD4-6DED-4F4B-8F17-FD23F8DDC3DE} key and create a new REG_SZ registry value with the name Application Identifier and assign it a value data of Hyper-V.

Note that {66841CD4-6DED-4F4B-8F17-FD23F8DDC3DE} is the GUID for the Microsoft Hyper-V VSS writer.

For more details concerning this, see the blog post from AskCore in the Tech Briefing section of this newsletter.

Note however that Windows Server Backup can't back up CSV volumes.

The above tip was previously published in an issue of WServerNews, a weekly newsletter from TechGenix that focuses on the administration, management and security of the Windows Server platform in particular and cloud solutions in general. Subscribe to WServerNews today by going to http://www.wservernews.com/subscribe.htm and join almost 100,000 other IT professionals around the world who read our newsletter!

5. Windows Networking Links of the Month

Microsoft releases major system center update to the world
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3013074/microsoft-releases-major-system-center-update-to-the-world.html

Microsoft to change Windows Server 2016 licensing rules, to use per-core metric
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3012983/servers/microsoft-to-change-windows-server-2016-licensing-rules-will-use-per-core-metric.html

Millions of embedded devices use the same hard-coded SSH and TLS private keys
http://www.itworld.com/article/3009142/millions-of-embedded-devices-use-the-same-hard-coded-ssh-and-tls-private-keys.html

Why network engineers need to learn Linux
http://www.networkcomputing.com/careers-and-certifications/why-network-engineers-need-to-learn-linux/a/d-id/1323436?

How different industry sectors are innovating in the Internet of Things
https://www.techworld.com/sponsored-how-different-industry-sectors-are-innovating-internet-of-things-3631318/

Migrating applications to Software-Defined Networks
http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netsysm/migrating-applications-to-software-defined-networks.html

6. Ask Sgt. Deb

Do I really need containers?

QUESTION:

I heard that Microsoft has a new security service for Azure networks. Do you know what parts of Azure it secures? Can I use it with non-Microsoft cloud services? We have a hybrid cloud so how about on-premises resources, will it help secure those too?

Thanks! –Morris

ANSWER:

Yes, Microsoft recently released for public preview a new cloud service name “Azure Security Center”. The goal of Azure Security Center is to help you secure assets you have on Azure, which include both IaaS and PaaS services. Microsoft says that Azure Security Center helps you protect, detect and respond to threats. The service is focused on four main areas:

• Security policy – you can set security policy for a subscription. There are a number of elements to a security policy and those elements change over time (typical of cloud services). Examples are policy elements for system updates, antimalware, SQL auditing and network security groups.
• Resource health – after setting a security policy, you can assess your current security state against policy. Azure Security Center provides a graphical view of your current security state, based on a high severity, medium severity and low severity method of classification. You can then drill down into the details for the different categories.
• Recommendations – based on assessments of resource health, Azure Security Center will then make security recommendations. These recommendations are useful for anyone who has deployed resources on Azure IaaS or PaaS. For security professionals, they’re a great reminder of things that you forgot to do or haven’t done yet. These recommendations are especially useful for non-security professionals, because it’s like having a security expert review their environment and make specific recommendations that will bring their deployment to a much improved security state. In many cases, you can implement the recommendations right in the Azure Security Center console.
• Alerts – Azure Security Center will detect many threats and attacks on your Azure situated assets. Many types of attacks are detected. When you get an alert, you can dig deeper into what triggered the alert and also receive information on what you can do to effectively respond to the alert

At this time Azure Security Center only secures Azure PaaS and IaaS services. As with any cloud service, it might extend its reach over time. So if you’re interested, make sure to check the Azure Security Team blog for updates.