WindowsNetworking.com - Monthly Newsletter - January 2016

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. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt: Keep out

A new year can represent many different and conflicting things. You can see it as a clean slate, a chance for new beginnings, a time for renewed commitment to your goals, the impetus for increased energy and opportunities. On the other hand, some people view the start of a new year with trepidation, wondering what unpleasant surprises are in store, hoping to be able to hold onto their jobs, worried about the state of the world, the economy and their own personal lives.

2015 literally ended with a bang in the suburban community where I live. On the day after Christmas, it was hit by an F-4 tornado that destroyed homes and businesses and left those of us who were lucky without power for days. I’m grateful that our house was spared from the worst, but now I look out my window every day and see a whole row of what were once beautiful two-story brick lakefront homes that are now piles of rubble. It makes you stop and think and reassess your priorities.

A tornado is only one example of a disruptive event. I know there are many in the IT world who might not be in the path of a physical storm, but in the past year have lived through the career equivalent. Just as a rotating wall cloud can change or even end lives, a disruptive technology such as cloud computing can change or end careers. Losing your job certainly isn’t as tragic as losing your home or loved ones, but it can still leave you reeling.

Because of the cloud and other factors, big tech companies are restructuring. Some small companies are downsizing or even eliminating their IT departments. Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Schlumberger and others had significant layoffs, even as new jobs were added.  As 2016 got started, the stock market has taken a dive, making many folks nervous about their futures.

The good news is that according to most analysts, the overall outlook for technology related occupations is expected to grow in the coming year. However, this isn’t your father’s IT job market. Adaptability and the willingness to upgrade your skills and knowledge are more important than ever as the transition from on-premises datacenters to the cloud continues. Exciting new opportunities in such fields as mobile, wearable tech, alternative input technologies (voice, handwriting recognition, etc.) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are opening up for those on the cutting edge. Security and compliance will continue to be hot specialties as cybercriminals proliferate and attack methods become more sophisticated, but these will be increasingly cloud-, mobile- and IoT-focused.

For many of us, IT is a second career that came after years of working in some other field. I’ve found that far too many IT pros in that situation discount their non-IT experience and feel it’s not useful to them in obtaining promotions or finding new jobs within the tech industry, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

Technology verticals such as healthcare, education, government, insurance, legal and financial services are in desperate need of people who understand both those industries and IT. IT professionals who are also M.D.s or R.N.s, attorneys, CFAs, or have experience in public service can leverage those backgrounds to become “experts” or even “rock stars” within their tech companies providing services to such organizations.  Those with police or federal law enforcement backgrounds can build on that by getting involved in computer/network forensics, incident response, and other related fields.

Some experts, such as David Wagner at InformationWeek, feel that CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is going to be a big thing in 2016 in terms of job growth. That includes CRM technical devs and business data analysts. The latter generally requires an MBA degree or at least a BBA or marketing degree, as well as use of analytical and data base software.

IT is coming around to the realization that it’s all about the data, and data scientists and big data engineers are looking to be two good areas to get into as we move further into this data-centric era. Data science is all about extracting useful insights from both structured and unstructured data and these two job titles overlap with one another and with BI (Business Intelligence) analysts, data modelers, and there will also be an ongoing need for application and web developers. Once again, although those two job titles have been around for a long time, they’ve evolved and require different skills than the same positions did a decade ago. Mobile app devs will be especially needed, and web devs need far more than HTML skills to create sites for today’s media-driven and highly interactive web sites.

It’s the trends in technology that determine where the jobs will be, and two trends that have been growing over the last decade and show no signs of letting up are mobile computing and wireless networking across multiple platforms.  Back in the Stone Age when I got started as an IT professional, you could get away with just knowing all about PCs and servers and Ethernet cabling and switches.

Today, in many cases the servers have moved to the cloud and are being taken care of by the cloud providers, which should make your job easier – but client support has gotten infinitely more complicated as you now must know about PCs and Macs and ChromeBooks, tablets and smart phones, running different versions of a diversity of operating systems on dozens of different hardware brands and models. Thanks to the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) movement, we no longer have just a few standardized devices issued and controlled by the organization. Instead we must work with employees’ personally owned devices and ensure that they don’t compromise the security of our corporate networks.

Is it harder to be a networking professional today? Yes and no. Just as medical professionals have more to learn and keep up with due to rapid advances in discoveries and treatments, and legal professionals have more to learn due to the ever-growing body of laws enacted by legislatures, those who have chosen the IT career path face the challenge of constant changes, new protocols, upgrades to operating systems and applications, better (but more complex) security mechanisms, and so forth. On the other hand, there is more and better training available today, automation makes many of the network admin tasks that once took considerable time and effort as simple as a few clicks or typing a few commands.

Our world is changing, but the future isn’t really as scary as it might seem – as long as you’re ready and willing to give up those technologies and techniques that are “so last year” and jump into the brave new world of networking that awaits us.

‘Til next time,
Deb

dshinder@windowsnetworking.com

=======================

Quotes of the Month

You have to accept the storms and the rainy days and the things in life that you sometimes don’t want to face. – Bai Ling

Storms make the oak grow deeper roots. – George Herbert

There is a safe spot within every tornado. My job is to find it. – David Copperfield.

=======================

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 one brand new article that’s focused on the new web browser in Windows 10, and continue with new installments for three other popular article series.

Discovering the Microsoft Edge Browser in Windows 10

Microsoft Edge isn’t an updated Internet Explorer; it’s a whole new web browser. One of the biggest technical differences is that it’s a modern UI app that can only run on Windows 10. Other than running it inside a virtual machine of Windows 10, it cannot run from prior Windows versions.Here we discuss the new web browser introduced in Windows 10, called Microsoft Edge. We’ll look at the new features, differences from Internet Explorer, and a few tips and tricks.

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/windows-10/discovering-microsoft-edge-browser-windows-10.html

Performing Windows 10 in-place upgrades with ConfigMgr TP3

As described in the previous article on WindowsNetworking.com, System Center Configuration Manager is a member of the Microsoft System Center suite of management solutions that is widely used in mid- and large enterprises for deploying operating systems and applications, ensuring compliance, and managing servers, desktops, laptops and mobile devices. In this article, Mitch Tulloch demonstrates how to use System Center Configuration Manager Technical Preview 3 to perform an in-place upgrade of a Windows 7/8 computer to Windows 10.
http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/windows-10/performing-windows-10-place-upgrades-configmgr-tp3.html

PowerShell for Storage and File System Management (Part 7)

In his previous article, Brien Posey showed you how to create a script that would retrieve SMART information and disk health information for the computers on your network. The script was even capable of looking at multiple servers. There were just two problems with the script. First, it was somewhat complicated. Second, it has the potential to produce an overwhelming amount of data. Brien’s goal in this article is to address those two issues.

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/netgeneral/powershell-storage-and-file-system-management-part7.html

Hybrid Network Infrastructure in Microsoft Azure (Part 10)

In this comprehensive series, I’ve covered what hybrid clouds are about, the networking functionality of Azure Infrastructure Services, the Datacenter Extension Reference Architecture diagram, site-to-site and point-to-point VPNs in this environment, dedicated WAN link service via ExpressRoute, and the Azure Virtual Gateway. I’ve also discussed Azure Virtual Networks and external and internal load balancers and virtual machine ACLs. In this 10^th installment, I delve into dual/multi-homed NIC virtual machines and third party firewalls on an Azure based hybrid infrastructure.

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/cloud-computing/hybrid-network-infrastructure-microsoft-azure-part10.html

4. Administrator KB Tip of the Month

Adding new operations to file associations
By Mitch Tulloch

A tip on how you can add a new operation to a file association.

Gene Walli who works as an Engineer at AT&T recently contacted me concerning the tip "Creating a new file association in Windows 7" which I had published in the Admin Knowledge Base on WindowsNetworking.com:
http://www.wservernews.com/go/1357898641695

Gene said to me: “Mitch, I don't want to change the default operation of a file type, I want to ADD a new operation. In previous Windows versions, you could have multiple operations for given extensions, eg: Open, Edit, View or whatever. You could set the default operation for an HTML file to open with Firefox, View with WordPad, and Edit with Emacs. Any way to do that in Win7?”

I pointed him to a thread on this topic in the Microsoft Answers forum but he said he had tried that and it hadn't worked. He also said he had searched the Windows 7 forums and found this post by Ramesh Srinivasan dated March 28 2010:

The file types tab has been removed in Windows Vista & Windows 7, and replaced by "Default Programs". If you need to customize the file type associations to a greater level (such as addition or modification of an additional verb in a file class), you may have to use a third-party tool or edit the registry manually.

Gene later contacted me and said he had found a third-party solution that could meet his needs:
“Mitch, Picked around in a few other threads, found:
http://www.wservernews.com/go/1357898662883 “

And it works fine!

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

And the cloud provider with the best uptime in 2015 is …
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3020235/cloud-computing/and-the-cloud-provider-with-the-best-uptime-in-2015-is.html

Dreaming of a wire-free laptop? It’s closer to reality.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3019579/computer-hardware/dreaming-of-a-wire-free-laptop-its-closer-to-reality.html

The latest IoT network builds on a power-grid foundation
http://www.itworld.com/article/3013965/the-latest-iot-network-builds-on-a-power-grid-foundation.html

IT spending in 2016: Slower growth expected
http://www.networkcomputing.com/applications/it-spending-in-2016-slower-growth-expected/d/d-id/1323773

Containing the growing enterprise bandwidth hogs
http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/datacenter/datacenter-blog/containing-the-growing-enterprise-bandwidth-hogs.html

Smart homes meet connected cars: X marks the spot
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/82919.html

6. Ask Sgt. Deb

QUESTION:

Hi, Deb. Question for you. Started a new job a couple of months ago to get into this cloud thing, which I think is the future. I work for a company that helps other companies set up hybrid cloud environments. The project I’m going to be working on involves something called Eucalyptus and I am embarrassed to say I had never heard of it. What can you tell me about this? Of course I’ll be doing research to dig into it but I’m thinking there are probably other people out there like me who might want to know what it is. - Judd

ANSWER:

Hi, Judd, and congrats on the new position. The cloud is where it’s at now, so it sounds as if you’re headed in the right direction. EUCALYPTUS (all caps) is actually an acronym that stands for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. Now where do we hear about “Elastic” a lot? That’s right – Amazon Web Services. And EUCALYPTUS was created as open source software for those who want to create hybrid clouds that are compatible with AWS.

It’s Linux-based software and can host both Linux and Windows virtual machines and you can manage AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances with it, as well as those hosted on EUCALYPTUS itself.  You can also move instances between the two. EUCALYPTUS came out with its own storage service similar to AWS S3, called Walrus, for storing VMs.  You can use many of the same tools and applications, since the AWS API runs on top of EUCALYPTUS.

HP bought EUCALYPTUS in 2014 and it’s now called HPE Helion Eucalyptus (lowercase). You can find out more about it here: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/cloud/helion-eucalyptus-overview.html