Now on a professional level this has not been a problem at all as quite frankly most of what I have been doing in the last 15 years revolves around fixing computers running Windows based operating systems. Recently however I have found myself in a bit of a pickle as the computer I’ve been using for work started acting up. I’m reasonably sure that this was some type of hardware problem as opposed to some type of software issue and when the IT folks at work suggested a replacement piece of hardware I had a look at it and realized that the build quality was not what I would have expected given the brand we where working with.

Looking back at older hardware of the same product family I could see a marked decline in the strength of the build and given how hard I generally am with hardware I was felling a little nervous about how long the replacement hardware would last. Then my boss said “Get a Mac”. All groaning about platform aside I had a look at the hardware, and could not find a comparable machine with the same type of build quality that I found on the MacBook Pro, I’m sure that such machines exist (I’ve seen them) but they are not something that’s generally sitting around and easy to put hands on.

So after some humming and hawing the bosses (thanks bosses) approved a replacement machine, a shiny new Macbook Pro (15 inch) to replace the machine that was giving me grief, and despite my first thoughts of paving the computer and installing Windows on it I have decided to stick with OSX and try to make a switch to a completely new OS for my day to day work machine. While there are a couple of applications that I do need Windows to run the machines these days are fast enough that I can run a VM to take care of those applications on an as needed basis. There are in fact only two of those left, so my need is not that huge.

After a few days of working with the computer I’m quite happy with the hardware, the OS is going to take some getting used to so i’ll probably be posting about that over the next little while. It’s going to be interesting, OSX is just different enough that I have that ‘new user’ feeling at times trying to get things done, hopefully it will pass soon. If not, well the hardware can run Windows.

But what if you did not want to use WOL? What if there is no network connection available to transmit the WOL packet? Power Save includes a feature we like to call “Local Wake-up” or “Wake-without-LAN” that will allow you to locally schedule a wake-up on the computer. The computer will automatically wake up from Standby or Hibernate mode at the scheduled time – like an alarm clock! Unfortunately, waking from a fully powered down state still requires WOL technology.

How is this helpful? Well, now you can setup your computers to automatically wake up before the employees walk into the door and be ready for their use. If you have any scheduled software updates, you can ensure the computers are awake before the updates take place. Power Save also has the ability to configure multiple power management configurations (Power Policies) for different times in the day, however, if the computer is in Standby mode, the next policy will not be able to take effect. So if the evening policy is to shutdown the computer, the computer will remain stuck in Standby mode. In this case, a Local Wake-up can be configured to wake up the machine prior to the policy change to ensure the next policy takes effect.

In version 4.3 we took this a step further and provided the optional ability to empower end-users to schedule their own computer to wake up from Standby or Hibernate mode. For example, if they tend to start their day earlier, they can setup their computers to automatically wake up everyday – just before they enter the door. They can also defer any further power saving actions for an specified period of time to minimize disruption. In another scenario, if the user is planning to remotely access the computers later that night, they can schedule a wake-up for that evening, otherwise they will not be able to remotely access the computer that has entered sleep mode.

Don’t you think this is a nice alternative to always relying on Wake-on-LAN technology?

http://www.faronics.com/en/Anti-Virus.aspx

As you can see we now have an Antivirus product available for our customer base. Now you may be wondering why we did this – and the simple answer is that we did it to ensure that there is an antivirus product out there that works with Deep Freeze seamlessly with little to no effort. For years we have had people having to hack their way around getting their AV software updating either on a frozen machine or during a scheduled maintenance window. And in many cases even after getting thier AV software up and running something would happen with the AV product (either an update or a change) that would render all the work done inoperative.

There are some AV software packages that are such a pain to get configured many customers simply wouldn’t do it as the effort was not worth it to them. Based on years of this Feedback our developers and product managers dug in and built a new AV offering that would tailor itself to our customer base and that would be able to apply antivirus updates to the workstation without having to thaw the computer out.

Now there are some cavets here – the first one is that the new AV requires Core Console for management, something that will be new for a lot of our Deep Freeze customers. And second the Antivirus only works with our latest version of Deep Freeze (7.0 or higher), so anybody running an older version of Deep Freeze will need to update to Deep Freeze 7.0 to be able to take advantage of our AV offering. There are legitimate technical reasons for this requirement – Deep Freeze 7.0 was designed to accommodate the AV software’s updates on a Frozen workstation, and the pieces that make that possible are simply not in place on older versions of Deep Freeze.

Either way, I recommend that you have a look at the offering and see how it holds up compared to your current AV solution. If you needed any help getting it installed or have any questions just let us know.

If during the update you still have some issues please contact the support team at 800-943-6422 x 1 and we can assist further.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9177474/Windows_XP_SP2_retirement_looms_puts_users_in_tough_spot

I know that a lot of people take the “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” attitude to a lot of things in IT, but when it comes to the security of the systems that your data sits on it’s probably a good idea to make sure that you are on a supported service pack.

It is interesting to note that Microsoft has already extended the support period for XP, and according to another article has changed their support policies to allow support people to continue to answer questions about the older service pack.

QA Team has replicated and confirmed FCC issue  #1249 “Upgrade of Core Console 3.2 from 3.1 rolling back [DBUpgrad]ERROR:”

This problem will appear for customers using remote database with SQL Authentication. When upgrade process is started, FC is trying to connect to SQL Server using local system account instead of SQL account from ServerConfig.xml file.  Currently FC developers are working on fix for this issue, meantime we found there is workaround for customer who affected by it:

1. In SQL Server Managment Studio under Security -> Logins customer will need to create an account for local system for machine with FC installed “<DOMAIN_NAME>\<MACHINE_NAME>$”.

2. In the Poperties for this account “User Mapping” should be enabled for FaronicsCore and FCCMembership.

3. Both FaronicsCore and FCCMembership should have db_owner and db_securityadmin roles enabled.

Please notice, this account is necessary only for upgrade process.

Once upgrade process is finished, this account can be removed and FC will continue using SQL account set up during original FC 3.1 installation.

As more information comes up we will keep you posted.

In a nutshell McAfee released a update to their antivirus software that quarantined some core system files on systems running Windows and that has resulted in a large number of systems being rendered inoperative. The Register is even going as far as to compare this issue with the effects of the Blaster worm and are questioning if any piece of malware has been able to take out that many systems as quickly and effectively. Now that’s not an entirely fair comparison as Blaster wasn’t a piece of software that users where trusting to work properly on their systems, but it’s still an interesting comparison.

I know for a fact that I probably push my work machine more than most people do, but even I don’t need a quad core machine for checking email (not that i’m complaining about having one mind you).

ACPI defines several different power states that a computer can be in at any given time, below is a table copied from Wikipedia that details the sleep states on a computer:

Now as you go through these power states the computer consumes less and less power as you move down towards S5, at S5 most computers are pulling about 7watts of power to keep things like wake on lan possible. The biggest drop between the power states happens when you get into the S3 Sleep state, in a large number of cases that’s the sweet spot for saving power.

Now with Windows XP there are some problems with getting into the S3 sleep state, a lot of machines don’t have the S3 sleep state enabled by default as a number of vendors USB devices back when XP was released may not have supported going into a S3 sleep state, or would not be able to wake a computer from S3 sleep with the push of the mouse button or keyboard.

There’s a document on the Microsoft site that details this better than I can:

To prevent a negative end-user experience, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 modify the power capabilities that are returned by the BIOS. Therefore, the system only supports wake by using the USB for the S1 system power state. If there is no USB device that is armed for wake from a system power state, the system enters the S3 system power state during standby.

The page also details a registry key that can be set that will force the computer to go into the S3 sleep state as opposed to defaulting to the S1 sleep state. So if you are looking to maximize the power savings on your older XP workstations – putting the following key into your system may be the trick to get the machines to sleep properly.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\usb
“USBBIOSx”=DWORD:00000000

Now some people may ask why not just go to S4, or S5 for that matter to save even more power? Well as you go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole you wind up taking a longer and longer time to come back to the S0 (Working) state on the computer. Anybody that has worked with computers in the past knows that users who have a machine that has gone to sleep is not going to want to wait too long for a computer to come back online. Trick is to balance the power savings against the inconvenience for the end user.

Core Console 3 represents a fairly large under the hood change in the Core Console product line, and I would honestly recommend it as a upgrade for pretty much all of our customers. The product page for the new version of Faronics Core can be found here. With this build we address a number of customer suggestions and comments about the Core Console that we have gathered over the past year or so.

We have separated the Console UI and the Core Server as two separate components. This change, while it seems small has a number of benefits for the end users:

• Multiple consoles talking to a single Core Server so that more than one person can be managing workstations through the same Core Server
• You can now install the Console UI on a different machine than the one running the Core Server, so you no longer have to remote desktop into the computer running Core Console to manage workstations.
• You can control multiple Core Servers from a single Core Console.
• Faronics Core no longer needs to be running interactively for a scheduled event to be run. This allows administrators to schedule events and then log off the server completely and still have the events fire properly.

That last point is probably one of the most requested features for Core Console by far.

The other big change that we have done is that we have moved away from using WMI / DCOM as our communications protocol between clients and the Core Server. We have opted to move towards our own protocol based on SOAP for a number of reasons.

First off it gives us more control over what we are doing and allows us to better support environments with mixed operating systems. The second thing that is does is gives us finer control over how we use the network. With WMI/DCOM we had to accept a rather large port range as needing to be open for optimal results (port 135 and anything above 1024), with our new protocol we only require that three ports be addressed (one on the client, two on the server). And finally it frees us up from needing to rely on Windows Authentication as much as we have been, making the software more consistent in Workgroups or situations where a full AD implementation is not in place.

As stated earlier, if you are running an older version of a Core Console managed product I would suggest grabbing the latest versions and giving Faronics Core another poke. And to answer the inevitable question, yes Deep Freeze will wind up in Core Console,  but I don’t have a specific timeframe as for exactly when it will occur.