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.

I’ve done this with magnetic media and never had some survive, even looking at this I’d be taking a backup before playing ball with my disk.

Had a small problem today.

I do a lot of photography and back in 2004 I finally put down the cash for a DSLR and proceeded to shoot whacks of photos. And up until last year everything was good. Then I hit 10,000 photos and the counter on the camera rolled over back to 0001. I didn’t think much of it at the time but the end result was that I started getting duplicate files in the directories that I import my photos into, so there where two files called DSC_0001.NEF on my hard disk.

No problem I figured, I segment the photos into folders based on the year that I shot them so as long as I make sure not to something silly with the photos I should be fine. Now skip ahead a year or so and now I’m seriously considering a copy of Lightroom for managing my photos as it does some really neat stuff with post processing the photos and should really cut down the time I’m spending working on getting photos processed the way that I want.

So, to test I load up a test system with Windows 7, toss in the updates and my applications and then upload a copy of my digital negatives onto the test machine and leave Lightroom to import the entire six years worth of photos. After several hours of grinding away at it I find that there’s a large number of errors during the import – namely that a whole bunch of files are duplicates and already exist in the library. The duplicates that I’ve been shooting for the last year and a bit since the camera rolled over the counter. Turns out that Lightroom doesn’t like to have two files with the same name in the Library, even if they are in different folders.

Rats.

Now I’ve got to find a way to rename all those files without loosing the sequence that they where shot in. Thinking that it’s no big deal I was just going to run the files all back through the program that I use to copy them off the memory cards in the first place, since it’s got the ability to rename files on the fly I thought I could just append the date the photo was taken to the file name and that would give me my unique file names. Unfortunately Nikon Transfer ONLY works with removable media, and I don’t have any media that’s large enough to hold an entire year of photos. That would make the process of importing the files again something that would have to be done 4gb at a time.

There’s 100gb of photos sitting here.

Double Rats.

It’s almost enough to make someone wonder if it’s worth the time just to be able to use Lightroom. Unfortunately it probably is or else I’d just leave it.

So not looking forward to a long process I look through some of the old file rename tricks that I used to do, problem with doing it in dos is that it’s a long script that I really don’t want to write, and I’m not sure that I’ll be trusting a script that I find online with my family photos unless I really know what it’s doing. After a bit of goggling I wondered if PowerShell might be able to assist, and sure enough I found a script that I altered as below:

dir |Rename-Item -NewName {"YEAR-"+$_.Name}

This, when run in the working directory appends a given text string to the name of the file, so all my DSC-0001.NEF files now read 2004-DSC-0001.NEF, and instead of a long and ugly rename process I was able to get everything renamed in a matter of about 5 min. Moving forward I’ll be doing the date append as I import the files from the media cards in the first place.

I think I’ll be picking through PowerShell a bit more to see what it can do, anybody else working with this or using it in conjunction with our products?