FROM THE IGLOO

I saw this link today, and thought that some of the people that read this might find it amusing:

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.

I originally posted this on my personal blog, but it’s a interesting note so I figured what harm is a little cross posting.

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?

After building and playing with Chrome OS for the last little while and looking through a lot of the reviews that have been posted there’s little left to say. But the one thing that that they are doing that I really like is that they are segmenting out the users information from the operating system. In Chrome OS they are doing this by putting the users data into the cloud and making the file system holding the OS as read only. In practice I’ve been doing something similar for over ten years for a number of different reasons.

On my computer there are always two disks installed, one that holds the OS and one that holds my user data. I like the segmentation because it lets me pave my OS without having to worry about loosing my data beforehand in the event that something goes sideways with my computer. Now while the data can be moved around getting a Windows based OS to behave like it’s on a read only file system is a difficult task. Thankfully there’s Deep Freeze to protect the operating system once it’s installed and configured to my liking.

It will be interesting to see what Google actually releases as a final product in a year when the devices start to show up with the OS installed, and it’s also going to be interesting to see what the adoption rate for people living full time in the cloud will be.

Here’s an interesting article from Larry Dignan, one of the editors at ZDNet.

Apparently his computer was overtaken by Antivirus Pro 2009 – a vicious piece of malware. It takes over your computer, hijacks Internet Explorer and inundates you with porn popups forcing you to register the software. Larry had McAfee AV installed on his computer but repeated scans during the attack failed to detect the malware because there was no AV Signature available from McAfee at the time. Although Antivirus Pro is not new it had morphed and changed its signature. Larry finally got a copy of Kaspersky – which had an updated signature and got rid of the problem.

Had Larry been running Faronics Anti-Executable at the time, nothing would have happened as Antivirus Pro 2009 would not have been allowed to run. In time McAfee would have pushed an updated signature file, detected Antivirus Pro 2009 and removed it. Larry would have been saved the stress, anguish and particulary the time it took him to solve his problems.

http://bit.ly/2pMnhT

Last year midsized companies spent a total of $17.2 billion fixing IT security incidents according to new research out this week from McAfee.

McAfee recently had MSI International surveyed 900 companies with between 51 and 1,000 employees to find that in the past year a single midsized organization lost $43,000 on average due to security incidents and that 56 percent of these companies suffered an increasing number of security incidents.

Nearly 30 percent of small businesses suffered a breach in the last year and McAfee reports that there has been a 322 percent increase in cyber attacks waged on midsized organizations in the past year.

Most midsized organizations are aware that security breaches can have dire consequences—71 percent of IT management at these companies believe there is some chance a serious breach could put their company out of business. However, many of these organizations are under the mistaken perception that hackers like to target larger companies. Approximately 43 percent think that organizations with more than 500 employees are at greater risk for an attack.

Read the full article here:

http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Security/Midsized-Companies-Lose-Average-of-43K-Per-Year-From-Security-Incidents-614511/

We have had some people asking questions about Wake On LAN in our products lately, and I thought that a quick post regarding what we are doing in the different products might be helpful to clear up some of the mystery surrounding Wake on LAN in our software. A lot of people see it as some black art but it’s really not that bad.

In our products we use two types of packets that we send out to wake a machine up, a directed packet, and a subnet directed broadcast. Now most environments don’t support broadcast between subnets, in fact according to a RFC document from August 1999 routers ship with the ability for broadcasts to pass through them disabled. Our Core Console product is able to work around this by using what we term a Wake on LAN relay, in essence we find a computer on the same subnet that the system you are trying to wake up and we use that computer to broadcast the WOL packet. While this will require that a system running our Core Agent is up and running on that subnet it allows the Core Console to wake up computers across subnets without turning on broadcasting on the network.

Our Deep Freeze product however does not have the ability to use a Wake on LAN Relay, and because of this behavior we can get into a situation where the behavior of Wake on LAN looks completely random. In effect if you are testing Wake on LAN by shutting a computer down and then attempting to wake it up right away it will work, but if you shut the computer down and come back the next morning and try to wake the computer up it won’t respond. What is happening is that the broadcast packets are being blocked but the directed packet is getting through when the testing is done right away, however once the ARP Cache that tells the directed packet where to go expires neither option can wake the computer up.

Now it is possible to turn on Broadcasting in your network if you have the appropriate gear in place, but it’s probably a really good idea to have a talk to the folks that manage your network before doing so. If you are the person managing the network, and you don’t know why broadcasting is turned off in the first place it’s probably better to leave it be, or give the support team here a call and we can talk to you about why you may or may not want to turn this option on.

I have seen a number of people emailing  us asking about if we will be supporting the 64 bit version of Windows 7 with Deep Freeze. It’s looking like more and more people are eyeing installing a 64 bit OS for the first time so I can understand the question.

YES Deep Freeze supports 64 bit versions of Windows, including Windows 7

We have supported 64 bit versions of Windows for quite some time, and Windows 7 will be no different. You will need a recent version of Deep Freeze (6.x) to work properly on a 64bit operating system, and for Windows 7 you will need the version that we released last week.

“Is it out yet? Is it out yet? Is it out yet?” That is what I have been asking our Dev and QA teams for the past couple of days. I’ve been driving them crazy…

They came through! Deep Freeze Standard and Enterprise v6.61 is now available. Customers with current Maintenance can download it and retrieve their current License Key from Faronics Labs. Everyone else can download an evaluation version from Faronics.com. Enjoy and let us know how it goes.

I have some time to kill before I can post an exciting announcement here, so I’ll tell a quick story.

My MacBook Pro 17″ unibody withstood some abuse last night very well. Specifically, my 45 pound son stood and then jumped on it. No damage whatsoever was done. However, I have to say: don’t try this at home! Here is the backstory:

I was at home last night watching a game in the living room. My 5 year old son came in and asked me where the candy was that I had bought him the day before. I told him where it was (on top of a cabinet in the front hall). I told him to go get it and let me know if he needed help. I admit I wondered to myself whether he would be able to reach it as the cabinet is quite high.

He came back a minute or so later with the candy, sat down on the sofa beside me, and casually said, “I couldn’t figure out how to reach it, so I stood on your backpack and jumped up. Wasn’t that smart of me?”

To make a long story short, while it’s debatable whether or not jumping on a backpack that contains a brand new MacBook Pro is “smart”, the machine was fine and my son got his candy. All’s well that ends well.