Windows Vista and XP Service Packs
Posted on March 25, 2008
Filed Under Security, Windows | Leave a Comment
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 has had a staggered release history but as of last week, it is finally available for download from Windows Update.
On February 14th, Windows Vista SP1 was released via the MSDN & TechNet Plus Subscription programs, Volume Licensing, and the TechBeta program.
On March 18, Microsoft released Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update but if you don’t manually update your copy of Windows, you won’t get it. It won’t be until mid-April until Windows Update will deliver SP1 automatically, providing of course you have automatic updates turned on.
But before you go off to manually download SP1 from Windows Update, there’s a catch. Sometimes SP1 isn’t available from Windows Update. What the heck??
In Knowledge Base article 948343 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948343) Microsoft offers 8 reasons why it might be that “Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is not available for installation from Windows Update and is not offered by Automatic Updates”. Some of them are no brainers like Cause 1 – “You are already running Windows Vista SP1″ but another could prove a bit more difficult to deal with if you really want to install SP1.
There is a reasonably small list of device drivers – software that allows Windows to communicate with and use hardware – that “are problematic on Windows Vista-based computers when you update to Windows Vista SP1.” In order to install SP1 in a computer with one or more of these device drivers, you’ll need to either install the optional updates on Windows Update first or get new drivers from the hardware manufacturer.
So should you upgrade? I wrote about SP1 and you can find it on my blog (www.bowesit.com/blog) but in a nutshell – yes. SP1 has no new features but rather is a rollup of patches and updates since Vista was released. In an effort to stay secure, the upgrade would be advisable.
And while we’re on the topic of service packs, for those who haven’t strayed into Vistaland yet, there is a new service in the pipes for Windows XP – Windows XP Service Pack 3.
XP Service Pack 2 was a major upgrade that made a lot of changes under the hood. One of the most notable was the fact that before SP2, a computer could run XP on 256 MB of RAM albeit slowly. After SP2 however that same computer needed 512 MB of RAM to run at even a decent pace. XP SP3 won’t make as many drastic changes under the hood.
Like Vista SP1, XP SP3 will include all prior critical updates but unlike Vista SP1 there will be a few feature enhancements as well. There is an excellent FAQ about XP SP3 at the SuperSite for Windows http://www.winsupersite.com/faq/xp_sp3.asp that describes the enhancements and new features in layman’s terms.
XP SP3 has been in testing for some time now but there is little indication as to when it will actually be released. According to the SuperSite for Windows, the more than three years that have passed since XP SP2 was released is a result of a lack of manpower. Apparently Microsoft dedicated many of its resources to getting Windows Vista to market and this delayed Windows XP updates.
With the poor rap that Windows Vista has been getting and the stall in Windows XP development that resulted from Vista’s shove to market, let’s hope both Service Packs are well received.
White House Email
Posted on March 12, 2008
Filed Under Internet, Networking, Software | Leave a Comment
For most of us, the delivery and backup of email is something we never think about and has no immediate consequence on our daily lives. We receive email, send email, and what happens out there in the “cloud” to make it all work doesn’t concern us in the least. But it really is worth knowing a little about lest you end up like George Bush and the White House staff.
With the mainstream email that one would get from their Internet provider (POP3 or Post Office Protocol version 3 if you’re interested), email is delivered to your Internet providers mail server and waits there until you check your email. Once you check your email, it is copied to your computer and then deleted from the Internet provider’s server.
In the case of Microsoft Outlook, email is stored in a single file on your computer known as a PST (Personal STore) file. PST files are meant for single user environments and have a number of drawbacks including the fact that they become corrupted when they get too big – at 2 GB. Microsoft recommends that a PST file never be allowed to grow larger than 1.6 GB.
So, you’ve opened your email program, in this case Outlook, and clicked Send/Receive which has copied all of your email to your computer and deleted it from your Internet provider’s server. What happens if your computer crashes and all your data is lost? Your email sitting there in that PST file is lost too.
In many business environments (and in one global superpower government in particular) the setup is a bit different. In its simplest terms, when you click Send/Receive your email isn’t actually copied to your computer but rather it is viewed while it remains on the server. Nothing is deleted from the server and nothing is copied to your computer. When your computer crashes you don’t lose your email too, it is still on the server.
Back in 2002 the White House switched corporate mail servers from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange. Microsoft Exchange uses Microsoft Outlook for users to access their email but rather than store their email in standard single user Outlook PST files, Outlook merely connects to the Exchange server and accesses email directly from it.
With me so far? The White House now uses Microsoft Outlook for email but they bypass Outlook’s PST file shortcomings by connecting directly to Microsoft Exchange servers.
One would think that if all users’ email is stored on a server, it would be reasonably straight forward to back it up. In fact, there’s a law in the US which according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) “requires the president to preserve all presidential records, which are defined as those records relating to the “activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of [the president’s] constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties. . .”
According to a Congressional hearing on February 26, 2008 into the loss of a purported 5 million email messages from White House servers between March 2003 and October 2005, the White House botched the switch from Notes to Exchange and failed to implement a proper backup and archiving system. You see, the White House chose to manually (yes, manually) back up their Exchange servers to – you got it – PST files.
There are plenty of off-the-shelf automated backup and archiving programs for Microsoft Exchange but the White House, the centre of power in the free world, chose to manually backup their Exchange servers to PST files. William Tolson testified “This is the first time I’ve personally run across this kind of process for archiving; the White House relied on human beings to do specific manual processes on a regular basis and I would not recommend it.” Tolson is the co-author of the book “E-Mail Archiving For Dummies”. And it gets better.
Theresa Payton , Chief Information Officer at the White House testified “…we still have PST files that we have not been able to associate with a component. I am assuming that was the same case back in 2005, but I do not know that for sure. They contain l7 million emails.”
In other words, the PST files themselves were so badly named that the White House is unable to determine what’s in them.
Steven McDevitt, a White House computer professional – who apparently made appropriate recommendations during the switchover from Notes that were completely ignored — testified “If my recollection is correct, at that time there were over 5,000 PST files with an average size of approximately 2 Gigabytes.”
So let’s put the pieces together. The White House switched email systems but didn’t plan for proper backups and archiving. Rather they chose a manual backup plan that was shoddy at best. Then they named the backup files so poorly that they are unable to identify some of their contents and finally, the average size of the files is the same size that PST files become corrupted.
For lack of a better way to close such a story, all I can say is WOW!
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