Windows VPN Rollout Guide

Windows VPN Rollout Guide

Imagine being back in your high school cafeteria. You need to get a message to your friend on the other side of the room, but your school has very strict rules, and yelling at him will get you thrown in detention. One way to get the message across the cafeteria would be to tell your neighbor, then have everyone in the cafeteria pass it on until it reaches the other side of the room. Assuming that each person in the chain correctly repeated the message it would eventually reach your friend. But what if the message was secret campaign information about the upcoming student election? You don't want everyone to know so you quickly find two cans and a long piece of string...

Find out what all this has to do with VPN at ServerWatch.com.

Apple set to follow Microsoft's lead on piracy

Apple set to follow Microsoft's lead on piracy

Apple is set to follow in Microsoft's footprints and introduce a controversial anti-piracy technology similar to Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage. The company has filed an updated patent application for a product activation technology that could every bit as contentious as that of its rival's. Patent application 20070288886, titled "Run-Time Code Injection To Perform Checks" and dated 13 December, spells out a "digital rights management system" that would "restrict execution of that application to specific hardware platforms." In the application, Apple noted the ease with which digital information can be copied and the just-as-easy way users could break promises not to illegally distribute copies of that data. It also admitted that, in the end, copy-protection schemes such as dongles or encrypting software wouldn't stop pirates on a mission.

Read the entire story at...

Online library reaches million book milestone

Online library reaches million book milestone

An international venture called the Universal Library Project has made more than one million books freely available in digitized format. The joint project of researchers from China, India, Egypt, and the US has the eventual aim of digitizing all published works of man, freeing the availability of information from geographic and socioeconomic boundaries, providing a basis for technological advancement, and preserving published works against time and tide. One and a half million books in more than 20 languages, including Chinese, English, Arabic, and various Indian languages, are now accessible via a single Web portal. The online library includes rare and out-of-print books from private and public collections around the world.

Although not the usual sort of topic posted in the news here, I felt this was worthy of our attention. Find the complete article at...

Microsoft Releases Office 2007 SP1 Early

Microsoft Releases Office 2007 SP1 Early

A year after its initial release, Microsoft today announced it is shipping the first service pack for Office 2007. Office System Service Pack 1, originally expected in early 2008, improves stability, performance and security, according to Office product manager Reed Shaffner.

"SP1 provides stability and performance improvements across the 2007 Office system, keying in on customers' leading productivity concerns, and beefs up security precautions to stay ahead of the latest threats from malicious software and other risks," Shaffner noted.

Read More Here

Managing Remote Routers over a VPN Tunnel

Managing Remote Routers over a VPN Tunnel

Managing remote routers which use only site-to-site VPN for connectivity can sometimes be a challenge. Most management services on the router send traffic sourced from the interface closest to the destination (typically the outside or WAN interface). However, this traffic will likely not hit your crypto maps and thus never reach the headend through the VPN tunnel (possibly leaving you unable to remotely manage the router). To remedy this problem on your remote routers set the source-interface option for your protocols to the interface on your remote LAN. This causes the traffic to be sourced from the specified interface, hit the crypto maps, and be directed through the VPN tunnel to the headend. Some common examples are listed below (replace e0 with the interface on your remote LAN)...

Finish reading at Cisco.com.

Manage your documents with Knowledge Tree

Manage your documents with Knowledge Tree

Someone in one of the forums was looking for a document management solution and SharePoint seemed to be the favorite answer. I thought that SharePoint was overkill but couldn't think of an alternative. I just came across this article. Haven't had a chance to really investigate, but I thought it was a worthy subject to post here. -Trip

Knowledge Tree is an open source document management system (DMS) that helps enterprise users categorize, store, index, and share documents. It offers features like metadata editing, versioning, and WebDAV access, which make it a better choice than a simple file server for sharing documents. The open source edition of the PHP-based Knowledge Tree ships under GPLv3; a commercial version with some additional features and support bundled is also available. You can run Knowledge Tree on Linux, Windows, or any platform that can run Apache, MySQL and PHP. The commercial...

IT Pro Shares His Job Search Tips

IT Pro Shares His Job Search Tips

Finding that first job or changing careers can be tough for many IT Pros. After each issue of CompTIA IT Professional Access, our editorial inbox receives several e-mails asking for career advice; how and where to begin. Last month we received an e-mail from IT Pro, Andy Fletcher, offering job search tips to his fellow colleagues. Previously in the military, Andy decided after retirement to pursue his interests with computers. He is currently employed at a small networking/PC repair business that serves about 700 clients. Although Andy is successfully working now, he knows from experience how difficult the transition can be, and shares advice on finding that first IT job.

Read the entire article at comptia.org.

Vista piracy the least of Microsoft's problems

Vista piracy the least of Microsoft's problems

ITWire.com isn't exactly a "friend" to Microsoft so you'd expect an article of this nature from them. On the other hand, the content is disturbing enough that it deserves a closer look. -Trip

Like thousands of other media commentators around the world, in January this year I attended the offical Microsoft launch of Windows Vista. In my show bag of goodies, among the press releases, I found shiny new boxed copies of the Ultimate versions of Vista and Office 2007. Since I didn't have a computer at the time that could run Vista, I loaned my copy to iTWire blogger Sam Varghese for a review. What happened next is most interesting. Like all dutiful reviewers, Sam did the right thing when he installed this brand new boxed copy of Vista. He registered and activated the copy. After he finished his review, he uninstalled his copy and returned it to me. A couple of months ago, I decided to upgrade...

Likewise Open-Sources Active Directory Authentication for Linux

Likewise Open-Sources Active Directory Authentication for Linux

Like it or lump it, Microsoft's Active Directory is a very popular network directory, and thus, management system. It's been possible to use AD for Linux, but it was never easy. Now, Likewise Software, formerly Centeris, a leader in mixing and matching Windows and Linux network solutions, has announced the first open-source version of release of version 4.0 of its cross-platform authentication software: Likewise Open. This is an open-source community project that enables core AD authentication for Linux. Likewise Open's source code is available today under the GPLv3. With this code, experienced Linux users and Linux vendors can integrate open-sourced AD Linux authentication into their distributions. The company has already packaged versions of Likewise Open for openSUSE 10.3, Fedora 8, and Ubuntu 7.10.

Read the full Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols article at...

Documentation: Give it up; it won't happen

Documentation: Give it up; it won't happen

Interesting article on the road to being a technical writer. -Trip

At one point in time and not too very long ago, I fancied myself a decent system administrator with a decent resume and work history. When I finished a series of writing tasks working on technology subjects that included system administration, I thought the time had come for me to work in a shop with Linux and MS. I put my resume up on Dice and Monster and waited for the phone to ring. When it didn't ring, I went up to see the hits. I saw six on Monster and eight on Dice. Only one company saved my data. I don't know what possessed me to build a tech writer resume, but I did. I had enough experience and I wrote the white papers no one "got around to", user manuals, policy and procedure guides, S-1 SEC registration sections and so forth. On Monster I immediately started getting hits - something like 164 in a week. On Dice the number...