System Administration
Is it Possible to Live by Best Practices?
If there can be Christmas in July then I guess another round of New Years’ resolutions in August isn’t too far off. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to live by best practices in a few key areas: following the principle of least privilege, using strong passwords that aren’t reused across multiple sites, and using No-Script in my web browser to protect against malicious scripts.
Let’s say we’ve already got all the low hanging fruits covered like regularly backing up our important files, running an antivirus program (Avast! recommended), and running our systems off a UPS (battery backup) so let’s try to mature and take our lifestyle to following the next level of best practices.
Use HP Web Jetadmin To Simplify Printer Management
In my organization, our networked laser printers are mostly made by HP and we have a large number of them so anything to make managing them and their consumables would be a godsend. One of the things to manage them, HP’s Web Jetadmin, has been out there for quite a while but I finally got around to check it out. At this point, anything that can save time and make up for the under-staffing is very welcome.
HP Web Jetadmin touts that it will save time, increase productivity, protect your investments, and reduce costs. HP printers offer a web interface to see things like toner levels, tray levels, page count, and change printer and network configurations and is what we’ve been using for as long as I can remember. Web Jetadmin can allow you to access all of those things from a single interface and can also interact to varying degrees with different manufacturer’s networked printers. It will also work with some PC attached printers.
Microsoft Releasing Out Of Band Update to Address LNK Vulnerability Today
Microsoft will be releasing a Windows Update in a couple of hours to address a vulnerability that has been getting a growing amount of press and has also seen an increasing number of attempts to exploit the vulnerability. Announced late last Thursday evening, the Microsoft Security Response Center stated that the release would occur at 10 AM PDT today.
We are releasing the bulletin as we’ve completed the required testing and the update has achieved the appropriate quality bar for broad distribution to customers. Additionally, we’re able to confirm that, in the past few days, we’ve seen an increase in attempts to exploit the vulnerability. We firmly believe that releasing the update out of band is the best thing to do to help protect our customers.
Deploying Adobe CS5 Products Through Group Policy With The Adobe Application Manager
When the Adobe CS4 products came out, I spent a lot of time looking into how to deploy titles like Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Even using the CS4 Deployment Toolkit, nothing would allow me to create a .msi installer that would work with Group Policy, only for Microsoft Systems Management Server and Apple Remote Desktop.
While I’m hoping to get my organization to invest in the IT architecture with Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager, it’s still in the future. I finally found a free moment today to pessimistically look into deploying the new Adobe CS5 titles using Group Policy. My negative outlook was defied and there is a successful method for deploying Photoshop CS5 and Dreamweaver CS5 and it should also work for the rest of the CS5 titles.
Happy SysAdmin Day 2010!
Happy SysAdmin Day! Here at 404 Tech Support we’ve been announcing this day for the past three years running: 2008, 2009, and now 2010. Always the last Friday in July, SysAdmin Day is the day for everybody to show their appreciation to their system administrators. I say, however, why stop at SysAdmins? All of IT deserves some appreciation, from the Help Desk on up to the CIO. Let’s give a round of applause to all of these hard-working people.
Hang in there!
Image courtesy of SysAdminDay.com
Deploying Skype to Your Organization via Group Policy
I was unfortunately given the task a while ago to deploy Skype to select computers within my organization. I say ‘unfortunately’ because I’ve heard many instances involving Skype that make me cringe with my network administrator hat on. Skype has a ‘feature’ that takes advantage of its P2P nature that it calls becoming a supernode. A supernode is just a computer that has Skype installed on it that has excess bandwidth. Skype then starts routing local Skype calls through your Internet connection. Sometimes when you have LOTS of excess bandwidth, such as at a University, so much traffic can start getting routed in that it floods the switches and disables an entire building’s network and Internet access. All of this was publicly a big deal a while ago but this article will include steps on deploying Skype with the Supernode disabled and other settings so the software package has minimal effect on your environment.
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