Devin on Earth

Microsoft has made two big product name announcements in the last couple of days:

• Monad (formerly the Microsoft Shell or Management Shell) has been renamed to Windows PowerShell. I, personally, am disappointed; Monad is a great name (grade-school sound substitutions aside) and had a decently geeky pedigree to interest folks who aren’t normally willing to look at innovations coming out of Redmond. I’ve personally been able to get at least two of my friends to look more closely at it (and ultimately pronounce it a “Cool Idea!”) just because they couldn’t believe that a Microsoft product would be named for something that esoteric. At the same time, it was sufficiently unique that it could be easily turned into a visible and valuable brand by a group with as much marketing muscle as Microsoft. Ah, well.
• Perhaps less surprising given the recent Office 2007 announcement, Exchange 12 is now officially Exchange Server 2007. Personally, I was hoping for something a bit snazzier, like Windows PowerMessaging Server 2007, built on Windows PowerShell technology.

A few people out there are shocked by this:

Market Bulletin: Microsoft Announces New Price, and Availability of Linux Support, for Virtual Server 2005 R2
Published: April 3, 2006
Today Microsoft announced that Virtual Server 2005 R2 is now available as a free download. This also will apply to the forthcoming service pack 1 of Virtual Server 2005 R2. In addition, Microsoft announced the availability of virtual machine add-ins for Linux and a technical product support model for Linux guest operating systems running on Virtual Server 2005 R2.

I don’t know why there is this level of surprise. It makes perfect sense to me. So which flavors of Linux are supported?

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 (update 6)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (update 6)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
• Red Hat Linux 7.3
• Red Hat Linux 9.0
• Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
• Novell’s SuSE Linux 9.2
• Novell’s SuSE Linux 9.3
• Novell’s SuSE Linux 10.0

The VM additions for Linux guests (available for free download) provide the following capabilities, bringing them closer to parity with Windows guest VMs:

• Guest and Host synchronization for time sync, heartbeat, and coordinated shutdown
• Mouse and display driver function
• SCSI disk emulation

One final juicy tidbit:

As previously announced, Virtual Server 2005 R2 service pack 1 is scheduled for a beta release in Q2 and general availability in early 2007. This service pack will support the hardware virtualization capabilities developed by AMD and Intel. By supporting both AMD Virtualization and Intel Virtualization Technology, customers will be provided better interoperability, strengthened isolation designed to help prevent corruption of one virtual machine from affecting others on the same system, and improved performance for non-Windows guest operating systems. The service pack will also support Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service, providing better support for backup and disaster recovery. Finally, this service pack will provide existing Microsoft Virtual Server customers an important transition to the Windows hypervisor, which will be delivered in the Windows Server “Longhorn” wave.

This is going to make life a lot easier for a lot of folks.

Trying to deploy Windows Mobile 5.0 devices with the Messaging and Security Feature Pack, along with Exchange Server 2003 SP2, so you can get that Direct Push and remote administration love? Running into problems? Never fear — Jason Langridge has your back. You can’t get this one off of the official Microsoft download site yet, although it will be there soon enough.

This document covers everything from upgrading your Exchange servers, configuring your front-end and back-end servers (single server configurations aren’t forgotten!), enabling and requiring SSL, installing ISA Server 2004, installing the new mobile management tools, provisioning and configuring your Windows Mobile devices, and setting device policies. It even, as a special bonus, tells you how to deploy certificate-based authentication — the Holy Grail of Windows Mobile messaging — as well as how to create CAB files to export root certificates to your devices. Needless to say, this is a must-get.

When I saw what the crazy cats at Frontmotion were up to, I tripped out:

FrontMotion Firefox Community Edition is Firefox with the ability to lockdown settings through Active Directory using Administrative Templates. Similar to lockdown settings with mozilla.cfg on one computer, you can now use Administrative Templates to enforce settings across your organization. Two templates are provided to allow common and advanced settings.

They supply the templates and versions of Firefox ready to deploy in MSI format. Go here to check it out.

This nicely negates one of the big advantages many companies cite for staying with Internet Explorer. I’m interested in seeing how this pans out.

I’ve reached another milestone on my personal plan for world domination: my first tech magazine article has been published. I talk more about it over on my work blog.

My debut article for Windows IT Pro Magazine, Fight Spam for Free, is now online in the April 2006 issue. If you’re a subscriber to Windows IT Pro, you can access the article now or wait for it to show up in your mailbox. This article isn’t anything new or revolutionary, but it is a concise overview of the native anti-spam capabilities you get in Exchange 2003, including the updates included in SP2. Leave me a comment if this article was helpful or you want to argue about something I said.

One interesting behind-the-scenes note: I originally wrote and submitted this article over a year ago. This kind of lead time is not uncommon in the magazine industry, especially in the tech industry where current developments can require the rapid inclusion of content that bumps an article that had been previously planned. It was an interesting experience and I’m eager to get more articles written — in fact, I’ve got a couple of ideas I’m working on.

Another peek behind the curtain: one of the tech reviewers was dubious about the whole premise of the article. For a long time, mail admins in the know refused to allow Exchange to be the edge server in their organization; they’d use an SMTP proxy or some other SMTP MTA (like my favorite Postfix) to handle all inbound connections. Even today, it isn’t a trivial task to harden an Exchange 2003 server to accept incoming connections from the Internet, and you still want to spend some time with your network and firewall design before you do it. (In particular, my favored design is to place ISA Server 2004 in the DMZ and use that to publish SMTP to the Exchange bridgeheads in the protected network.) However, Exchange 2003 — especially with SP2 — has finally matured enough and gained enough useful anti-spam features to make it worth the effort. The tech reviewer in question argued that no major companies would use this configuration; I happen to know of one or two. In fact, it was this very discussion — and my defense of Exchange 2003 as the edge mail server, especially in small-to-midsize companies (which are more likely to be in the Windows IT Pro target audience) — that prompted me to update my own home network. For years, I’d been using Postfix as an edge mail router to my Exchange org. I’ve since retired both Postfix (and the Solaris box it ran on). Postfix has a lot of nice features (like greylisting) that Exchange doesn’t have, but I wasn’t using any of them — and the resulting reduction in time to configure and maintain my network (plus the ability to completely track all message flow in and out of my network from Exchange) more than makes up for it.

Not that I think Postfix is a bad MTA, mind you; in fact, there are many circumstances in which I’d still encourage clients to use it (or another MTA) in front of their Exchange organization. However, it’s no longer the only sane option; Exchange is more than capable of taking care of itself now, as long as you have a sane network and firewall configuration. And I very much appreciate not having to take my Solaris box down to single-user mode to apply the latest security patch clusters anymore; WSUS is the cat’s meow and helps me keep my network safer than ever.