Month: June 2010

VDI Smackdown..who wins?

If your organization is looking at deploying VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), I highly recommend you check out the VDI Smackdown report by PQR. It has a very lengthy and highly detailed feature comparison matrix of leading VDI solutions such as Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 SP1, Microsoft Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop...

RMS Automatic Template Downloading on Windows 7

Recently the project I'm supporting is looking at RMS to provide information rights management (IRM) on some documents. Windows RMS provides two means to let users protect content. First, there is the ad hoc method that lets a user specify what protections they want to put on their content, and...

PowerShell command to change Windows Cipher Suite Order

While journying down the whole cipher suite road this weekend, I put together a little one liner that reconfigures the cipher suite order that Windows will try and use. As I mentioned in a previous blog, you can configure this via GPO. But, maybe you want to build in the...

Easily configure your Windows Cipher Suites!

After many hours of digging around the Windows registry and experimenting with various keys to enable TLS 1.2 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 (see my blog post here), I found this free tool that gives you one click access to configuring your Windows Cipher Suites. The Harden...

Enable TLS 1.2 Ciphers in IIS 7.5, Server 2008 R2, Windows 7

Some industries, like Government, require the use of certain cryptography algorithms. One of the great features of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 is the support for TLS 1.2 ciphers. TLS 1.2 ciphers support AES-256 encryption with SHA-256 hashes. Unfortunately, Microsoft did not enable these protocols out of the box....

PXE Booting a Wyse zero client, Part 1

In some industries end point security is a significant concern, so organizations have been moving away from a traditional fat client to thin clients, and even to zero clients. Traditionally thin clients have some security and maintenance issues of their own. If they run Window Embedded you still need to...

XenDesktop 4 Provisioning Services Firewall Rules

A couple of weeks ago Citrix released Provisioning Services 5.6, which is a component of their XenDesktop 4.0 suite. Provisioning services is supported on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, however it does not automatically add firewall rules. In fact, when you configure provisioning services it tells you...

Extracting VMware ESXi pvscsi boot floppy images

When VMware released ESX(i) 4.0 U1, they officially supported booting your OS drive from a paravirtual SCSI controller. Prior to U1 you could only use one of their other SCSI controllers such as BusLogic. However, when you try and install Windows with a PVSCSI controller it will not detect any...

DAT401: SQL 2008 HA/DR case studies

This session talked about several proven methods of high availability and disaster recovery for SQL 2008. It focused on several case studies of real-word companies, their HA/DR approach, and metrics from their environments. It didn't cover any new wizbang technology or third party products. With the proper design, processes, procedures,...

UNC305: OCS 14 Setup and Deployment

This was a fairly dry session covering the setup and deployment of OCS 14. I won't go through all of the somewhat boring details, but will cover a few juicy tidbits that I learned.- The Setup of OCS 14 is a completely new experience, 100% different than any previous version...

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