This is going to be a bit of a different “The Internet Fishing Trawler” post in that I’ve seen quite a few interesting looking Microsoft KBs crop up on their RSS feeds lately. So for this edition I’ll just be presenting each KB, you can have a bit of a look at any that may apply to your environment. Good luck! Unsupported Sysprep scenarios FIX: More than 1,000 rules in the NRPT causes no rules to be loaded into memory in Windows SCOM 2012 or SCOM 2007 R2 throws a “Heartbeat Failure” message and then goes into a greyed out state in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Data Deduplication garbage collection job does not work as expected in Windows Server 2012 FIX: TCP connections that use ephemeral loopback addresses are dropped suddenly in Windows Data loss occurs when a Windows Server 2012-based computer that has the data deduplication feature enabled crashes Issues when a physical disk encounters an error in a Windows Server 2012-based environment Error message when you try to schedule a shadow copy task in Windows Server 2012 Microsoft security advisory: Vulnerability in DirectAccess could allow security feature bypass

John Herbert over at Lame Journal has an interesting post asking what network engineers will be doing in five years time. For all the worry about automation there will still be people pressing buttons, just fewer of them. This might be a problem if you view IT as a job and not a career. Chuck Hollis has a bit of background on VMware+OpenStack. I think it is all pretty cool and if you have a spare 45 minutes I’d really recommend doing the Project NEE (VMware HOL) OpenStack lab.

Ah management devices, the soft underbelly of your infrastructure. The good people over at Rapid7 have been doing some analysis of the IPMI implementation in SuperMicro servers and have found a few things. There will be some Metasploit modules released. While SuperMicro is the target here, if you watch your favourite hardware vendor’s announcements you will see this is something they all struggle with. There is a Microsoft Graphics Component vulnerability doing the rounds as of late.

Cisco have announced their Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) initiative. Over at the Cisco Data Center and Cloud blog they have a post that details where it fits into their overall strategy. Still at the Data Center and Cloud blog there is another post that details some of the partners that Cisco have lined up for ACI. I’m guessing these are all companies that don’t compete with Cisco directly (e.g. now that ACE is dead f5 are free to partner).

Hard to believe it but yes, people are still using Windows XP (it is pretty popular in industrial applications). The SANS ISC has a good post on why you should move away and some metrics on the Swiss cheese security of the OS. Sometimes I think Brian Madden lives in the cloud but his post on the use of storage quotas in modern enterprises really got me thinking about how end user perceptions of IT services really have changed.

Anthony Burke over at Cisco Inferno has a good blog post on what he believes the current state of play is with NSX. After reading it I have to agree. I believe that to reach any kind of scale we need tech like NSX. Overlays are here to stay. Scott Lowe has a great blog series on NSX (was NVP when it was Nicira) that I believe is a must read.

New versions of the Dell iDRAC have a feature to auto-lock the OS when the last virtual console has disconnected. I think this is pretty useful and I’d like something like this inside VMware but it is obviously more important for physical servers. John Allspaw at the Kitchen Soap blog has a really great post on being a senior engineer. This is one of those articles that I think everyone should read.

Seems there is a bit of a change in the way mailbox sizes are calculated in Exchange 2013. You can read a good argument on why it isn’t a big issue from Tony at Windows IT Pro. To me it is only a non-issue if the numbers in Outlook match up. If users find they’ve suddenly lost quota they tend to get pretty annoyed! Having upgraded to Windows 8.1 it is very clear Microsoft want you to have a Microsoft Account.

I usually shy away from vendor battles as the technology should speak for itself but sometimes the FUD from vendors can be a bit much. Jamie Doherty at the Bits and Bytes blog takes down a recent HP video for OneView. Vendors shouldn’t purposefully misuse competitors products in a video on the *Internet,*it isn’t really a good look. Kevin Houston over at Blades Made Simple has a great comparison of the maximum number of 10GbE network cards for 2x socket servers in various blade vendors’ chassis.

It seems Kaspersky Anti-Virus is identifying tcpip.sys as malware. How can this be happening in 2013? This issue has been going on since AV was introduced and yet there has been no movement. Very sad. Every time an AV issue like this one crops up I feel the need to post this article by the SANS Computer Forensics blog. I feel that at this point AV simply checks a box and provides no real protection against anything but the lowest and most common threats.