An IT Pro's Rants

Minasi Conference 2010

NOT TO BE MISSED!

May 2nd > 5th 2010 the 5th annual Minasi Forum Group Conference will commence at the Founders Inn in Virginia Beach, VA.

This is a not to be missed event for all those looking to advance their skill set as you will get unlimited unprecedented access to some of the industries foremost experts both at the conference & afterhours at the dinners & bar. Past speakers have included Mark Minasi, Rhonda Layfield, Steve Riley, Todd Lammle, Jeremy Mozkowitz, Don Jones & Rodger Grimes as well as a extensive line up of Microsoft MVP’s & other industry experts that are all members of the Minasi Forum Group.

There is a minimal $450 registration fee + accommodations (at a negotiated rate). Its a small price to pay for a outstanding line up.

Don't delay, do yourself a favor & attend a conference where you will actually walk away with.

More details can be found at: http://www.minasiconference.com

See you there!

Cisco ASA Anyconnect Setup

** Replace all items in RED + OTHERS AS SEEN FIT**

There are eight basic steps in setting up remote access VPN for users with the Cisco ASA.

· Step 1. Configure an Identity Certificate

· Step 2. Upload the SSL VPN Client Image to the ASA

· Step 3. Enable AnyConnect VPN Access

· Step 4. Create a Group Policy

· Step 5. Configure Access List Bypass

· Step 6. Create a Connection Profile and Tunnel Group

· Step 7. Configure NAT Exemption

· Step 8. Configure User Accounts

So let’s get started!

Step 1: Configure an Identity Certificate

Here we will create a general purpose, self-signed, identity certificate named sslvpnkey and applying that certificate to the “outside” interface. You can purchase a certificate through a vendor such as Verisign, if you choose.

corpasa(config)#crypto key generate rsa label sslvpnkey

corpasa(config)#crypto ca trustpoint localtrust

corpasa(config-ca-trustpoint)#enrollment self

corpasa(config-ca-trustpoint)#fqdn sslvpn.mycompany.com

corpasa(config-ca-trustpoint)#subject-name CN=sslvpn.mycompany.com

corpasa(config-ca-trustpoint)#keypair sslvpnkey

corpasa(config-ca-trustpoint)#crypto ca enroll localtrust noconfirm

corpasa(config)# ssl trust-point localtrust outside

Step 2: Upload the SSL VPN Client Image to the ASA

You can obtain the client image at Cisco.com. As you choose which image to download to your tftp server, remember that you will need a separate image for each OS that your users have. After you select and download your client software, you can tftp it to your ASA.

corpasa(config)#copy tftp://192.168.0.10/ anyconnect-win-2.4.0202-k9.pkg flash

After the file has been uploaded to the ASA, configure this file to be used for webvpn sessions. Note that if you have more than one CLIENT; configure the most commonly used client to have the highest priority. In this case, we’re using only one client and giving it a priority of 1.

corpasa(config)#webvpn

corpasa(config-webvpn)#svc image disk0:/ anyconnect-win-2.4.0202-k9.pkg 1

Step 3: Enable AnyConnect VPN Access

corpasa(config)#webvpn

corpasa(config-webvpn)#enable outside

corpasa(config-webvpn)#svc enable

Step 4: Create a Group Policy

Group Policies are used to specify the parameters that are applied to clients when they connect. In this case, we’ll create a group policy named SSLClient. The remote access clients will need to be assigned an IP address during login, so we’ll also set up a DHCP pool for them, but you could also use a DHCP server if you have one.

corpasa(config)#ip local pool SSLClientPool 192.168.0.150-192.168.0.160 mask 255.255.255.0

corpasa(config)#group-policy SSLCLient internal

corpasa(config)#group-policy SSLCLient attributes

corpasa(config-group-policy)#dns-server value 192.168.0.5

corpasa(config-group-policy)#vpn-tunnel-protocol svc

corpasa(config-group-policy)#default-domain value mysite.com

corpasa(config-group-policy)#address-pools value SSLClientPool

Step 5: Configure Access List ByPass

By using the sysopt connect command we tell the ASA to allow the SSL/IPsec clients to bypass the interface access lists.

corpasa(config)#sysopt connection permit-vpn

Step 6: Create a Connection Profile and Tunnel Group

As remote access clients connect to the ASA, they connect to a connection profile, which is also known as a tunnel group. We’ll use this tunnel group to define the specific connection parameters we want them to use. In our case, we’re configuring these remote access clients to use the Cisco AnyConnect SSL client, but you can also configure the tunnel groups to use IPsec, L2L, etc.

First, let’s create the tunnel group SSL Client:

corpasa(config)#tunnel-group SSLClient type remote-access

Next, we’ll assign the specific attributes:

corpasa(config)#tunnel-group SSLClient general-attributes

corpasa(config-tunnel-general)#default-group-policy SSLCLient

corpasa(config-tunnel-general)#tunnel-group SSLClient webvpn-attributes

corpasa(config-tunnel-webvpn)#group-alias MY_RA enable

corpasa(config-tunnel-webvpn)#webvpn

corpasa(config-webvpn)#tunnel-group-list enable

Note that the alias MY_RA is the group that your users will see when they are prompted for login authentication.

Step 7: Configure NAT Exemption

Now we need to tell the ASA not to NAT the traffic between the remote access clients and the internal network they will be accessing. First we’ll create an access list that defines the traffic, and then we’ll apply this list to the nat statement for our interface.

corpasa(config)#access-list no_nat extended permit ip 192.168.200.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.100.0 255.255.255.0

corpasa(config)#nat (inside) 0 access-list no_nat

Step 8: Configure User Accounts

Now we’re ready for some user accounts. Here we’ll create a user and assign this user to our remote access vpn.

corpasa(config)#username JDOE password PASSWORD

corpasa(config)#username JDOE attributes

corpasa(config-username)#service-type remote-access

Finishing up

Don’t forget to save your configuration to memory.

corpasa#write memory

Verify your configuration by establishing a remote access session and use the following show command to view session details.

corpasa #show vpn-sessiondb svc

This guide should help you to get your remote access users up and running in no time. If you run into any difficulties, use the debug webvpn commands to diagnose the problem.

Good luck and have fun out there!

Windows 7 – 77 tips

A great post from Keith Ward on TechNet about getting your apps ready for Windows 7

See it at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.10.77windows.aspx

Conquering Outlook 2007 Performance Issues – By: Scott Forsyth

Outlook is one of those programs that's easy to have a love-hate relationship with. It offers so much, but the earlier versions have been plagued with stability and performance issues.

With the recent updates to Outlook 2007, stability has gotten substantially better. In fact, I don't remember Outlook crashing on me in months, which says a lot to the improvements that have been made.  Performance on a tuned Outlook is very comfortable now too, so with the right love and care, Outlook 2007 can function very well for you.

At the time of this writing, two performance upgrades to Outlook were recently released and are well worth installing. They are http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=968009 (cumulative update) and http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=961752 (hotfix). There are a bunch of exciting performance enhancements there.

However, even with the latest of everything, Outlook got REALLY slow for me last week and needed some housekeeping.  It was taking me 4 – 5 seconds to view each email, which for handling any amount of email in a day, is pretty much unusable.

I’m sure there are many additional ways to improve performance in Outlook, but I thought I would explain the couple that helped me this weekend.

First and foremost, any time I hear people complain about a slow Outlook, I always tell them to clean up their email and don’t store it all in their primary mailbox.  Once they clean it up, it almost always returns to a good speed again.  A bloated primary mailbox causes slow load times, slow running times and slow (or failed) shutdown.  Additionally the search indexer works extra hard, causing the the entire computer to slow.

I checked the size of my Outlook.ost file and it was over 9GB!  Oops.  Note that I use Exchange Server with caching enabled.  You may have a PST as your primary mailbox.

I used a 3-step approach to get my Outlook back in-line again.

1. Clean up the obvious folders
2. Find the non-obvious folders
3. Compact the mailboxes

1. Clean up the obvious folders

There are many different ways to work with emails.  I know that a lot of people like to delete their emails when they have finished reading them.  I don’t work that way.  I find that I go back to emails fairly often, so I keep pretty much all email except for spam or obvious junk.  This causes my email count to climb at a fast rate, and years of email really adds up.  I do, however, delete old email lists and newsletter emails since they are archived online or elsewhere.

If you’re one of the people that delete your read email, this first step may simply be to get to Inbox zero and delete your emails in the process.

For me, I create a “Saved” mailbox (PST file) and I drag and drop email older than a couple months there.  I like to keep a couple months worth since I’m more likely to reference recent email, and it takes more effort to search for an email thread in my Saved mailbox than in my active mailbox.

2. Find the non-obvious folders

This step is what really helped me this time.  I thought I had all of my normally large folders taken care of, but it was still taking me 4 – 5 seconds to view each email.  I knew something was up, so I used Outlook’s handy Mailbox Cleanup tool to find out what I was missing.  You can access this from Tools –> Mailbox Cleanup…

Mailbox Cleanup has a number of tools that come in handy for cleaning up your mailbox and speeding up Outlook.  In this case, it was the View Mailbox Size tool that I used. 

I was in for 2 surprises after running this.  The first: I came to find out that I have a lot of emails in my Deleted Items folder.  I had just emptied that folder so I wasn’t expecting to find anything.  It turns out that I deleted everything in the root of the Deleted Items folder, but I missed the little + showing that there were subfolders that I overlooked.

Normally I delete using “Shift Delete” which bypasses the Deleted Items folder, but occasionally I don’t, and it looks like some folders I had deleted a long time ago were still sticking around.

I didn’t save a screenshot, but it was the Folder Size tools in the screenshot above that gave me what I needed.

The second surprise was the Sync folder.  I had over 61,000 items in the Sync Issues/Conflicts folder!  That was the greatest cause of performance issues.  I did this over the weekend and I knew that I should be spending time with my family anyway, so I did a Select All on that folder (waited a long time) and then did a Shift Delete and left the laptop to do its stuff.  A few hours later my laptop was available for use again.

Performance still wasn’t resolved, so I had more work ahead.

I had to ask myself why the Conflicts folder had grown like this.  I don’t have it fully figured yet, but I found that part of it had to do with NOD32, my anti-virus program.  It was touching the files on the way through and adding a signature to the files to say that they are scanned.  That change caused Outlook to flag the message as a sync issue.  I tweaked that setting and the new Conflicts are minimal now.  I’ll continue to watch this and find out the cause for the rest.

3. Compact the mailboxes

Even though the mailboxes were down to a reasonable size, the performance issue remained.  Outlook still needed to compact the mailboxes to reclaim that space.

The compact option is hidden away somewhat.  You can get to it from Tools –> Accounts –> Data Files

Here if you want to look at the file itself, select the mailbox name and click on Open Folder…. The Compact Now button is in the mailbox settings. 

For PST files, the button is on the first screen:

Click on Compact Now and let it do it’s stuff.  Note that if it’s taking a while and you want to use your computer again, you can safely cancel it at any time and it will continue next time where it left off. 

An exchange mailbox hides the Compact Now button even further.  It’s in the Advanced tab –> Offline Folder File Settings …

It took another few hours for the compact to complete for me.  I may have been faster just deleting the mailbox and creating it again, but I let it do its thing and it went from the bloated 9GB down to around 1GB.  If I really wanted, I could get it smaller, but with it performing very fast again, there was no need. 

That did it.  My mouse clicks are measured in milliseconds now rather than seconds!

Outlook really has improved over the years and when looked after properly, it can serve you well. 

Credit: Scott Forsyth @ http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/

Tweak-7 Beta

A public beta version of Tweak-7 is available for download below. The beta version is fully functional for a period of 14 days and can be downloaded and installed by everybody running any version of Windows 7 (up from RC1 - build 7100). Upcoming beta versions will extend the testing period.

The current beta version of Tweak-7 has been tested in detail by us and by thousands of other users, and seems to be almost bug free. However - it is possible that there are still some very rare bugs within the product, which we kindly ask the testers to report. In case of application crashes, a special crash report can be send to our server which helps us to determine the cause of the crash.

We expect the final version of Tweak-7 to be available in July 2009.

System requirements: Windows 7 (at least RC1 build 7100), 32bit or 64bit editions.

Edition

Version

Size
Download

Tweak-7 Beta 5
v1.0.570 - History
22 MB
Click here

Attention: the download link above expires 30 minutes after loading this page. That means that the link will stop working and display an error message once it has expired. If you want to share the download of the Tweak-7 beta, please link to this website instead. If your download link has expired, click here to reload this page and a new link will be generated for you.

Download problems: If you encounter any download trouble, please do disable any download accelerators you might have installed as such applications are know to cause problems with the download under certain circumstances. Anti Virus applications, or software firewalls that do filter HTTP streams, can also cause trouble downloading. You should disable such applications before you start the download and re-enable them once the download has completed.

Tweak-7 comes with heaps of fantastic features, all packed into one single application:

Packed with hundreds of tweaks

Everything you need to customize and tweak your Windows 7 to fit your needs. From startmenu, to desktop tweaks, from taskbar customization to system tweaks

Packed with features to optimize your Windows 7 experience

A system cleanup suite never seen before in just one application: an incredible fast registry cleaner, a registry defragmentation feature (compresses the Windows registry), a disk drive clean up utility, and much more ...

All the vitamins your Windows 7 needs

3D system performance analyzation combined with heaps of system related tweaks to optimize your Windows 7 in speed and reliability. System restrictions: you allow what is allowed on your system and what is not: protected folders, protected applications

Automatic internet connection optmization

Tweak-7 includes an internet connection analyzer, which automatically inspects your internet connection to speed it up by up to 25% - this incredible new feature is a must for every Windows 7 user used to browse the net at high speed!

Be prepared ... Tweak-7: not just another tweaking software.

Tweak-7: all the vitamins your Windows 7 needs!

A public beta will be available for download from this page once available. A first public beta is planned to be released in May 2009.

Career Assist Package:

Register for Second Shot and get any Microsoft E-Learning collection for just US$35

Until June 30, 2009, as a part of Second Shot, we are offering a Career Assist Package. Along with enjoying the benefits of Second Shot, you can access a collection of Microsoft E-Learning courses, which provide 8 to 20 hours of online instructional content to help you master a product and prepare for a certification. This offer applies to IT professional or developer e-learning collection titles only. Does not include Microsoft Office or Windows end-user (non-IT) focused collections.

Career Assist is available only in select countries.

• See a list of eligible countries/regions

Normally priced up to US$350, these e-learning collections are just US$35 when you register for Second Shot. Limit one per customer.

Note: For this promotional offer, once you have activated the discounted e-learning collection it will only be available for 90 days.

In today's challenging economic times, how do you stand out from the crowd, stay up to date with relevant technologies, and get the top jobs? Becoming a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) is a great start.

Data Domain sells out to NetApp

Dear Data Domain Customers and Partners,

Today we announced that Data Domain has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by NetApp.  The proposed merger is subject to Data Domain stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently, and it is business as usual.
Deal rationale.  The merger combines our own market leading data protection and archive storage with NetApp's best-in-class primary storage solutions. Worthy of note are the following characteristics of the combined entity.

• In the face of never-abating data growth, the two companies share a passion for storage efficiency, using software and CPU-centric approaches to deliver ultra-efficient storage rather than the brute force method of adding more disk spindles to boost performance and availability. Disk spindles are expensive in large volume and consume great amounts of power and data center space. Our combined quest is simply to be the very best in enterprise data storage.
• The combined company will deliver a broader solution footprint in the data center. This will allow enterprise customers to rely on a single vendor for more of their needs. The combined company will have a much stronger position in the highly competitive storage market place than either of the individual companies.
• We see compelling opportunities to innovate through integration of our respective product sets, yielding enhanced compatibilities, feature sets and differentiation. Specifically, we believe that our combined storage solutions will address the complete spectrum of performance and capacity optimized storage needs. At Data Domain we have long recognized the need to become present in the primary storage market, and this merger accomplishes that objective in a very timely and compelling manner.
• Data Domain partners may see an expanded opportunity to sell Data Domain products as a function of NetApp’s much deeper and broader sales coverage as well as customer base.  Data Domain products will gain access to enterprise customers, vertical industry sectors and geographies where we have had less presence thus far.
• The respective companies have a good cultural fit.  We share similar business values and a commitment to superior technology and solutions.

We are very grateful to our partners and customers who chose Data Domain for their IT infrastructure needs.  We believe that this merger will strengthen our business globally, accelerate our roadmap on critical technologies, and deliver a superior product, support and service experience for our valued customers and partners around the world. 
There are still many details and activities to be worked through – and we expect many questions.  We will be communicating with you as more information becomes available for us to share.   To learn more about the acquisition, please visit www.datadomain.com.

Frank Slootman
President and CEO
Data Domain, Inc.

Free e-learning offers from Microsoft

Be sure to check out some of these great offers from Microsoft on FREE Virtualization Training + there are many other free offers out there & be sure to remember to sign up for the “Free Second Shot” offer as that will expire on June 30th.

Here are a few of the links;

Free virtualization e-learning collection offer

Take Microsoft E-Learning Collection 6333: Exploring Microsoft Virtualization Technologies for free! Collection 6333 includes the following:

• Clinic 5935: Introducing Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008

• Clinic 6334: Exploring Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008

• Clinic 6335: Exploring Microsoft Application Virtualization

• Clinic 6336: Exploring Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008

VMware Webcast: vSphere Overview

High Availability in Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Welcome to the future! The future of Exchange high availability, that is. In this session, we reveal the changes and improvements to the built-in high availability platform in Exchange Server 2010. Exchange 2010 includes a unified framework for high availability and disaster recovery that is quick to deploy and easy to manage. Learn about all of the new features in Exchange 2010 that make it the most resilient, highly available version of Exchange ever.

Click here to see the video now from Tech Ed '09...