By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 9:48:11 AM

There's a lot of buzz in the security industry right now after a paper was published by some researchers from Princeton University that demonstrates how whole disk encryption systems can be completely thwarted by obtaining the encryption keys from a laptop's RAM.  How is this possible?  Well, when an Operating System is in sleep mode the decryption keys are stored in memory to allow the operating system to boot back up and continue accessing the encrypted disk.  In addition, different RAM chips decay their memory contents at different rates when power has been removed from the RAM chips.  Cooling the RAM chips can slow that decay rate upwards of 10 minutes by using a simply air duster can turned upside down.  Once the RAM chips are cooled, their contents can be dumped by booting to a USB disk with memory extraction tools, or if you're unable to change the boot order, the chips can be removed and transferred to another system where the contents of the RAM c ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 8:01:04 AM

Citrix has posted my second technical video this time covering an Introduction to Citrix Streaming and Virtualization (or Isolation as Citrix loves to call it)

As Brian Madden alluded to here and here, Citrix has begun to post more and more technical videos on the XenApp landing page. Within the last week they've posted up the video I created that describes what Citrix Streaming is all about and demonstrates a walk through of creating a streamed application for both a Presentation Server and an ICA Client.  The video is 33 minutes long and gives a good overview of how Streaming works as well as some best practices for streaming your applications.  If you like this video, please post a comment and let me know y ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Tuesday, February 19, 2008 4:31:02 PM

At a customer site I recently ran into an issue in their PS 4.5 farm (PS 4.5 with HRP1 and AMC 4.6 updates).  The issue manifests itself as certain icons appears a black squares.  The strange part is the icon doesn't look like a black square while you're adding the published app, but the minute you click Finish to save the published application, you see the AMC display it in all of it's blackness like so:

If you then go to view one of these icons in Web Interface, you'll see it show up like this:

Obviously this will result in confusion for the admin as well as frustrated us ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, February 14, 2008 3:34:50 PM

Citrix finally put out a public hotfix to replace limited release hotfix PSE450R01W2K3021.  The new hotfix PSE450R01W2K3033 fixes several issues with Installation Manager including one that's existed since MetaFrame XP!

Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, February 14, 2008 9:06:51 AM

Citrix has recently announced a new product called Workflow Studio that is a tool for putting together a visual workflow for completing repetitive tasks.  This workflow would then leverage PowerShell scripts to complete the individual tasks.  What's interesting about this tool is that Citrix has mentioned that it came from an unmentioned technology acquistion/partnership.  From my perspective, it sounds an awful lot like FullArmor's Workflow Studio product that was announced in July 2007.  It's also got the PowerShell community wondering the same thing.  Folks like Karl Prosser of the amazing PowerShell Analyzer and PowerShe ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Thursday, February 14, 2008 8:23:15 AM

Trying to play catch up on the industry as I've been extremely busy lately.  I've come across several blog items from other community guys that I thought were important to share.  All of these items have something to do with Terminal Server scale / performance.

First Michel Roth of ThinComputing.net pointed me to a new free utility from Warren Simondson of Ctrl-Alt-Del Consultancy called TSLoadStat.  This is a command line utililty that measures a few server performance stats and reports them on the command line.  While I don't personally find static measurement tools a good indication of server performance (especially because often these tools induce their own load that artificially makes the server look terribly busy when it's not, it's still worth mentioning here).  You can find the information on TSLoadStat here.

Ne ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Wednesday, February 13, 2008 8:14:58 AM

PubForum is a conference that is put on by Server Based Computing experts as a community gathering / learning experience.  I presented at PubForum 2005 in Nice, France and it was a great experience.  If you plan to be in Dublin during May 9th through 11th, or if you've ever wanted to go to Dublin, I highly recommend this conference.  The conference costs a nominal €175 so it's not very expensive.  Although with the current weak dollar, that's about 1 billion USD LOL.  It's actually around $260-275 US.

More details about the conference including scheduled presenters and topics can be found at the following link.

By Shawn Bass on Monday, February 11, 2008 6:11:11 PM

A ton of things have been happening in the Exchange world that I've not been keeping up with very well, but I did come across two items that were of particular interest to me that I thought I'd share.

First, the MS Exchange Team has put up a blog item discussion a feature of Exchange that's been around a long time (Single Instance Storage).  SIS is a technology that was introduced in Exchange 4.0 that allows for an email to only exist once in the Information Store for multiple different users (if those users are on the same system).  So if an email (especially an email that contains attachments) is sent out to 10 different users, the Exchange server will only keep one copy of the email and all users will reference that copy.  There are some changes with SIS in Exchange 2007 namely that it only performs Single Instance Storage of message attachments, not of message bodies.  This makes perfect sense when you think about it considering that most of ... Read More »

By Shawn Bass on Friday, February 01, 2008 8:30:23 AM

According to Microsoft's Press Pass website, Microsoft has extended another offer to Yahoo for a corporate merger.  From the sums of money involved, it would seem that Google is a bigger threat to Microsoft than VMWare is.  The question is, would this truly position Microsoft in better territory to fight Google?  I'm not so certain of that, but they would definitely get a higher chunk of the advertising revenue that's out there.

By Shawn Bass on Sunday, January 20, 2008 1:36:11 PM

Al has a very nice overview of Citrix XenServer 4.01 and areas that it compares/differs to VMWare ESX.  It's a great read.