Paul Gormley's blog

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Microsoft's July patches appeared overnight, and range from 'critical' to 'important'. We've only waited a year to see an infamous ActiveX vulnerability plugged, so be relieved to see that a fix for that issue has been included, along with others that prevent remote code execution and could contribute to botnet infections and denial of service attacks.

All in all, this months patch tuesday has six patches for nine vulnerabilities.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/advance.mspx

Microsoft must be too busy with the upcoming release of Windows 7 to care about Patch Tuesday, we've had some heavy patching thus far in 2009 but come what may and all has gone quiet over at fortress M$.....

The highlight of May's Patch Tuesday is the issue  of a fix for a zero-day vulnerability in PowerPoint, all versions, which with the aid of WSUS we should be patched by the end of today.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/advance.mspx

Currently we use a combination of a Hardware and Software firewall solution (namely a Fortigate 100a and MS ISA 2004) to protect ourselves from the big bad www. Our plan is to replace both with an open source solution called untangle, basically a free network gateway which offers what our current solution offers plus a lot more, in the form of web filtering, spyware blocking and a more robust reporting engine (that doesn't require a PHD to operate).

No space, no backup, no future.....

Redploying CRM 4 after a major issue with our VMWare ESX Server (in a later post will discuss ESX but for now we'll outline how to redeploy CRM 4)

First things first, good practice when builidng/rebuilding CRM Sever is:
1. Install Windows
2. Additional Components (IIS, snmp etc)
3. All Patches/Updates/Service Packs
4. SQL Server (Including Reporting Server etc)
5. SQL Server Service Packs
6. CRM
7. CRM Rollups

So far 2009 has been a time to build & rebuild, two new staff members, a current staff member with a bit of nasty malware known as AV2009 and a Vista laptop that would try the patience of job !!

There's never a good time to upgrade the software of a Telephone system but none the less it was time, we had hoped (rather than expected) it would all run smoothly but as expected it didn't go so good, from the off the odds where stacked against us, what with corrupt upgrade software leading to issues with the system hard drive you could sense that it was going to be a 'freaky friday' and it didn't disappoint.

Spoke with Mark Wiseler (Google Enterprise, Ireland) to get a better understanding of Google Apps and what they might mean to NICVA going forward.

First things first, I put on my non-profit hat, however it was quickly tilted to the one side when he informed me that there are currently no discounts in Europe for non-profits (except on Postini which we'll get into later.)

Is it virtually impossible to convert a physical machine to a virtual machine in a few clicks ??

The resounding answer is NO its not, in fact its far from impossible with VMWare's latest and more importantly considering the current financial climate, free tool, aptly named VMWare vCenter Convertor.

http://www.vmware.com/download/converter/

With this little piece of software you can take your physical server and convert it to a virtual server/machine, import to VMWare, press play and viola.

[from pbgormley] Creating MySQL Backups With AutoMySQLBackup | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials - [NICVA network on del.icio.us]

Installed AutoMySQLBackup, next step configure the settings for connecting to mySQL.

We then configured automysqlbackup.sh.2.5 to match the test mySQL DB we where going to use (paul_test).

We set the location of the backup to the NAS (NICVANas\BkUp_Sue)