When working on a disaster recovery or business continuity plan, two essential points that must be agreed upon by all parties are the recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO and RPO). Without these, it is impossible to correctly size your backup systems or recovery procedures.
Do you need clustered systems or off-site failover? How frequently should backups be performed? What about SQL transaction logs?
These questions can only be answered once you have an agreed upon RTO and RPO with the business units. So what exactly are they?
5 Ways to Improve Your IT Department's Reputation
Let's face it. We all know IT doesn't have the greatest reputation in many companies. We can be considered aloof, obstructive, or even rude. Most of the time that is simply due to a lack of resources (both time and money) or a difference in personalities. Despite that, here are five ways to improve the image and reputation of IT in your organization with just a little bit of time and patience.
How To Setup Home Directories on a Windows File Server
My recommendation is to keep things as simple as possible with a single share and simple permissions only set at the NTFS level.
Responsible Disclosure
Update 6/15/2010: The security vulnerability in Windows reference in this article is now being actively exploited. In this case, full disclosure is without a doubt leaving putting Windows users at risk.
Today, Microsoft confirmed that there is an unpatched remote execution exploit in Windows XP and Server 2003. This vulnerability was first reported to Microsoft on June 5th by discoverer and Google employee Tavis Ormandy. Microsoft had to confirm this unpatched vulnerability today because Ormandy decided to release the details of the exploit under the guise of Full Disclosure yesterday, five days after reporting his finding to Microsoft.
Now, I certainly do not consider myself to be an expert in the security field, but I am someone who is responsible for deploying vendor patches and monitoring the security of our systems. I personally find Ormandy's actions in disclosing the details of this exploit before Microsoft could patch the issue to be suspect. Now we are left in a situation where exploit code has been released by a security researcher a month or more before the vendor can analyze the details, develop, test and release a patch. How does this situation improve our overall security?
Today, Microsoft confirmed that there is an unpatched remote execution exploit in Windows XP and Server 2003. This vulnerability was first reported to Microsoft on June 5th by discoverer and Google employee Tavis Ormandy. Microsoft had to confirm this unpatched vulnerability today because Ormandy decided to release the details of the exploit under the guise of Full Disclosure yesterday, five days after reporting his finding to Microsoft.
Now, I certainly do not consider myself to be an expert in the security field, but I am someone who is responsible for deploying vendor patches and monitoring the security of our systems. I personally find Ormandy's actions in disclosing the details of this exploit before Microsoft could patch the issue to be suspect. Now we are left in a situation where exploit code has been released by a security researcher a month or more before the vendor can analyze the details, develop, test and release a patch. How does this situation improve our overall security?
Outlook Synchronization of SharePoint Document Library Results in 0x80004005 Error
We recently came across an issue when trying to connect a large document library in SharePoint 2007 to Outlook 2007. Outlook would throw out the following error when attempting the sync:
After some additional troubleshooting, I determined that this only happened when trying to synchronize a sub-folder of the library (with the amount of data in this library, synchronizing sub-folders was the common practice). Eventually a call to Microsoft PSS was required to troubleshoot this further.
In the end, we determined that parts of the folder structure used characters that Outlook considered invalid for synchronization. Specifically, Outlook would not sync a folder with "--" in the name or folder path (in our case, the root folders were all named "A---", "B---", etc.) The support engineer did mention that there may be other characters which Outlook won't sychronize, but luckily we did not run into those.
If you are running in to this Outlook error when connecting to a SharePoint document library, try looking in to the folder names and see if something looks abnormal.
Task 'SharePoint' reported error (0x80004005): 'An error occurred either in Outlook or SharePoint. Contact the SharePoint site administrator.'
In the end, we determined that parts of the folder structure used characters that Outlook considered invalid for synchronization. Specifically, Outlook would not sync a folder with "--" in the name or folder path (in our case, the root folders were all named "A---", "B---", etc.) The support engineer did mention that there may be other characters which Outlook won't sychronize, but luckily we did not run into those.
If you are running in to this Outlook error when connecting to a SharePoint document library, try looking in to the folder names and see if something looks abnormal.
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