There's no rest for the wicked. Or the SysAdmin, it seems. Either your infrastructure is evolving, your pesky users are throwing spanners in the works, or your first visit to a new client reveals a mind-bending mess of policies and PST files which would make M.C Escher's head spin.

Take a moment and ask yourself how much time you spend just trying to figure out what your Exchange environment looks like, who has the largest mailboxes, and where in your network PST files have been squirreled away. Then consider how tedious it is to deal with that mess manually (or worse still, imagine the pain of relying on users to help you out - just ask Sean Duffy.)

You can tackle both of these mind-numbing tasks quickly & easily with two free tools from Red Gate. The Exchange Mailbox Sizer tool (which was built in a week by caffeine-fuelled geniuses) will tell you the size and structure of your information stores, complete with detailed visual breakdowns of the data, and then it will show you how much space you could save by archiving. This is vital information when you're in front of managers. Next, the PST Importer tool (built by the same team, and currently in EAP) will tell you exactly where on your network PST files are stored, and help you to smoothly take control of them with minimal impact on your network and users.

These are two key components for making the life of a SysAdmin hassle-free. Between them, they'll let you examine and manage your Exchange environment with a minimum of fuss, and for the best price around - nothing.

A little under a year ago, Matt Simmons wrote a rather reflective article about his terrifying brush with stress-induced ill health. SysAdmins and DBAs have always been prime victims of work-related stress, but I wonder if that predilection is perhaps getting worse, despite the best efforts of Matt and his trusty side-kick, HR. The constant pressure from share-holders and CFOs to 'streamline' the workforce is partially to blame, but the more recent culprit is technology itself.

I can't deny that the rise of technologies like virtualization, PowerCLI, PowerShell, and a host of others has been a tremendous boon. As a result, individual IT professionals are now able to handle more and more tasks and manage increasingly large and complex environments. But, without a doubt, this is a two-edged sword; The reward for competence is invariably more work.

Unfortunately, SysAdmins play such a pivotal role in modern business that it's easy to see how they can very quickly become swamped in conflicting demands coming from different directions. However, that doesn't justify the ridiculous hours many are asked (or volunteer) to devote to their work. Admirably though their commitment is, it isn't healthy for them, it sets a dangerous expectation, and eventually something will snap. There are times when everyone needs to step up to the plate outside of 'normal' work hours, but that time isn't all the time.

Naturally, with all that lovely technology, you can automate more and more of those tricky tasks to keep on top of the workload, but you are still only human. Clever though you may be, there is a very real limit to how far technology can take you. I'm not suggesting that you avoid these technologies, or deliberately aim for mediocrity; I'm just saying that you need to be more than just technically skilled (and Wesley Nonapeptide riffs on and around this topic in his excellent 'Telepathic Robot Drones' blog post). You need to be able to manage expectations, not just Exchange.

Specifically, that means your own expectations of what you are capable of, because those come before everyone else's. After all, how can you keep your work-life balance under control, if you're the one setting the bar way too high? Talking to your manager, or discussing issues with your users, is only going to be productive if you have some facts to work with.

"Know Thyself" is the first law of managing work overload, and this is obviously a skill which people develop over time; the fact that veteran Sysadmins exist at all is testament to this. I'd just love to know how you get to that point. Personally, I'm using RescueTime to keep myself honest, but I'm open to recommendations for better methods. Do you track your own time, do you have an intuitive sense of what is possible, or do you just rely on someone else to handle that all for you?

Cheers,

Michael

More and more companies are becoming attracted to the idea of Infrastructure as a Service (or IaaS). It would seem that you can outsource the provisioning and management of your services, encompassing everything from Email, through to your servers, workstations and software, all the way down to your LAN and internet services. This type of outsourcing can be a very attractive option for companies who have tight budgets and are short of technical skills, or don't have the means to provide long-term IT support.

Essentially, you can outsource your services at low short-term costs that are knowable and controllable. The services are provided in such as way as to be quickly and easily scalable, and with the minimum of hassle for your internal staff. If you want to get a sophisticated IT infrastructure set up in a hurry without the usual high buy-in costs, or the task of finding and hiring the right specialists, then it would seem the way to go; especially when their salesmen are hypnotizing you with oleaginous phrases such as "we are closely aligned with our client organization's core business requirements, providing agile services".

It sounds too good to be true, and so it often is. Whereas the costs will have initially been calculated on the annual renewal fees and service fees for ongoing support, there are other charges too, such as fees for customization and upgrades, which aren't so obvious. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) only becomes apparent when it is too late to extract the company easily from the arrangement. After a few years, these fees can add up to more than the initial cost of implementing a traditional in-house system. Worse than that is that you can then lose your power to determine your priorities. When you become reliant on another company, with its own schedule of priorities, to implement even simple changes, then you have effectively lost control of your technical infrastructure. This will make senior management very nervous. Likewise the IT staff will likely be nervous of a change in roles and responsibilities, possibly even redundancy.

There is definitely a requirement for outsourcing services. If the organization's overriding priority is to provide an exceptionally high class of service, which requires more expertise than it currently possesses, then outsourcing is worth considering. The IT team will almost certainly be involved with user assistance and smoothing out integrations with an external provider. Heck, if you outsource to IBM, the SysAdmins can go along for the ride and polish their expertise. Crucially, though, it will free up time to work on something entirely new. What you need to do is figure out much this time is worth, because ultimately it is this, rather than any substantial cost savings, that will be the main benefit to you and your organization.

Cheers,

Michael

A busy SysAdmin will occasionally have reason to curse SMTP. It is, certainly, one of the strangest events in the history of IT that such a deeply flawed system, designed originally purely for campus use, should have reached its current dominant position. The explanation was that it was the first open-standard email system, so SMTP/POP3 became the internet standard. We are, in consequence, dogged with a system with security weaknesses so extreme that messages are sent in plain text and you have no real assurance as to who the message came from anyway (SMTP-AUTH hasn't really caught on). Even without the security issues, the use of SMTP in an office environment provides a management nightmare to all commercial users responsible for complying with all regulations that control the conduct of business: such as tracking, retaining, and recording company documents.

SMTP mail developed from various Unix-based systems designed for campus use that took the mail analogy so literally that mail messages were actually delivered to the users, using a 'store and forward' mechanism. This meant that, from the start, the end user had to store, manage and delete messages. This is a problem that has passed through all the releases of MS Outlook: It has to be able to manage mail locally in the dreaded PST file. As a stand-alone system, Outlook is flawed by its neglect of any means of automatic backup. Previous Outlook PST files actually blew up without warning when they reached the 2 Gig limit and became corrupted and inaccessible, leading to a thriving industry of 3rd party tools to clear up the mess.

Microsoft Exchange is, of course, a server-based system. Emails are less likely to be lost in such a system if it is properly run. However, there is nothing to stop users from using local PSTs as well. There is the additional temptation to load emails into mobile devices, or USB keys for off-line working. The result is that the System Administrator is faced by a complex hybrid system where backups have to be taken from Servers, and PCs scattered around the network, where duplication of emails causes storage issues, and document retention policies become impossible to manage. If one adds to that the complexity of mobile phone email readers and mail synchronization, the problem is daunting. It is hardly surprising that the mood darkens when SysAdmins meet and discuss PST Hell.

If you were promoted to the task of tormenting the souls of the damned in Hades, what aspects of the management of Outlook would you find most useful for your task? I'd love to hear from you.

Cheers,

Michael

Whatever else one concludes from reading the 'ClimateGate', or 'CRUtape' files, it is a fascinating archive for System Administrators to study. Despite the lurid and absurd tales from the established media of sinister Russian hackers intercepting emails, it is obviously nothing of the sort. It is merely a zip file that consists of a smörgåsbord of different materials prepared in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, marked FOI2009 (Freedom of Information 2009). There are certainly 1079 emails (in a directory marked FOIA), which seem to have been archived routinely off the mail servers (a mixed bunch of Sendmail, Exchange and Exim). There are other files assembled from a variety of sources, on a scale that would be impossible for a hacker, but routine work for a compliance officer. There is nothing to suggest an email exploit. If it was a hacker, then he has sadly failed to get the elusive HadCrut Raw Data files or the result files, and it seems that he has even taken the trouble to delete personal information from the emails. Whereas most of the material is routine, there are some damning parts; but the story is incomplete.

The file first appeared on public FTP servers on around Nov 13 to Nov 17. A clever analysis of the material comes to the charitable conclusion that the final release into the public domain was the work of a whistle-blower. By several accounts, the security of the Motley CRU's public-facing server was so poor that anyone on the internet with the urge to trawl for evidence of UFOs could have found the file. 'We took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation', said the initial CRU press release huffily. The server? So all that data was collected on just one server, suggesting that the .zip file already existed at the CRU.

After you have ploughed through the files (and parts are so unintentionally funny that they could have been written as a satire by Phil Factor) you'll be left with the awful thought that the original reluctance of the CRU to disclose their research was not done to conceal conspiracy but muddle, bad scientific method, and emotion. We are left with the overall impression of C-list scientists promoted out of their depth, and eager to jump to the tune of the media, pressure groups, and politicians.

The analysis and dissemination of the archive happened outside the public eye. The established media refused to report it until they had to. The story resisted suppression. A new power has evolved; the power of informed bloggers with specialist scientific knowledge. It is a novel and formidable avenue to scientific truth and scientific integrity.

Cheers,

Michael Francis
Simple Talk SysAdmin Editor

Vista Service Pack 3, as we like to call Windows 7, is worth getting if you are stuck with Vista.  Why?  Well, Vista was Microsoft's first real product failure since Windows ME.  Windows 7 repairs the damage. It is not as fast as good old XP Service Pack 3, but it is easier to escape the torpid sluggishness of Vista by an upgrade to Windows 7 than to..er. sidegrade to XP Service Pack 3. 

The worst thing about Vista was the way that it tried to funnel all its users into its perception of the average user. Instead of allowing you to mold it to your ways and preferences, Vista was a shrieking nanny that insisted in assuming you were an airhead collector of digital photos and MP3s. It wailed 'Are you sure?' at every opportunity, or asked your mother if you really wanted to install the application. However often you politely asked it to show you the file details in date order, it would almost invariably insist on giving directory listings  with 'ratings' and 'date taken', full of achingly-slowly-generated thumbnails.

Anyone who installs Windows 7 will gain a surge of happiness when they find that it seems to be able to understand and browse windows networks, even in a laptop, and doesn't get occasional amnesia about the existence of Wifi.  You can also actually find stuff on your machine rather than seeing the most ridiculous brute-force search taking place, even to find a particular filename.  No longer to you see the black screen of catalepsy or the ghastly long pauses before performing any network operation.

Windows 7 removes all this frightful dumbing down, this vacuous example of 'animated paperclip' thinking, that spoiled the Vista product even more than the numerous technical flaws.

Even more interesting than this for the administrator is Windows 7's VHD support,  which allows Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) files as a native format, and provides for the booting a physical machine from a VHD file.  Support for virtual disks is in the disk management tools.  By using these, you can create a new uninitialized VHD file of fixed, or dynamically expanding, size.   You can then make this virtual disk available to the system as if you plugged in a hard disk drive. You can attach  a VHD from a server, or boot from and VHD. At last we have a common image format from desktop to server and common tools to manage and deploy Windows images that run either in Hyper-V virtual machines or on physical machines.  This will make image management simpler and reduce the number of images to maintain and catalog. This will make a huge difference in the speed at which applications can be tested in a number of different settings, and it won't be long before third-party applications come along to make good use of the huge potential of this apparently simple feature.

Cheers,

Michael

Emails are causing problems. Based on a survey of 220 large US companies in 2008, 43% reported that they had investigated an email-based leak of confidential information, and nearly a third had terminated the employment of an employee for violating company email policies. Over a third of the companies were so concerned about the loss of sensitive or embarrassing information that they had employed staff specifically to monitor the content of outbound emails.

Although Email continues to present the most serious threat to the security of company data, more companies are now aware of the dangers of internet-based data-sharing systems. In the past year, nearly a fifth of all US companies have investigated violations arising from the use of blogs, media sharing sites such as Youtube, and Social networking sites such as Twitter (Proofpoint/Osterman).

This isn't just paranoia. In many cases, a company has a statutory obligation to monitor outgoing emails for compliance reasons. For example, HIPAA dictates strict rules for the security of emails containing personal data such as medical records. Also, more generally, an employer has an obligation to prevent employees being exposed to 'inappropriate' emails at work: this has to be done by enforcing 'Acceptable Use Policies'.

In each case, it's hard to see how these rules could be enforced without monitoring or filtering emails, but at the same time the right to privacy of the patient, or employee, must be protected. This makes the monitoring process a legal minefield. In the UK, for example, monitoring of workers has to be consistent with the Data Protection Act, the Human Rights Act 1998, and Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which creates a right to respect for private and family life and for correspondence. There is even a published government code for employers who need to monitor their employees.

This represents a dilemma for any employer, and explains why so many companies are relying on staff, rather than clever software, to monitor emails. A panacea software solution is unlikely to be legal. It is hard to devise a monitoring process that does not intrude into the private lives of employees, or interfere with the relationship of mutual trust and confidence that should exist between them and their employer.

How can one draw a distinction between work-place and private information? One cannot reasonably enforce a policy that bans any personal use of emails in the workplace, when an employee can legitimately expect to be able to correspond, at work and in privacy, with an occupational health advisor, medical advisor or trade union representative. All email monitoring runs the risk of handling information that is confidential to the employee.

The problem develops faster than the law, in which there are wide international variations. To play safe, it seems best to make sure that there is a clearly defined internet policy (or AUP) in place for emails, or any other electronic medium, that is agreed, read and understood by staff. It needs to spell out the disciplinary consequences of a breach of the policy.

All this is easier said than done, and represents yet another source of stress for the beleaguered corporate IT departments around the world.

Do you have a solution? It would be great to hear what you think.

Cheers,

Michael Francis

In European, and American law, there is a wisdom that can, on first glance, look perverse. You take a digital photo of a person vandalizing your car. You then give the image to the police. They shake their heads and have to tell you that, although it suggests strongly to them who the perpetrator is, it isn't evidence. It is the same with any digital materials. How can you prove that the materials have not been tampered with? How, in this case, can you prove a link between the moment of time captured by the camera and the submission of the material in court. The  struggle to be able to  prove provenance of digital data is becoming one of the sharp edges of software development. Since the Enron scandal, it has become increasingly obvious that email is at the heart of any investigation into company practice, and so a lot of thought has been put into giving 'evidential weight' to any digital materials  

When the current internet Email was invented, the legal issues that haunt us today, were the last thing on the minds of the pioneers who envisaged a communication system, SMTP,  for  academic rather than commercial use. There were plenty of other systems that had been designed for commercial use within organizations, such as Wang Office, but none could resist the adoption of internet mail via SMTP. It is flawed, it is insecure, but everyone uses it. For all their faults, Telex and Fax were trusted because they were, for all practical purposes, inherently tamper-proof. Email isn't.

The subject can seem intimidating. Even reading the title 'BIP 0008-3:2008 Evidential Weight and Legal Admissibility of Linking Electronic Identity to Documents. Code of Practice for the Implementation of BS 10008' of the British Standards Institute document is a daunting task. The price of £60 for a 75 page booklet adds shock to the awe. However, the task could be simpler than this.

Exchange is packed with features, such as the journal, the application of policies and the advanced scripting, that can be used to assist in ensuring the provenance of intra-company emails, and with external customers and suppliers. It got us wondering, in our Simple-Talk editorial meetings, whether it was possible to use the features that were already there in Exchange to comply with the requirements of the legal department. Then the thought occurred to us that our readers would know a great deal on the subject. So how can you prove that the emails you have were sent by, and received by the people, groups or organizations that they purport to have done? We'd be fascinated to hear how you, or your company, approaches the task.

Cheers,

Michael Francis