All the test machines has a fully updated system with nothing running but the Symantec program, wiht the exception of the Symantec 10 server which was also running several smaller inhouse apps.  The management program uses java, (another pig) which explains the high use of memory when the management app is open.  I attempted to do PCmark benchmarks, however it didnt like the virtual machines.

This is an horrible misuse of memory.  The program’s size on disk is less than all that.  Several posts by developers on symantec’s forums mentioned that they tried to reduce the memory footprint.  Not sure how they thought they were doing that.  I am hesitant to start rolling this out, because I know that all my users will start complaining about their machines slowing down.  I am running the endpoint client on my machine, however its a brand new Dell and has plenty of resources to spare.  I just need to install it on a Vista machine for the ultimate bloat experience.

I have several ideas to extend the functionality of this tool, and I will work on them when I get time over the next few months. If you have any suggestions please let me know.

However part of the reason that the Sysinternals tools were so great were because they were third party tools. Now that they are owned by Microsoft, more people will be more distrustful of the tools. But I think that it is a good move overall. Perhaps some other developers in Microsoft will be able to add helpful features to the tools. I definitly do not think that Microsoft will charge for these tools, since there support department uses them so much.

The program is pretty simple as can be seen in this screenshot. It can generate multiple passwords of any length with lowercase, uppercase, numbers, and symbols.

You will need IIS installed host computer for the virtual server administration website. IIS can be installed by opening up Add/Remove Programs in the control panel, select windows components from the bar on the left. Select IIS. When you click next it will ask for your windows disk and install IIS.

Then start the virtual server setup program. This series of screenshots shows the whole setup process. Its pretty simple, just select next for everything. The last screen shows what you will see if everything goes right. Click any image for full size.

To setup a new host:

Click on Create in the virtual machines section. You will see a screen like this:

Here you can give the virtual machine a name, setup how much ram, connect it to a network, and add a hard drive.

Then insert your windows xp cd into your hard drive and boot up the new virtual computer. It will boot off the cd and start windows setup.

After windows is setup be sure to install the Virtual Machine Additions from the status page. This will allow you to integrate the virtual machine with the physical host.

To access your virtual machines you use the Virtual Machine Remote Control Client. This utility is very similar to windows remote desktop, except that it show the console. To use this you must first enable the Remote control Server. The property page for this can be found by going to Server Properties, and then Remote control Server properties. Click enable and ok to enable remote control.

Then open up the client and connect to your machines by entering this long goofy string. I wish they would make it as easy as just entering a name. But this does allow this client to open virtual machines on other servers.

Other features
One of virtual servers features is the ability to have different networks. These are each bound to either an externally connected network interface or to an internal network. Virtual machines connected to an external network can access other virtual and physical machines on the same network. The internal network can also be setup to allow you to have virtual networks that don’t connect to the outside.

Virtual server has the ability to allocate cpu resources among different virtual machines. This can reserve cpu cycles for a specific virtual machine. This can be helpful if you have multiple virtaul machines all vying for cpu. If you have a multiple cpu system a single virtual machine can not use more than one cpu however.

Virtual server can create virtual hard and floppy disks. These are stored on the hard drive as .vhd and .vfd files. A useful feature is the Linked Virtual Hard Drive. This is a virtual hard drive that is linked to a physical drive. This is an easy way to have your virtual machine acces your host hard drive for file copying.

Microsoft’s Virtual Server is a great (free!) tool for create and running multiple machines. I have used it many times to create test networks, dedicate a virtual machine for an app, run honeypots, web servers, and anything you need an extra computer for. You can run any operating system you want with it too. I have virtual machines with Linux, BeOS, Plan9, QNX, and even Windows 1.01.

Outages
When I want to open up a document, I want to be able to access it right away. If the app goes down, I won’t be able to open my document and that will cause a loss of productivity. On the tradiditonal desktop the only time you have an outage is when your machine crashes or the app installation gets corrupted. You(or your IT department) are resonsible for keeping your machine running. If you are using an online application, you are still resonsible for keeping your machine running, but you also have to rely on the asp to keep their service running. Asps work hard to keep their application up at all times. I work for an asp, so I know how important it is to keep it up and running. Our company uses Salesforce for keeping track of our customers, and I have heard the complaints whenever salesforce goes down, or has other issues.

Bandwidth
Feature rich applications require a lot of bandwidth. With some applications, like Salesforce, email, calendars, etc, current bandwidth speeds are already adequate. When you use those applications you are typically working with small amounts of data stored in a database. Office apps like Writely and Google Spreadsheets use significantly more bandwidth. For instance, when you open a spreadsheet with Excel, Excel copies itself into memory and loads your spreadsheet. To load a spreadsheet from your computer into Google spreadsheet, the app has to download its files off Google’s servers and load into your computer. Then it has to load the document. And to save it to their servers it has to copy it across the internet. Obviously the bandwidth between your hard drive and memory is millions times faster then the pipe across the internet. For Google spreadsheets to have a chance at competing with Excel it will need to have all the features of Excel. This will make the app quite a bit bigger. Of course it only needs to copy the parts it needs when it needs it, but that will put more strain on your bandwidth.

Privacy
No big corporation is ever going to want their sensitive data stored on another corporation server. And the way these online apps work best is when the document that is being worked on is on the same server as the app. This is probably the biggest deterrent to the adoption of online apps.

Solutions
To solve the problem of bandwidth and outages, the app could cache itself on the users computer, thus making itself available during outages, and being able to load more features in the background while it works. This could also solve the privacy problem by allowing the app to open local files easier. But if you think about this approach, it is reinventing the wheel. The online app is now a client app because it is storing itself and running on the local computer. And we already have great client apps that do this. What I feel will happen is that server products will be developed to interoperate with client apps, and also provide an online interface to those apps. If you have every used Microsofts Outlook Web Access, you know that it works almost exactly like Outlook 2003. Eventually they should develop Word and Excel versions that would allow you to remotely work on your documents. This would be a great system for corporations.

In conclusion, I think that the current online office apps are a long way from becoming a threat to current client apps. As Microsoft said their features are old by over 10 years. I don’t completely understand the goal of these online apps. They are moving everything that has been on traditionally on the desktop to the server, despite the fact that computer hardware is getting faster all the time. There is obviously a cycle to software, as we are slowly starting to move back to software on the server, just like in the early days of computing with mainframes and terminals. Just now our software is on the other side of the internet.

The image on top is Word 2.0, in the middle is Word 2003, and on the bottom is the latest Word 2007. It’s easy to see that the Word interface changed very little between 1992 and 2003. But starting in 2007, the interface changes dramatically. The biggest difference is that Office 2007 got rid of the ubiquitous drop down menus. No more File, Tools, View, Edit, etc. Instead there is a tabbed interface with all the buttons on it. This is very confusing, and I think it is hard to get used to. It means that things aren’t were I expect them to be. I have to search through an array of tabs and icons to find what I want. While I am willing to learn the new interface, I don’t really want to spend (waste) the time necessary learn how to do what I want(and already know how to do with the old version).

Working in IT support, I know that when users start getting computers with this new version of Office they are going to panic because they don’t know what they are doing. I am especially thinking of older, less tech savy users who are used to what they are doing and don’t want to change. The same is true for the new Windows Vista. It is going to throw off a lot of people from what they are used to. However, I remember the many small changes to the interface that I have gotten used to since I started working with Windows 95. Going back to a Windows 95 computer now, I flounder around looking for what I want. However, the struggle of aclimating new users to the next Office is still at least a year away. And I have the beta for that year to learn it so I can teach others. Overall I think that Microsoft has changed the interface so much that it is going to cause many headaches for many people in 2007. Send me tylenol for Christmas!

Another problem I have with the new Office Beta is related to Outlook. For one it keeps the old Office interface which is suprising. But my biggest problem with it is that it is horrendously slow. It is slow switching between folders and emails, especially emails with html. Regular text emails are pretty quick to come up, but html heavy emails take forever to display in the preview pane. After using it for a week, I am really getting sick of it. Also the new microsoft search beta thing that I installed to enable the searching in Outlook is a major resource hog. That and outlook combined can really chew up a lot of ram. And my hard drive always cranks up when ever I am using Outlook. I have Outlook connected to my Exchange server, so I am guessing that since it is beta there is some kind of incompatability. But I am ready to put Outlook 2003 back on, and get rid of the Microsoft search.

Overall I think Microsoft is doing good with office. It is still beta as evidenced by my problems with Outlook. I do think it is getting more and more bloated. And the interface was fine in for 16 years, so why change it now. But I am sure 50 years from now it will be completely different, so I will just get used to it.

As you can see it started opening tons of VNC connections, since it kept looping around. Kind of like holding two mirrors together. I guess it would keep going forever, except the computer would eventually crash. I closed the first vnc windows pretty quickly, and everything was back to normal. I wouldn’t recommend doing this, but I wanted to see what would happen.

A detailed Microsoft Knowledge base article on the Port Reporter can be found here.
The Port Reporter can be downloaded here.
The Port Reporter Parser can be downloaded here.

To install both of these tools, first download them. Then when you first run the setup you will have to extract the files to a temporary folder, and run the setup from there. Port Reporter is installed as a service, but its startup type is set to manual. It can be started by going into the services and clicking start.

The log files are stored by default in the c:\windows\system32\logfiles\portreporter folder. The tool makes three log files. One is an initial log file, that logs the ports, processes, and modules that are in use when the service starts. The next file logs when a port is used. It captures: date, time, protocol, local port, local IP address, remote port, remote IP address, PID, module, and user context for each port connection that is made. The last log file captures detailed information for each use of a port. The port reporter by default will start a new log when a file reaches 5mb in size.

I found that after running the service for a day that it stored about 40mb of log information. Of course I use Firefox, IE, IM, remote desktop, vnc, ssh, and plenty of different network stuff all day long, so I would expect the logs to be huge. I would not recommend using the Port Reporter all the time, but instead you should run it for a day to get a good idea of the different connections that you computer makes. Then when you need to log port use, perhaps to try to find a trojan, or another security problem, you know what should be normal.

The Port Reporter Parser is a great tool for digging through the log files. Instead of opening up the logs in notepad, this tool will neatly display the log in a grid, with sortable columns. It can analyze the data and display a wide variety of statistics. Double clicking on a record in the main grid will bring up its associated module information from the larger log.

In conclusion, I have not used this program for very long, but it logs a wealth of great information that would be very helpful for detecting attacks and security breaches. For example, the tool could be installed on users computers, and the logs analyzed to determine if the user has installed malware, or some unwanted programs on there computer. It would also be useful for logging port access on a server.