Cobweb Solutions Blog - The UK's Leading Cloud Provider

Going back to Barca!

hello...  just as Stephen, Matt and David return from TechEd in Barcelona, Cobweb are off to Barca again :-)   
(BTW it sounds like they had a great time and they have literally dozens of ideas for new services, improvements and recommendations to make things better!)

Shelley and I are fortunate enough to be going to the EMEA Hosting Club in early December.  This is a two day get together of execs from the leading and best hosting companies across EMEA to discuss and share experiences, look at market opportunities, and network with like-minded individuals.

This is the 7th event, I think we've been to them all, including the opening event atop the Eiffel Tower, and they are a very worthwhile event.    Although it's supported and organised by Microsoft, it's an open even where general hosting and various subjects can be discussed.   Naturally much of the content, round-table discussions and networking are about HMC and WBH, but there are other agenda items - SaaS, innovations, operational best practices etc. which provide valuable content and discussion.

For us it's a great networking event and that's where we get the most value.  We also get to spend time with the Microsoft UK Hosting Team, who are always good to talk to and facilitate discussions among hosters.   Often these events reinforce our thinking about our business and industry - it's good to hear others with similar ideas or problems.

If you're going, we'll see you there.

So that was TechEd 2007

Hello

So TechEd is over for another year and I thought I would share some of the figures from the week.

No of delegates - 5200 approx
No of delegate access PC's - 1300
Wireless Access Points - 90
Cisco switches - 40
Kilometres of copper cable used - 20
Kilometres of fibre used - 6
No of unique wireless devices seen - 4590
No of viruses detected - 0
Peak Internet bandwidth - 60Mb/sec

I have been very excited this week by what I have seen from Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0, they are both maturing into very capable products with many new features that will make my job as a Windows Administrator a lot easier and I look forward to start investigating how the new features can benefit Cobweb and our customers.

I will keep blogging over the coming months with updates on how things are going.

David

All your anti-virus are belong to us

Dear all,

Sorry for the slightly strange title, I’m sure some of you get it. If not, click here. Today is the last day of TechEd and I am happy to say that it has been brilliant. An absolutely fantastic session by Laura Chappell this morning on network forensics and then a follow up security panel discussion with Laura and more top MS and non-MS security professionals. This was my biggest shock of the day:

During a routine threat analysis of anti-virus programs, some open source Trojan source code was downloaded from the web. It was then compiled and several scan engines were used on the binary. None of the engines picked up the Trojan, even though it was a well known threat.

The reason?

This binary had been compiled with Delphi 2005 and the original virus writer had used a previous version. Therefore the signature didn’t match.

I’ll leave you with that, and finish by saying goodbye for now and I hope to see a bit of Barcelona tonight as we finish early at 4:30pm and it will still be light.

TechEd 2007 - Day 4

21:00 It's Thursday night, and its the last day of TechEd tomorrow - and we've covered a mass of subjects and overviews which has made the whole event just fly by.  Today I've been following some of the security tracks, and got some useful insight - as well as attending the best named sessions so far.

The first session looked at Wireless networking security - "The Black Arts of Wireless Security and White-Magic Countermeasures".  The presenter, from Microsoft, went through a number of the methodologies that hackers use for getting in to - and then disrupting - wireless networking.  So we started off talking about a site called www.wigle.net, a growing database (13mln and counting) of wireless networks available, whether they are open/free, what their SSIDs are, MAC addresses, channel etc.  While this is a mostly US based utility, the world maps are worth a look if nothing else.  Looking at the results of some searches, most users are still using the default settings for their devices - something like an SSID of "Linksys".  This gives a hacker a great start - if the SSID hasn't changed, I would doubt the default password has either...  This was proven in a great example from the lecturer - he was working in a hotel, and the wireless was a bit slow.  So he connected to the router - used the default settings (widely available on manufacturer websites), logged in and increased the broadcast power.  If you haven't already, log in and get them changed.

The second session covered some Windows OS security - "How the Evolution of Military Strategy can be applied to Information Security Strategies in the Enterprise".  For this session I was perhaps expecting Sun Tzu's art of war (here), and while the grand title didn't deliver this it had some great advice for actively protecting your OS.  One that stuck for example was many viruses/trojans - for example Blaster and Sasser - use the cmd.exe file to deliver their service and infect a computer.  This was demonstrated by gaining access to remote machine through an hacking utility (an RPC exploit) which presented a cmd shell with system privileges.  Next, on the targetted machine, we changed the file security to Interactive access only (file can only be executed locally) and ran the same hack.  And it didn't work.  So this then would have been protection against these viruses, and potentially many others too.  Simple when you know.

Logistics at TechEd

Good morning,

It is now Thursday and it is amazing how these three days have rushed by.  I just wanted to give people an idea of the organisation that has gone into this event.

There are PCs everywhere, from the highly restricted 'feedback terminals' to the work terminals that you sign in with your MS events web site login.  Furthermore, they have an exchange server here so you can email any delegate and search by name / company.  When you launch outlook on one of these work PCs it will autodiscover your identity and set up your MAPI profile, there is full roaming profile support and you always print to the nearest printer.

Of course none of this is really rocket science, however it is still mightily impressive.  There is a session on Friday that describes how MSIT (the Microsoft internal IT department) created the infrastructure we have here.  I might go along.

All this is an IT perspective but to be honest the way that the lunch is organised is just as impressive, this is really the feeding of the 5000.  In an hour and a half.

Adiós