RunAs Radio

Richard flies solo to talk to Barry Dorrans, now at Microsoft, about the recent spate of security breaches at Certificate Authorities like Comodo and DigiNotar. What can you as an IT Pro do about this recent set of hacks? Other than replacing your potentially exploited certificate, not a lot. Barry talks about how these exploits have happened, what Microsoft, Google and others are doing about it and some possible long term solutions to the problems. Check out Barry's blog at idunno.org. Barry also mentions an alternative solution to Certificate Authorities called Convergence and why Chrome won't be implementing it.

Richard and Greg talk to Donald Farmer about his new role over at QlikView. Don spent ten years working on Business Intelligence technologies at Microsoft and now has taken his experiences into QlikView and their business analytic products. Don also digs into how business analytics has evolved, reducing the cost of systems and making BI 'disposable' - low cost, agile and easily replaceable. Towards the end of the show, Don tells some great BI stories of different companies taking advantage of their BI systems.

Richard talks to Mark Russinovich and Aaron Margosis about the newly released Sysinternals Administrator's Reference. SysInternals is a vital part of any IT administrator's toolkit, but has never been well documented. The administrator's reference is that documentation, including details on every SysInternals tool as well as troubleshooting examples and a detailed overview of core Windows concepts. If you're using SysInternals (and who isn't), you need this book!

Richard flies solo to talk to Laura Hunter, now working at Microsoft IT about the identity infrastructure at Microsoft. Laura talks about the scale of the identity problem at Microsoft, the challenges of using smart cards instead of passwords (the passwords won). The conversation moves on to talking about identification in general, talking about different ways of recognizing users, the shared authentication via twitter, facebook, etc. Ultimately Richard and Laura end up back at ADFS and how cloud technology is facilitating the adoption of ADFS and claims-based security.

Richard talks to Jeremy Moskowitz about his latest version of PolicyPak. PolicyPak provides Group Policy templates for third party applications. This is one of those products that once you understand what it does, you can't live without it. There's a free community edition as well as a paid version that is ten bucks per PC! Check it out at www.policypak.com.

Richard and Greg to talk Yong Rhee from Microsoft Premier Field Engineering. Yong talks about optimization and health checks for Windows clients. He focuses on using the Windows Performance Analysis Tools (WPAT) which includes three tools: xperf, xperfview and xbootmgr. WPAT works with Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), available for Windows Vista and 7.

Richard and Greg talk to Cameron Fuller about System Center Operations Manager. Operations Manager is the instrumentation part of System Center - centralizing the status of all your servers into one console. The conversation moves into the concept of server and application health... looking beyond ping times and into knowing how healthy your application is. Cameron also helps us understand how Operations Manager interacts with other System Center products including Configuration Manager, Service Manager and Orchestrator. Check out http://systemcentercentral.com/ for more info on System Center.

Richard flies solo to talk to James Bannan about System Center Configuration Manager. Configuration Manager pulls together the administration of operating system, driver and application installs working alongside tools like Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. Check out James' blog at http://www.jamesbannanit.com/.

Early one morning at Kim and Paul's place, Richard sat down for a conversation about how they go about helping their customers make SQL Server go faster. The conversation wanders over index tuning, hardware issues and learning issues. Also listen for a special guest visit from Paul's nine year old daughter who knows that auto shrink is evil.

Richard and Greg talk to Stephen Foskett about storage technologies. Stephen gives a history of storage technologies from RAID arrays to SANs, including Microsoft's Storage Server. The conversation ranges over a huge number of storage technologies, including the new generation of low cost iSCSI targets, lamenting the death of Microsoft Home Server and even diving into obscure concepts like (get this) Fibre Channel over Token Ring! The show ends exploring the prospects of storage in the cloud and the possibilities going forward for data storage.