Microsoft Plans for Thin Light Weight Windows Server

Uncategorized
30
Jun 2015

3015019_Nano_Server_Microsoft_cloud

Leaked slides discuss Microsoft’s upcoming plans to provide a thin lightweight windows server known as Windows Nano Server. Here’s what we know so far.

A slide deck, which was leaked, shows Microsoft’s plans to enhance the ability of installing Windows on a “headless” machine.  A “headless” machine is a system which does not have a keyboard, mouse or display. This new type of server will be branded as the “Nano Server”.   This new “headless” design will allow administrators to access it via web-or-PowerShell-driven management tools.

The New Nano Server Features

nano_server_windows_server_210499357

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  • The new Thin Light Weight Windows Server will look to replace the typical Windows server environments which are compliant with POSIX, particularly for company networks which use Windows systems.
  • Designed to be streamlined to fit within the Cloud infrastructure. The idea will be to split the server into two roles. One part will be a server within a container and the other part will devote itself to managing the cloud.
  • However it has one obvious part where it does not keep up with the competition: its dependency on still needing a client machine to act as a graphical user interface to access the server.
  • This implies that a graphics card, mouse and keyboard will in fact be required to access it. This will step back to the usual way that administration is normally carried out through the GUI.
  • The roles or work performed exist on the Nano Server’s exterior. In the image, it does not contain any metadata or binaries but instead depends on standalone packages. These are installed similar to applications.
  • It will support containers, Hyper-V, clustering, storage, ASP.NET, PaasV2 and V.Next.
  • It will be developed to support drivers, anti-malware, System Center and Apps Insight agents.
  • The slides imply that Windows Nano Server is going to be placed as the core of an environment which is clustered or virtualized.  It is also being declared as the only true-cloud-OS assuring provision of reduced resource expenditure and faster deployment than the current solutions from Microsoft.
  • Even if it will present support for next generation applications which are distributed, the slides show that it is going to be suitable for current applications running on Windows Server.
  • Expected to be the next step to support working within OS Apps and the Cloud Infrastructure- to Follow the server core pattern.
  • No specific fixed time frame is attached, only speculation of a possible release for some time in 2016.
  • Microsoft has not talked openly about this and dismisses it as “speculation and rumors”.

For more ways to support your server environment and network infrastructure, contact your local IT professionals.

 

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What to do when your printer stops working

hardware, Office IT,
28
Jun 2015

The-Humanity-of-Printing

Do you know what to do when your printer stops working? If not, we’ll help you take out some of the guesswork with some basic troubleshooting tips.

Printers may be an understated piece of equipment. It almost becomes part of the office furniture, until it gets used for printing.  But what happens when the office printer stops working, what is one to do before they decide to call for help?  Firstly, remain calm. The good news is that we’ve pieced together a checklist for what to do when a printer stops working.

What to check before first

Just a preliminary note: It may sound obvious; however, most printers can actually display the problem on their LCD displays or give clues as to what the problem is. Make a note of any errors which may flash on this display too.

  • Restart the printer. Simply power off and then switch it back on. Sometimes all that is needed for a printer to work well again is a simple restart. This often does the trick, almost works like magic!
  • Clear the printer’s sprint queue. This is a common problem where one print job within the print queue jams up all other print jobs waiting for their turn to print in the queue. To clear the queue, simply head over to the printer’s setting from your computer’s Control Panel on Windows 7 or 8 by going to

Start > Control Panel > Hardware and Sound> Printers
Double click the printer that has the problem.
A print queue should be available, and from there you can delete and clear the print jobs to tell it to stop printing. Click Cancel to remove the print jobs.

Try to send a new print job to test its working fine.

  • Make sure your printer has enough supplies. By this we mean enough paper to feed through it and plenty of ink to use. Insufficient levels of these can make a printer unhappy, so be sure to not overlook this!

Paper Jams- a common problem

paper-jam

Printers are usually good at telling their users when there’s a paper jam. If there is one, it’s a good idea to check that paper isn’t stuck. Even the smallest piece of paper jammed in the printer’s rollers qualifies as a paper jam.

Sometimes a printer will complain about a phantom paper jam. In this case, it’s a matter of checking there’s enough paper in the paper tray and all trays or doors are closed shut.

Servicing your printer

The inside of a typical laser printer from Zinetic.

Diagram of the inside of a typical laser printer from Zinetic.

Laser jet printers need servicing from time to time, so it’s always a good idea to have it serviced. Once a certain amount of printing threshold has been reached, the printer may request a service to replace one of its components from wear and tear such as a print drum or paper roller, helping to further extend the printer’s life.

Check the warranty

It’s always a good idea to register your printer for its warranty as soon as it arrives in the office. You’ll want the least amount of trouble by having your warranty activated which will cover you for a faulty printer and have the problem fixed promptly by the vendor.

For more ways to troubleshoot your printers and computers, contact your local IT professionals.

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How Many Cores Does Your PC Need?

hardware,
25
Jun 2015

Multi-Core-CPU

Do you know how many cores your PC needs? Look no further than our guide, where you’ll find out the recommended number of cores for various scenarios.

You may have considered purchasing a desktop, laptop or PC, only to find some rather technical jargon in the specifications, especially when it comes to processors.

Single, dual or quad core, which one should you buy and is it worth it and at what speed?

These are some of the common questions asked when shopping around for new home or office PCs. The prices vary considerably so we’ve pieced together this article on what to look for based on your scenario.

What is a core?

Core refers a processor’s capabilities of processing. In other words, how much work it can do in parallel. The more cores a processor has, the more powerful it is to respond to computer instructions.  To the user this is all invisible apart from how quickly the computer works.

Older style processors use a single core, which only allows it to process one instruction at a time. At present, multiple instructions can be processed at different cores of the processor. Each core acts as a separate processing unit, which can even have their own cache memory on it. Therefore in essence, each additional core within a processor chip acts as its own separate processor. See below the recommended use for reach type of core processor.

Single, dual or quad core computer?

Socket-939

Single core system

A single core system has only one core. It should be used for a very basic computer that doesn’t need too much processing power such as a file server or a simple desktop. As the name suggest, single core contains a single strength of processing power. Computers with single cores tend to be very affordable.

Dual core system

A Dual core system is ideal for business workstations or non-critical laptops.
This type of processor has the power of two single core systems, and therefore, it can manage a little more workload for simple programs to run or to multi-task, such as MS office and having many browser tabs open.

Quad core system

A Quad core system is a more powerful processor that has four times the processing power of a single core chip and can respond to instructions quickly with ease. For instance, it is particularly used in servers, or on systems that run programs for video production, graphics work, handling large files or doing heavy multitasking.

Processor speed

Processor speed is measured in cycles per second, which is measured in hertz. Nowadays processors are available in Ghz speed, which translates as billions of cycles per second.

For instance a 3 GHz dual core processor is not the same as a 1.7GHz quad core one, as the latter is considerably slower in responding to instructions than the dual core processor. However, as mentioned before, the quad core can carry out multiple instructions with double capacity than the dual core but at nearly half of its speed.  This is something to watch out for as many retailers will advertise quad core processors at a dwarfed speed. Therefore, be sure you purchase one with a high enough Ghz speed.

For more ways to optimize your office systems, contact your local IT professionals.

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How Much Memory Does Your PC Need?

hardware, ,
23
Jun 2015

ram

Do you need to figure out how much memory is needed for your PC? Our guide can help you run through the various scenarios and their memory recommendations.

Whether a computer complains about running low on memory  or struggles to run with multiple application open, it’s clear that it may need more memory.

As a rough guide, read our list below to see which memory size to purchase for ideal system usage.

Suggested computer memory usage guide

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  • 2GB – At present, this amount of memory is the suggested minimum to use. Avoid this level of memory unless the system is being used to only process basic documents, email or browse the web and only one of those tasks at a time. Be warned, it’ll be incredibly slow!

Note: 2GB was considered to be fast around a decade ago. It goes to show how the standard computer specification is changing and growing in tangent with newer software, operating system updates, applications, and computer processors becoming more resource hungry.

  • 4GB – This size of memory is considered good enough for business work stations and any systems which need to be able to efficiently access email, browse the web and work on documents or all at the same time.

Note: 4GB also used to be considered good to use on servers about 10 years ago. This is another example to put things into perspective.

  • 8GB – This is good for business workstations that require more resources from memory such as heavy multitasking. For instance, a workstation that runs more than one program at a time, works on multiple documents and opens many browser tabs will need this. 8 GB will offer a much more seamless performance.
  • 8GB+ – Memory can go beyond 8GB. For instance two 8GB modules can be installed in a server’s memory slot, making it 16GB. This is ideal for highly productive systems such as servers, or production systems, or systems that carry out graphics processing, video editing or work on large files and databases.

DIY memory upgrade?

diy-dream-build-970x0

Systems with sufficient levels of memory for its intended purpose can be purchased straight out from the box. Alternatively, memory can also be upgraded within a system.

Computer memory can be purchased as “memory sticks” and they can be inserted into the memory slots of a pc or laptop. If a laptop is under warranty, opening up the seal to upgrade the memory may cause the warranty to become void. So be  sure to consider this first.

Also keep in mind that 32-bit systems can only have a maximum of 4gb of memory.

Types of Memory

If going down the route of manually upgrading your system’s memory, there are different types of memory to consider.

As a quick overview, memory does not only come in size, but it also comes in different speeds. DDR, DDR2, and DDR3 are the memory modules available on the market that operate at different at speeds. For instance, DDR will have transfer rates of 1600 MB/s, whereas DDR2 will double that of DDR and DDR3 will double the speed rate of DDR2 memory modules.

What also differentiates each type of DDR memory is the number of pins on it. Therefore, be sure to acquire the right type of DDR memory to fit into your system’s motherboard, as well as one that supports the memory speed of your motherboard.

Different types of DDR memory will not be compatible with one another. For example, a mother board built to fit DDR2 memory sticks will not be compatible with DDR and DDR3. So be sure to also check this before purchasing additional memory for your system.

For the best performance pc, it’s desirable to have the highest level of memory size and speed, such as 16 GB+ DDR3 2933, however it does come with a premium price tag.

For more ways to optimize your systems and office productivity, contact your local IT professionals.

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Summary of the NSA Malware Discovery

Security, ,
21
Jun 2015

nsa-malware-hard-drives-570

Security firm Kaspersky reveals malicious National Security Agency (NSA) malware hidden in drivers and firmware around the world. Read the summary here.

Kaspersky exposes NSA malware built into hard drives worldwide

Sitting on millions of hard drives across the globe lays a deep rooted NSA malware designed to spy on computer activity, which has also been noted to have done so for over a decade!  The NSA is responsible for gathering electronic intelligence on behalf of the U.S. government.

The majority of brands such as Seagate, Toshiba, Western Digital and many others, have had the tampered firmware built into their hard drives, according to the security software giant Kaspersky.

As many as 30 countries around the globe have the spyware infection implanted on their personal computers. Prime targets have been found to be military and government bodies, banks, energy companies, telecommunication firms and many others.

Most of the targets are from countries such as Afghanistan, Algeria, China, Mali, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia, Syria and Yemen; however it has been picked up in other western countries such as the UK, and parts of Europe.

The party behind all of this has been branded with the name “The equation Group”, who cleverly gained access to the various different firmware’s source code and cracked complex encryption algorithms. They’ve used their highly skilled ability to infect and access very specific targets.

Kaspersky has not named the firm responsible for all the spying operations. It’s believed to be strongly related to the Stuxnet attack which was led by the NSA. Stuxnet was a campaign designed to attack the uranium enrichment facility in Iran.

The Factors behind the Malware’s success

  • The malware, reported as a  dll file, is able to resist computer reformats and hard disk wipes in a ploy to reinfect the host.
  • Ironically, this has impressed Kaspersky Labs in the sense of a piece of hardware having the ability to cause re-infection to a pc. They described it as “ground-breaking technology”.
  • The malware was coded into the hard drive’s firmware, which is the software that allows it (the hardware) to run. For instance, when a computer is switched on it’ll access the firmware to talk to hard drives and other system hardware.
  • In the case of the dll file, a computer will end up getting re-infected as the firmware is needed to use the hard drives.
  • The spy program could work on any hard disk currently sold on the market.

How did it get there in the first place?

NSA-Listens-Shirtmock

It begs the question as to how such malware could have been embedded into the firmware of so many hard drives and to the majority of hard drive companies in the first place?
According to Kaspersky’s director, Costin Raiu, the makers of the spyware must have been able to have had access to the actual source code of each and every infected hard drive. The source code holds the structure, and when in the hands of a third party programmer, this can permit vulnerabilities to be identified and used to harbor malware within it and used for attack.

Raiu continued to add, that’s there’s little chance for the hard drive firmware to be rewritten by just anyone with the use of public information.

Most hard drive companies would not officially disclose whether or not they’ve allowed any such NSA agency officials to access the source code. However Western Digital, Seagate and Micron spokesmen have stated that they have not allowed their source code to be tampered with and take security very seriously.

Despite this, it is still possible for undercover NSA coders to have been employed by any given hard drive manufacturer over a decade ago or disguised as software developers to acquire the source code. It is also likely for hard disk code evaluations to have been requested on behalf of the Pentagon. All are theories of how social engineering could have been part of “the equation”.

This has now made many corporate giants, like Google and others in the US, rethink who could have attacked them back in 2009, which was originally pinned on China.

Evidence exists of hackers having reached the source code from various large American technology and defense corporations, according to reports from investigators.

For more ways to secure your data and systems, contact your local IT professionals.

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