Tag Archives: Microsoft

Logon Triggers – SQL Server 2008 R2

Logon triggers fire stored procedures in response to a LOGON event. This event is raised when a user session is established with an instance of SQL Server. Logon triggers fire after the authentication phase of logging in finishes, but before the user session is actually established. Therefore, all messages originating inside the trigger that would typically reach the user, such as error messages and messages from the PRINT statement, are diverted to the SQL Server error log. Logon triggers do not fire if authentication fails.

 

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You can use logon triggers to audit and control server sessions, such as by tracking login activity, restricting logins to SQL Server, or limiting the number of sessions for a specific login. For example, in the following code, the logon trigger denies log in attempts to SQL Server initiated by login login_test if there are already three user sessions created by that login.
Copy

USE master;
GO
CREATE LOGIN login_test WITH PASSWORD = ‘3KHJ6dhx(0xVYsdf’ MUST_CHANGE,
CHECK_EXPIRATION = ON;
GO
GRANT VIEW SERVER STATE TO login_test;
GO
CREATE TRIGGER connection_limit_trigger
ON ALL SERVER WITH EXECUTE AS ‘login_test’
FOR LOGON
AS
BEGIN
IF ORIGINAL_LOGIN()= ‘login_test’ AND
(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sys.dm_exec_sessions
WHERE is_user_process = 1 AND
original_login_name = ‘login_test’) > 3
ROLLBACK;
END;

Note that the LOGON event corresponds to the AUDIT_LOGIN SQL Trace event, which can be used in event notifications. The primary difference between triggers and event notifications is that triggers are raised synchronously with events, whereas event notifications are asynchronous. This means, for example, that if you want to stop a session from being established, you must use a logon trigger. An event notification on an AUDIT_LOGIN event cannot be used for this purpose.

Google Releases Stable Version of Chrome 12

Google Chrome 12 is now the stable release of Google’s web browser, bringing several improvements in security, privacy and graphics capabilities.

 

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Chrome now checks downloaded files for malware, and Google claims it has designed the feature in such a way that it doesn’t have to know which URLs you visited or which files you downloaded to be able to detect malicious files.

You can now also fine tune the data that websites store on your computer, including Flash Player’s Local Shared Objects (also known as Flash cookies), directly from Chrome.

On the graphics front, Chrome 12 includes support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, which enables some nifty effects such as rotating and scaling videos. Try this Chrome Experiment to see some of the new features in action.

Finally, Chrome 12 brings several minor improvements such as an improved interface for setting a homepage and searching for Chrome Apps directly from the address bar.

Google Chrome 12 is available at www.google.com/chrome. Existing users will be automatically updated to the new version in the next couple of days.

Microsoft promises Windows 8 details tomorrow?

Microsoft appears to be readying a more in-depth look at its forthcoming Windows 8 platform at the Computex event in Taipei tomorrow.

According to Engadget, during Microsoft’s Computex Keynote Steven Guggenheimer, corporate VP for the OEM division, said that the company will announce plans for the ‘next version’ of Windows.

 

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Given the multiple claims and retractions around Windows 8 so far, we’re loathe to say Ballmer’s Bunch is going to show off screenshots or give a Windows 8 release date, but it seems the company is finally ready to talk to the world about the new platform.

Tablet time?

Earlier reports suggest that Microsoft will be showing off its new Windows 8 tablet platform, which may be limited to a single set of reference specifications, in a similar way to Windows Phone 7.

Windows 8 is set to be an evolution to the popular PC platform, featuring UI tweaks and mostly improving the speed of users’s systems

However, given that Microsoft only recently came out and denied Ballmer’s claims that Windows 8 even exists, we’re intrigued to see what will be spoken about tomorrow at 10AM Taipei time (2AM to us Brits).

Tips for picking an IaaS provider II

However, you will need to make sure your outsourcer’s expertise matches up with your IaaS of choice. “A lot of these guys already have a cloud practice, managing at least the Amazon cloud. But the key thing is to make sure the company can demonstrate experience managing the cloud instance you’ll be using,” he cautions.

 


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Managing the load

A second option is to select a traditional hosting company that has developed a cloud infrastructure and has a services arm that will help you manage the operating system, applications and anything else you’d like.

IaaS providers of this ilk include AT&T, Fujitsu, GoGrid, HP, IBM, NaviSite, Rackspace, SoftLayer, SunGard and Verizon Business, which includes Terremark.

“You’re making a decision that you’re going to use this particular cloud, and you’re not necessarily going to value portability nor are you going to value having multiple clouds,” Staten says.

“This company’s expertise is going to be limited to its cloud, but those consultants are probably the most knowledgeable about what the cloud can do, and they’ll have insider tricks because the guys who built the cloud sit right next to them,” Staten says.

The data center host-cum-cloud IaaS provider model has worked perfectly for SaaS provider Cycle30, Jim Dunlap says, company president.

When the Cycle 30 team received the go-ahead to create a subsidiary, it decided not to spend “precious capital” on building its own data centers but rather to partner with a traditional hosting company, SunGard. “And that gave us the opportunity to look at our business model and determine whether or not we could use cloud computing as a way to decrease our cost of going to market,” he says.

Its cloud theory was put to the test right off the bat, Dunlap says.

“We had the immediate need to test the process of giving SunGard our specs and systems to clone, and telling them that they’d need to turn up 25 to 50 new environments in the course of a week. And that we’d want to use that cloud computing facility for six to nine months, then we’d be done and they’d need to turn the facilities down and we’d stop paying for that infrastructure,” Dunlap says.

It worked – so much so that Cycle30 now handles all such projects via SunGard’s managed cloud service, he adds.

IaaS is smart choice for ConnectEDU

The third option for managed IaaS, Staten says, is pure-play cloud managers – companies such as Cloudscaling. “What you’re buying here is 100% pure expertise in the cloud. They know how to best take advantage of the cloud and what’s unique to cloud environments,” he says.
Cloud first

The difference between a Capgemini and a Cloudscaling, for example, is that the former approaches the cloud from an enterprise perspective, so manages the cloud from an operational point of view, while the latter thinks cloud first and so has an application design viewpoint.

“As a result, a pure-play cloud provider can put things in the cloud and can do things programmatically that can help you reduce your cloud bill, improve the availability of your application and recommend changes in your application design to get better cloud economics,” Staten explains. .

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A complete menu for ordering cloud services from SAAS and IAAS vendors.
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/// IAAS is smart choice for ConnectEDU
/// Six tough questions for your next IAAS vendor
Tips for picking an IaaS provider
Vendors offer a variety of options, from pure-play to managed services
By Beth Schultz, Network World
June 06, 2011 12:08 AM ET

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Making the leap to a public cloud infrastructure requires careful planning.

As Gartner analyst Lydia Leong cautions in a recent report, the cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market “is immature, the services are all unique and evolving rapidly, and vendors must be chosen with care.”

Six tough questions for your next IAAS vendor

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With such a provider, for example, you could drop an application onto Amazon EC2 or other cloud and then have its consultants manage it for you. It’s not a bad way to go, he adds. “They can tweak your application and its deployment, push it across multiple geographies and do a whole bunch of other things that you don’t have a clue how to do and probably don’t even know that you could do such things in the cloud.”

Cloud IaaS services, managed or not, are becoming viable options for enterprise deployments of all sorts. They offer a nice foundational starting point in some cases, quick on and off in others and business-enabling infrastructure in others. There are caveats, of course, with the one painful lesson learned of late with the Amazon EC2 outage – have high availability and disaster recovery plans in place with your provider of choice.

Tips for picking an IaaS provider

Making the leap to a public cloud infrastructure requires careful planning.

As Gartner analyst Lydia Leong cautions in a recent report, the cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market “is immature, the services are all unique and evolving rapidly, and vendors must be chosen with care.”

 

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Six tough questions for your next IAAS vendor

The temptation may be to first look to vendors with which you have a pre-existing relationship, but experts say you want to be sure you ask the right questions.

For example, Post-n-Track, an online healthcare transaction and information exchange based in Wethersfield, Conn., decided to move to cloud computing for scalability and flexibility.

The company found out that its managed services provider, NaviSite, was building up a cloud infrastructure, says Randy Ulloa, vice president of technology at Post-n-Track. “We immediately jumped on that potential and dug into how it was going to achieve its cloud service,” he says.

But a good working history with NaviSite didn’t make the company a shoo-in for Post-n-Track’s cloud business, Ulloa emphasizes. “It wasn’t until we understood its physical cloud architecture – the underlying CPU and storage builds and the software and management layers on top – that we could put our minds at ease and decide to take the next step with it,” he says.

When moving to IaaS, some IT executives, such as Schumacher Group CIO Doug Menefee, look first to the market leader, Amazon EC2.

While already running 85% of its business processes in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, Schumacher only recently ventured into cloud IaaS. The impetus was an internal data center glitch experienced over the Christmas holiday, Menefee says.

10 SaaS companies to watch

“That was a big wake up call. And recognizing the maturity level of site services like Amazon EC2, we’ve now decided to leverage external cloud service providers to provide the infrastructure for anything we don’t have to put inside our own data centers,” he says. “We don’t want to be a single point of failure for the organization.”
Managed IaaS

To some users, IaaS is about being able to carve out a private space within the public cloud infrastructure. They get similar availability, cost and scalability benefits as they do with pure IaaS, without the security concerns related to sharing infrastructure with others. Others like the idea of cloud IaaS but want some hand-holding rather than the purely self-service model.

Many enterprises, like Post-n-Track, fall into this latter category, as might be expected given IT’s comfort level with using outsourcers and hosting providers for management help, says James Staten, principal analyst with Forrester Research.

Managed IaaS comes in three forms, Staten says.

If you’re already using an IT outsourcer such as Accenture, Capgemini or IBM, going with that provider for managed IaaS can be the “cleanest, easiest and quickest” option, he says. “It already knows your systems, your applications and what SLAs you care about.”

Google Doodle Honors 92nd Birthday of ‘Busytown’ Creator Richard Scarry

Google’s Sunday homepage doodle honors what would have been the 92nd birthday of childrens’ book author Richard Scarry.

The doodle features a scene from “Busytown,” a fictional world created by Scarry, which is inhabited by well-known characters like Postman Pig, Huckle Cat, Sergeant Murphy, and Lowly Worm. Click through the main doodle, and the smaller homepage doodle on the top left replaces the “l” in Google with Lowly Worm.

 

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Scarry was born in Boston in 1919, and his comfortable childhood is reflected in the more than 300 books he produced during his life, according to a biography published by Sterling Children’s Book. He attended the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but was later drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II. He was sent to North Africa, where he was the art director, editor, writer and illustrator in the Morale Services Section of Allied Forces HQ.
Richard Scarry doodle

Scarry worked at various magazines after the war, but also pursued freelance work as an illustrator; he drew the pictures that went alongside the text for childrens’ books. His first book, “Great Big Car and Truck Book,” was published in 1951 by Little Golden Books. Simon and Schuster published five more that same year.

Scarry’s first best seller, however, came in 1963 with “Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever.” The book featured pages chock full of items for young children to discover; more than 1,400 in all.

Scarry is known for books featuring anthropomorphic animals living in the fictional Busytown. As he explained to Publishers Weekly, “children can identify more closely with pictures of animals than they can with pictures of another child. They see an illustration of a blond girl or a dark-haired boy, who they know is somebody other than themselves, and competition creeps in. With imagination—and children all have marvelous imagination—they can easily identify with an anteater who is a painter or a pig who transforms from peasant to knight.”
Lowly Worm

Scarry’s characters have not been confined to books. The “Best Ever” series was made into animated videos. The world of Busytown was also made into an animated series, “The Busy World of Richard Scarry,” which ran on Nick. Jr. from 1995 to 2000.

Scarry and his family re-located to Gstaad, Switzerland in 1972, where Scarry worked until his death in 1994. His books have sold over 200 million copies in 30 languages.

Google, meanwhile, has made headlines for its own in-house homepage doodles, including an interactive undersea-themed drawing in honor of author Jules Verne’s 183rd birthday and 17 holiday-themed doodles that were live for two days in December. Recently, Google.com also featured 16 homepage doodles in honor of what would have been the 76th birthday of children’s author Roger Hargreaves, who wrote the Mr. Men and Little Miss series, and dancer/choreographer Martha Graham.

Recently, it was revealed that Google obtained a patent for its popular homepage doodles, covering “systems and methods for enticing users to access a Web site.”

California second grader Matteo Lopez was recently selected as the winner of this year’s Doodle 4 Google competition. His space-themed doodle was featured on the Google homepage on May 20, and he took home a $15,000 college scholarship and a $25,000 technology grant for his school.

For more on Google’s doodles, see the slideshow below.

The Peculiar Origins of Tech Terms

Earlier this year, PCMag offered up a brief history of malware. While researching the story, we had a little back and forth regarding the origin of the term “computer virus.”

One side had contended that the phrase first appeared in the science fiction book When HARLIE Was One. The other insisted that it was coined by computer scientist Fred Cohen. The former ultimately won out on account of chronology (1972 versus 1983), but Cohen got the nod for the first mention of the term in an academic paper. (Interestingly, it’s been subsequently brought to my attention that the term “computer virus” also popped up in a 1982 issue of The Uncanny X-Men, penned by Chris Claremont.)

 

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Interestingly, someone also commented that the term “worm” was also born in sci-fi—this time in John Brunner’s 1975 bit of dystopia, The Shockwave Rider. It’s likely not a major revelation to most that a number of well-known tech terms actually originated on the pulpy pages of sci-fi novels.

Science fiction authors often draw on current advances in technology in order to predict the future, and computer developers often read a lot of science fiction. Take, for instance, “cyberspace,” which entered the lexicon by way of William Gibson’s short story “Burning Chrome,” and later his beloved 1984 novel, Neuromancer.

This got us thinking about the origins of other well-known tech terms. Turns out, many were born from far more diverse sources than just the predictions of science fiction authors. In this slideshow, we’ve pointed out familiar terms that were born from comedy sketches, comic books, practical jokes, and children’s stories, and there’s even one that started life as an airport shuttle.

Stupid user tricks 5: IT’s weakest link

But we were prepped. We were almost grinning, because we were about to be heroes. We told the IT guy that we have virtual images of his servers, that we had their configs registered with a local outfit that will rent us replacement infrastructure until he gets the new stuff on order, so all we need are the backup tapes and we can have him up and running in about a day, maybe less.

 

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Boy, that would have been nice. But we also learned that Mr. IT had gotten tired of going to the second floor to replace backup tapes. After all, that disk array was doing just fine as a backup. So the last tape they had was from four months before the four-post header.

Fallout: Not only did Mr. IT get fired, but the IT team lost the contract — unfair.

Moral: Do your daily backups, and don’t treat your  IT infrastructure like a fridge.

Stupid user trick No. 5: Letting mom monkey around with the admin console
Incident: One IT consultant tells tale of yet another hard-learned lesson in proper password management brought to you by that time-honored IT pro, mom.

A small-business client had us install a Small Business Server box for her. She had about 12 people working for her, including her mom, who was doubling as the office manager and her daughter’s personal assistant.

We did as we were asked. Everything was set up, tested, and found to be working. We established an admin account on the server and left it with the owner with strict instructions that it’s for emergencies when she’s on the phone with us only. She, of course, gave the admin account info to her mom to keep someplace safe without passing on the last part of the instructions.

Her mother went exploring and found this thing called Active Directory. Next thing we know, we’re getting an angry call from the daughter because our email server was sending strange emails to all her clients and friends. The story: Her mom had figured out how to get into Computers and Users and had been adding everyone in her daughter’s address book into AD, along with generating them an internal email address in addition to the one listed in her daughter’s rolodex. The system sent everyone a welcome email with an introduction to the “new” network they’d just joined.

Fallout: Apology emails around, consultant fees to delete all those users and set AD right, and palpable tension between daughter and mom.

Moral: Server passwords aren’t status symbols. If a person doesn’t need one, don’t share it.

Stupid user trick No. 6: Paying before planning
Incident: Hubris is no stranger to the world of IT. But when a trumped-up higher-up puts the purchase before the plan, the fallout can mean only one thing — a derailed career, as one developer recounts.

I worked for an Internet startup back in the late ’90s, complete with big-time VC funding and a small DNA kernel of three business whizzes and one techno geek who gleefully grabbed the CTO title.

The startup’s goal was to create a Java-based vertical accounting system followed by inventory and sales systems that would eventually comprise a “suite” of offerings. The three kernel guys land a huge bundle of first-round financing and sit down with two “experts” from the vertical to discuss what the initial application should look like and how it should run.

They’re in germination meetings for about a week, coming out with huge schematics and wireframes for the first rev. The CTO decided a messaging bus platform is absolutely required and proceeded to do a deal with the leader in that space at the time (name withheld), for — wait for it — $5 million.

Mcitp Training Online: Learn At Your Own Pace In Your Own Home

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