K12IT

As a long time VMware ESX user, I'm happy to see some real competition finally coming from Microsoft. How good is that competition?...we will see, as we have a vm bake-off at IU 13 in preparation for our presentation to our districts.

Mike Shellenberger (our resident Microsoft-fanboy) and myself (Mr. Apple and VMware proponent) will be putting the systems head to head. We will focus on their strengths/weaknesses as they relate to educational institutions.

Stay tuned for future posts about our findings. Email or post with any suggestions.

 LastPass is a free password manager (premium version also available).  This sounds so unexciting, but it is a powerful tool.  It allows you to securely maintain all of your Internet passwords in one database.  The end result is that you can log into all of your websites by just remembering one master password.

LastPass is a browser plugin that installs very easily from the LastPass website.  It works on all major web browsers.  Once the plugin is installed, LastPass automatically recognizes websites you encounter that requires a username and password.  When you enter your username and password, LastPass asks you if you would like to remember the login details.  If so, LastPass stores the information in your ‘vault’ and you can now login with your single LastPass master password. The following video briefly illustrates how LastPass works.

LastPass Instructions

Since there are so many cool Web2.0 tools, many people use the same username and login for numerous websites.  This is a bad idea from a security perspective.  If someone finds out your password on one site, they potentially have your password for all of your sites that use the same password.  By using one master password to access LastPass, you don’t have to remember numerous login information from various websites. When you encounter a new website and your are required to create a password, LastPass typically automatically detects this and prompts you to use an automatically generated strong password.  If you use this feature, the end result is that you have a unique password for each website that is a long string of random characters, numbers, and symbols.

How secure is it?

This is a great question that I am sure people are thinking.  Just like any password, if you keep your master password written on a sticky on your laptop, then the answer is ‘not very secure’.  The security of the master password is critical.  It should be long, include numbers and symbols, and include lower- and upper-case letters.  It should also not be any word that is found within a dictionary. The actual LastPass database that contains all of your website passwords is encrypted based on your password.  The bad news is that if you lose your password, you are out of luck (LastPass does have a one time provision for this).  The good news is that no one is able to see your individual passwords without knowing your master password.  In an interview with one of the LastPass executives, it was made clear that not even LastPass employees could access your passwords, or anyone hacking their database (approximately minute 9:00). The interview details more of the security features.  Other than keyloggers, the security appears to be very good and has many security experts supporting LastPass.
LastPass Interview by user4752733

Use in an educational environment:

Since more and more teachers and students are creating accounts online, managing passwords becomes a practical issue.  I personally think that managing passwords also becomes one of those core computer/technology skills that we need to instruct, just like teaching how to add an attachment to an email.  The result is that teachers and staff become more aware of security and their online data and profiles are less likely to be compromised. If everyone within a school district used LastPass, the number of calls to the tech department to reset passwords would be drastically reduced.  Additionally, the tech department would not need to reset numerous passwords when a teacher’s index card full of passwords mysteriously disappears.  Students would also not have the same phenomenon of losing their notebook with all of their passwords and finding out that a peer hacked into their accounts.   Probably the biggest difficulty would be to convince everyone to use LastPass.  Many people already have different systems (mental, pencil/paper, etc.) for remembering passwords.  To successfully use LastPass, all of these passwords should be entered into LastPass.  If LastPass is installed, the user is prompted if they would like to add the password to LastPass each time a new website login in encountered.  However, some people may continue to use other methods.

How-to Material:

The LastPass support website has many materials geared for installing, using, and troubleshooting LastPass.  This includes FAQs and screencasts.  There is also a user forum to discuss various issues.

Other Features:

LastPass has additional features that make it useful.  It is a cloud-based system, so it is not tied to one computer.  This makes it very useful in a school setting.  There is also an ability to add secure notes.  This could be credit card numbers, bank accounts, or a teacher’s PPID.  LastPass also has security test that tests the overall security of your accounts passwords.  This is very useful if you are interested in the security of your existing accounts

Apple says "Let your fingers do the clicking." Will you?

Is Apple’s Magic Trackpad really worth using on a desktop? Laptop trackpads for years have been giving me problems. Whether if its crumbs causing no response or the hand lotions users use causing the trackpad to get worn out. Apple sells the Magic Trackpad for $69.00, however is replacing your desktop mouse with a magic trackpad really worth the money and allow you to be as efficient? 

I was lucky enough to test out the trackpad for a week on my laptop in both an Apple environment and on a Windows environment. The magic trackpad connects to the computer through a Bluetooth signal. It requires two AA batteries and will respond to the computer up to 33 feet away. Using the trackpad on the Apple environment gives you the options to set the corners of the trackpad as a second click. It gives you the advanced options for one, two,three,and four finger options. On the Windows environment it did not give me the options to make all the changes and gave me just the basics of adjusting the scroll speed.

One feature I enjoyed using the trackpad in the apple environment was the scroll feature. It was handy while on a webpage to scroll up and down. On the Windows environment however this was not handy. You needed to double click on the scroll bar on the side and not take your finger off of it while scrolling up and down. I found it difficult to maneuver across a two screen environment and was very sensative when trying to click on a particular button within a word document.

Is Apple's Magic Trackpad worth replacing your computer mouse? I say no. I found myself constantly going back to the mouse as using the mouse was a much faster to navigate using the scroll wheel and was much more efficiant while using the right click button. In this case I say pass on the Apple Magic Trackpad.

Winner : Mouse

For the past few weeks I have been using Internet Explorer 9 Beta exclusively as my browser. With Google Chrome, and Mozilla FireFox now in the market and being the internet browers of choice by most IT professionals Microsoft has really set themselves up for an uphill battle to win people over. Here are a few things that has been improved in IE9 that might sway some people back.

Microsoft has streamlined and minimized the IE9 Interface. The biggest change that has pleased me is the "one bar" address bar. This is similar to what you see when using Google Chrome. Not only does this double as an address and search bar with Bing, Google, Yahoo, and etc, but you can also add other websites such as Amazon and Facebook for searches. This is the single reason that I have stuck with IE9. Customizing searches makes finding what I want on the web that much easier. One other update to the general interface of the browser is that there is finally a download manager in IE.

When it comes down to performance Microsoft has taken some nice steps in giving control to the user. The days of IE being all bogged down with bloatware that is next to impossible to remove are over. The "Add-on Performance Monitor" shows you what add-ons are running, and how much time they add to the startup of the browser. I have had great success with stopping all of the add-ons and it does make a difference.

I have been a FireFox (Windows) user for a few years now and I can honestly say that IE9 is going to be my browser of choice on Windows. In an Active Directory environment you can't beat the integration and for home use it is stable, and fast; two very important things for me when it comes to my web browsing experience.

Here is the web address if you wish to check it out for yourself. 

I promised the results of our Hyper-V vs VMware bake-off, so here they are...we are moving our entire environment to Hyper-V!  Just kidding. I've said it before and I'll reiterate, I'm a big VMware fan, but I must give props to Microsoft for bringing some real competition to the virtual world.

Our testing involved the configuration of a 2 node Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster and going through some everyday tasks, including configuration of the environment, VM provisioning, VM migration and host maintenance. Since we already use VMware vSphere 4, those tasks are old hat and we can compare from that knowledge. Remember, we evaluated the capabilities through the K12 education lens. How functional is the solution for most schools to implement in their environment. Also, we did not go into a direct performance comparison since there are many of those (some highly biased) already out there.

Some background information: Both environments require physical host computers running a hypervisor (Windows Server 2008 R2 with the Hyper-V role or Windows Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 for Hyper-V and ESX or ESXi for VMware), a management server (Virtual Machine Manager/VMM for Hyper-V and vCenter for VMware), shared storage (SAN, NAS), and a network infrastructure.

Our environment was comprised of two Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers running Windows 2008 R2 Data Center Edition with the Hyper-V role, EMC fibre channel storage, and network trunks connecting the hosts to the network. We tried to run the servers using the Hyper-V server, which is a slimmed down, non-GUI version of Windows, but could not configure the Intel network cards for trunking without Device Manager. Your mileage may vary, depending on the NICs in your servers. Most K12 admins would want the familiar Windows GUI anyway, since the commands for Hyper-V are unfamiliar. The VMware environment is using Dell PowerEdge R710 servers running ESXi 4.1, EMC fibre channel storage, and network trunks for the virtual network infrastructure. The VMM server and vCenter server are both VMs running in our production VMware environment. The management server can be a physical server, but a virtual server is preferred.

Please note: VMware announced that version 4.1 will be the last version of ESX server and all development, moving forward, will be for ESXi. ESXi does not have a service console, thus is less than 100MB in size. ESXi's role is more of a firmware than an operating system.

Setup

Installing Hyper-V is really no different than installing any other flavor of Windows Server 2008. Once installed, normal configuration of the server (IP address, multi-path storage software, specific hardware drivers) is necessary. This is where one of the MAJOR differences between the two hypervisors comes into play. Hyper-V is Windows, thus it is dependent on third party drivers for many of its components. VMware creates all the drivers for supported devices, thus there are no drivers to install. That means for Hyper-V to talk to your storage over multiple paths, MPIO must be configured on the host. The same is true for NIC teaming; the drivers for the specific NICs needs to be installed and configured on the Hyper-V host. Again, Hyper-V is just like any standard Windows server for setup. Being reliant on third party drivers does allow Hyper-V to run on pretty much any server that can run Windows 2008 R2, while ESXi has a very strict hardware compatibility list.

One final setup for Hyper-V is to configure the servers for Microsoft Clustering. This is required to keep the VMs running in the case of a hardware failure or planned maintenance. Microsoft clustering is pretty simple to configure and not as scary as it used to be. If you've set up Microsoft clustering for any other service, you've set it up for Hyper-V. This does require that a quorum is configured on your shared storage and accessible to all Hyper-V hosts.

ESXi can be installed in about 5 minutes. The only initial configuration is the host name, an IP address for the first management interface and the root password. Some server vendors offer ESXi installed on an optional flash memory module which avoids installing ESXi to a local hard drive.

In Part II of our Hyper-V/VMware bake-off I will go over the configuration of the virtual environment (virtual networking, storage allocation, and VM 

Apparently, in SQL Server Management Studio, copying a database via Tasks -> Copy Database and choosing the “Detach and Attach” method can drop all user permissions from the source database. Awesome.

I’ve yet to figure out whether this always happens or if it’s only in specific circumstances, but I can say that I’ve had it happen to me multiple times. My advice: use the tried-and-true method of backing up the source database and restoring it to the new destination instead.

...and one book to rule them all. Well, I don’t know if it is the one book to rule them all; however, here is an excellent resource.  It is a book dedicated to Web 2.0 technologies for educational purposes.  If you want to read about all of the latest web-based applications and how they are being used within the classroom, this is a great resource.  There are sections for elementary, administrators, ELL, and many more.  The best part about the book is it is a collaborations between a number of prominent education bloggers…and it is also free.