K12IT

www.businessdictionary.com defines Data Integrity as follows:

(1)Accuracy and consistency of stored data, indicted by an absence of any alteration in data between two updates of a data record. Data integrity is imposed within a database at its design stage through the use of standard rules and procedures, and is maintained through the use of error checking and validation routines.
(2) Exact duplication of the sent data at the receiving end, achieved through the use of error checking and correcting protocols.

The Parkerian Hexad, proposed by Donn B Parker in 2002, states there are six (6) fundamental, atomic, non-overlapping attributes of information that are protected by information security measures. They are confidentiality, possession, integrity, authenticity, availability, and utility.

From my point of view, data integrity is the most important part of data collection. There are many state reports that rely on the integrity of the data sent.  I am one of the lucky few that are assigned the task of collecting data from 22 school districts to be compiled and reported to the state, so I have a first-hand look at the data before the errors have been corrected, and believe me, there are quite a few.  I do admit it is getting better as the years go by, but we are a long way from where we should be with something this important.  We must be aware of the data we collect and periodically run checks to ensure the data are correct. Enforcing data integrity ensures the quality of the data. There should be validation rules in place to enforce data integrity. The bottom line is this, incorrect data can result in less funding for schools.

Meeting Challenges and Celebrating Successes was the theme of this years’ AESA Annual Conference held in Savannah, GA. This was their 25^th ….. and my first. According to the current President of AESA, Dee Alarcón, the intent of the annual gathering was to “…provide many ideas on how to leverage resources by partnering, collaborating and sharing ideas”. Ironically, attendance at this conference was way down, most likely due to cutbacks related to the down economy.  Budgets are getting tight as fund sources shrink or disappear and in times like this, it is better to keep your head up and your eyes open rather than adopting the “bunker” mentality. When you’re in a bunker, your vision is very limited and vision is what is needed to survive the tough times.

Meeting Challenges and Celebrating Successes was the theme of this years’ AESA Annual Conference held in Savannah, GA. This was their 25^th ….. and my first. According to the current President of AESA, Dee Alarcón, the intent of the annual gathering was to “…provide many ideas on how to leverage resources by partnering, collaborating and sharing ideas”.  Ironically, attendance at this conference was way down, most likely due to cutbacks related to the down economy.  Budgets are getting tight as fund sources shrink or disappear and in times like this, it is better to keep your head up and your eyes open rather than adopting the “bunker” mentality. When you’re in a bunker, your vision is very limited and vision is what is needed to survive the tough times.

Vision was the focus of the breakout session present by Andy Pechacek, Deputy Executive Director for Region 4 ESC of Houston, TX entitled “The Future Role of ESA’s – In Search of Blue Oceans”.  From Wikipedia:  “Blue Ocean Strategy is a business strategy book first published in 2005 and written by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne of The Blue Ocean Strategy Institute at INSEAD, one of the top European business schools. The book illustrates the high growth and profits an organization can generate by creating new demand in an uncontested market space, or a "Blue Ocean", than by competing head-to-head with other suppliers for known customers in an existing industry.^[1]  . This was a nice introductory look at the concept put forth by the book – a book now on my reading list!

Another session I attended was “The New Paradigm for Cooperative Purchasing: On Line Reverse Auctioning” presented by LEARN Regional Education Service Center of Lyme, CT. A reverse auction is nothing more than a web-enabled RFP process that provides a method for vendors to actively lower their bids based on real-time bids of other participants.  Based on the stated savings profiled, this would be a great budget-stretcher, especially if employed in conjunction with a purchasing cooperative – the power of economies of scale. The trick is to find an Auction host a reasonable price.

“Survivor: The Island of Safe, Cost-Effective Student Computing” was another presentation by LEARN Regional Education Service Center of Lyme, CT and was all about a partnership  with a company called Grace Global to provide an e-Classroom environment via networked teachers and studenst issued custom-built notebook computers. The ‘take-away’ from this for me was the notebook PC. As soon as I saw this compact, feature rich, standards based, hardened machine I thought not of students, but of our Itinerant Therapists. We currently issue them full-sized laptop’s that often take quite a pounding due to the …well...itinerant nature of their users. The real kicker was the price – about $500 each! This is definitely an alternative to consider.

The last session I was able to make was “Shared Technology Services: How ESA’s Can Be the Missing Piece in the Puzzle ” offered up by Josh Sumption, Manager of Information Technology, SW/WC Service Cooperative of Marshall, MN. He outlined their model for providing  technology  support for participating school districts and providing a full service “complete IT Department”. In my opinion, this is – or should be – one of the key fundamental concepts for the ESA’s moving forward. Technology is such a specialized, rapidly changing field that relegating this responsibility as a secondary duty for teachers or other district staff doesn’t make sense. Benefits include purchasing power, shared common projects, standardized implementations and research and development. I definitely see this as a “Blue Ocean”.

So..on my last blog we took a brief look at Kotter's work and his 8 reasons for change to fail. Now that we have identified the errors, what according to Kotter do we need to do to find success? 

The first thing and probably most important, according to Kotter, is to have strong leadership throughout the change process. It is important to note that Kotter views Leadership very differently from Management. Management means enforcing policies and procedures, scheduling, and in general making sure the trains run on time… Leadership is about creating and successfully communicating a vision. It is about insuring people to follow that vision to achieve change or dramatic results. Management is often something that is appointed to us - by our job title or position. Leadership is something that must be earned. It is important to realize that sometime the true leaders in a organization are not the best managers or are not the people with the title or officially in charge. In my opinion to be a truly great Technology Director, you must have a appropriate mix of leadership and management. I  always tell my managers that they need to have their feet firmly on the ground but their head in the clouds looking forward. 

According to Kotter: Successful change is 70 to 90 percent leadership and only 10 to 30 percent management. Yet for historical reasons, many organizations today don't have much leadership. I tend to agree with Kotter, strong leadership is the first key ingredient in successfully managing change.  How do we become great leaders? I believe through experience, watching successful leaders, study and internal drive. I great resource that has helped me work towards becoming successful leader is the book: The Feiner Points of Leadership by Michael Feiner. Within his book Feiner address The Fifty Basic Laws That Will Make People Want To Perform Better For You.

Examples of Feiner's Laws include:

 

• The Law of Building a Cathedral: Leaders convince their people that they're building a cathedral, not cutting stone.
• The Law of Class vs. Style: Never...Ever...Ever...EVER Treat Your Boss Like A Bumbling Old Fool (Even If He Or She Is One).
• The Law of Winning Championships: No matter how talented the team, team members have different agendas -- and leaders know what they are.
• The Law of the Silent Sinner: If you can't tell anyone what you're doing, don't do it!
• The Law of the Onion: High Performance Leaders look beneath the surface -- and never assume anything.
• The Law of the Tombstone: Remember what's really important -- and that your net worth won't be noted on your final resting place.

 

Give Feiner's book a look and reflect on your own leadership. In your own organization what role has leadership or lack of leadership played in managing change? You can find more on Feiner's book at http://www.feinerpoints.com/about.php. In addition I have bookmarked a article in the Profession Resources section on K12IT.

Next week we will continue our discussion on the successful elements of managing change.

Paul

 

After witnessing the high profile DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on sites such as Paypal, Visa and Mastercard following their bans on donations to the Wikileaks website (www.wikileaks.ch), it has become clear that DDoS attacks as protests against companies will only increase in the future. In reading up on current DDoS methods, I learned about a proof of concept that a white hat hacker has created to trick unsuspecting users into participating in an attack.

 

What is a DDoS? The primary goal of most attacks is to take down the website of a company. This is done, usually, by having a large number of computers simultaneously access the resources of a target web server. These computers may be members of a botnet, and therefore assisting in the skirmish without the actual owners knowing about it. Using a program such as LOIC or MyDoom amplifies this effect a hundredfold.

A new, more malevolent, tool in these battles is the ability to trick users into assisting an invasion through the use of a URL shortener site, such as bit.ly. The creator of this idea used a site he created called doz.me to create a shortened link that, when used, would launch an attack on a targeted website without the visitor having any idea it was occurring. The only person that would be aware of the attack is the person who originally shortened the link.

The obvious way to launch an attack this way would be to find some content that many people would find appealing and then post the shortened URL to news aggregation sites such as reddit. Once this is done, the miscreant can just sit back and watch the barrage unfold. Another problem with this method of attack is less obvious. Now, “hacktivists” may have plausible deniability in their offensives because they are simply clicking a link that takes them to a completely unrelated image or site. They aren’t running any applications on their machines and can argue that they have no knowledge of the ulterior motives of the shortened URL.

I feel that knowing that something like this site is out there will only help us as IT professionals react quicker to attacks and be more successful in protecting our networks. For more detail on this idea, from the actual creator, go here .

You've heard it for years... IPv4 addresses are running out. Hurricane Electric claims that IPv4 addresses will be exhausted within the next 10 weeks.

 

Whether you believe their estimate is up to you, but one thing is certain, new IPv4 address space is getting hard to come by. ARIN has tightened their rules for allocation of IPv4 space.

Until now, there has not been much business case for adoption of IPv6. There are costs involved in receiving an IPv6 allocation, cost for implementation, cost for management. Why invest in something new, when what you have still works, and you'll still have to support the old? These costs becomes even harder to justify for education.

What's more, there may not even be anything to connect to upstream. Few service providers are providing support for IPv6. In fact, Comcast is just preparing to deploy IPv6 capable DNS servers in January of 2011 for its Business Class customers.

Network administrators have also put off thinking about IPv6. There are already too many projects and not enough time. It may seem confusing or intimidating. Many network admins memorize the addresses of their equipment. While that's not a problem with 32-bit dotted decimal, try it with 128-bit Hex. Many think they have to buy all new equipment to support it. Not true, as most current desktop and infrastructure equipment is IPv6 or dual-stack capable.

So, why start your IPv6 plan now? Simple. Do it before it becomes an emergency.

If you need more reasons, though try these:

Efficiency: A new header design allows IPv6 packets to be processed more quickly by routers.

Security: IPsec is built-in. IPv6 is where IPsec came from in the first place.

Auto configuration: Goodbye DHCP servers. OK, maybe not that easy, but stateless auto-configuration may save some work down the road.

Multicast: Again, built-in.

Microsoft DirectAccess: If you want to implement DirectAccess, you need to get your IPv6 structure in place.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Check these out for more information:

IPv6 on Wikipedia

IPv6 Forum

Cisco's IPv6 Information

IPv6 Info on esotile.com

...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.

The Super Book of Web Tools for Educators

Tech Leadership – Leading Change

One of the only constants in life is change and nothing could be truer in the field of Technology.  As Managers of a District Technology teams we are faced with change regularly.  Change might include: existing software updates or new installs, hardware implementation, development of polices and procedures, new state and federal regulations and the list goes on and on…

As managers we are required to help manage change even sometimes change that really has nothing to do with technology.  In my opinion most technology projects fail for one of two reasons; failure to properly manage change and failure to use a systematic method of project management.  As a result it is critical that technology managers learn Change Management and Project Management. 

Luckily, there are books, research and trainings readily available to teach both skills. John P  Kotter in his book Leading Change advances a systematic approach to managing change. Leading Change by John P Kotter addresses the eight errors that lead to failure:

1.    Not establishing enough sense of urgency.
•    Transformation programs require aggressive co-operation by many       individuals.
•    Without motivation, people won't help and the effort goes nowhere.

2.    Not creating a powerful guiding coalition.
•     Organizations that fail in this phase usually underestimate the difficulties of producing change and thus the importance of a guiding coalition with energy and authority.

3.    Lacking a clear vision.
•    Without a clear and sensible vision, a transformation effort can easily dissolve into a list of confusing and incompatible projects that can take the organization in the wrong direction or nowhere at all

4.    Under-communicating the vision.
•    Transformation is impossible people are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices

5.    Not removing obstacles to the new vision.
•    Obstacles can be: the organizational structure, narrowly defined job categories, compensation or performance-appraisal systems, and, worst of all, bosses who refuse to change and make demands that are inconsistent with the overall change vision

6.    Not systematically planning and creating short-term wins.
•    Planning and creating short-term wins is different from hoping for short-term wins. 
•    Actively look for ways to obtain clear performance improvements, establish goals in the yearly planning system, achieve the objectives, and reward the people involved with recognition, promotions, or money

7.    Declaring victory too soon.
•    Instead of declaring victory, leaders of successful change efforts use the credibility afforded by the short-term wins to tackle even bigger problems

8.    Not anchoring changes in the corporation's culture.
•    Change sticks when it becomes the way we do things around here, when it becomes part of the corporate culture.
•    Until new behaviors are rooted in social norms and shared values, they are subject to degradation as soon as the pressure for change is removed

One or all of these eight errors can cause the failure of a technology project. Successful technology mangers understand these elements, educate both superiors and subordinates concerning these elements and are constantly vigilant in working to prevent any of the eight elements from taking place. 

Easier said than done… Pick-up a copy of Kotter’s book or check my post next week to learn the secrets of successfully managing change and avoiding failure. 

Paul

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 

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.