TechVirtuoso

TV Guide for March 30

March 30th, 2010 at 11:01 AM  1 Comment

This is the introduction post to the TechVirtuoso Guide, what we hope will become a daily breakdown of important IT tidbits from the previous day, and what we expect to happen that day.

Yet again, someone has come forward with another rumor that a CDMA iPhone is coming this summer. This time, it comes from the Wall Street Journal. The new iPhone would work on Verizon Wireless, as well as Sprint Nextel in the United States and a handful of carriers in other countries including South Korea and Japan. The current iPhone is designed to work on the vast majority of carriers world-wide, including AT&T and T-Mobile in the US, using a signaling technology called GSM.

It would seem that SSL isn’t as secure as once thought. The problem isn’t the encryption, but the certificate providers. Ars has a breakdown of how governments are working with the CAs to “subvert the entire system to allow them to spy on anyone they wish to keep tabs on.”

Apple has released a major update to OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” — fixes in version 10.6.3 include enhancements to USB, OpenGL, DNS, QuickTime X, AirPort, iCal, Mail, MobileMe, Time Machine, and numerous other areas of the operating system. Choose Software Update from the Apple menu to check for the latest Apple software via the Internet, including this update.

Future versions of the Ubuntu Linux operating system will change the way units are measured in the operating system and enforced throughout applications used in the OS. Starting in Ubuntu 10.10, coming this October, SI prefixes (base-10) will denote 1 kB as 1000 bytes, 1 MB as 1000 kB, 1 GB as 1000 MB, and so on. This is similar to the way OS X started measuring data in Snow Leopard. Neowin has a full breakdown of the measuring guidelines.

You will soon be able to jailbreak an iPhone over the air, instead of having it tethered to a computer. Your move Apple.

Need help running Linux as a guest OS in Microsoft Hyper-V? Sounds strange, but Microsoft has released a best practices guide to do just that. Download it off their website. Don’t blame us if you create a black hole in your datacenter though. In related news, Hypervizor.net has a great article on anti-virus exemptions in Hyper-V. Proper configuration of your antivirus can prevent performance issues, but also keep your VMs from being eaten alive by an aggressive scanning engine.

Changes in Windows Server 2008 R2

January 6th, 2010 at 5:20 PM  No Comments

Microsoft has posted a little bit of light reading, a document titled Changes in Functionality in Windows Server 2008 R2 that outlines exactly that, the differences between the R2 release and the original 2008 release. It only weighs in at 1.1MB and 211 pages. You can grab it from the Microsoft Download Center in Microsoft Word format or browse the document online through Technet.

Topics such as new features in Active Directory, DNS (including DNSSEC), Group Policy, iSCSI, IIS, clustering, Windows Deployment Server and many other elements are all covered in great detail. If you’re looking at a server wondering if you’d see any significant benefit to upgrading, other then getting the latest guts of Windows, this is a helpful guide.

Windows Server 2008 was released in February 2008, followed by R2 which was released in October 2009. R2 is Microsoft’s first 64-bit only operating system release and is based on many of the same core programming as Windows 7.