November 3, 1996
Sunbelt Windows NToolstm Electronic Newsletter
Vol. 1, # 16
USA: www.ntsoftdist.com
EUROPE: www.sunbelt.co.uk
Sunbelt Windows NTools E-News Sunbelt Windows NTools E-News is the world's largest E-newsletter
designed for NT System Managers that have the job of getting and keeping WinNT up & running in a production
environment. Sunbelt launched this electronic newsletter so that we could keep members of the Windows NT community
informed and aware of what is happening with 3-rd party NT System Management Tools, and to provide hints and tips that
will enable you to better understand and utilize Windows NT. You'll find general Windows NTools related and third party
news, technical information, and 3-rd party beta and release information. By subscribing to NTools E-News, you are
also a charter member of the Sunbelt Field Test Bonus Program. Sunbelt Software is the first and largest distributor
worldwide of Third Party System Management Tools for Windows NT.
This Issue of Windows NToolstme-news contains:
2. "WINDOWS WORLD SHOW BRIEFINGS"
* SMS REVIEWER'S GUIDE
* MICROSOFT RELEASES OFFICE'97
* NTOOLS BEST OF SHOW AWARD: PARTITION MAGIC FOR NT
* IMAGEMASSTER 1000: FORMAT & LOAD NT IN < 60 SECONDS
3. "NT RELATED NEWS"
* YOUR SKILLS ARE NEEDED EVEN MORE
4. "THIRD PARTY NEWS"
* WHY START PERFORMANCE MONITORING NOW
* OCTOPUS NAMED FINALIST IN PC COMPUTING AWARD, V2.0 READY!
* TOOL TO MANAGE AND MAINTAIN SECURITY REGISTRY
* NEW UTILITY TO RECOVER AND RESTORE CORRUPT NT DATA
* INTERNET SECURITY SYSTEM - NEW TOOL ADDS TO IIS
* SYMANTEC POSTS SNEAK PREVIEW OF WINFAXNT
5. "HINTS AND TIPS"
* WHICH CD-WRITE FOR NT 4.0?
* DO NOT INSTALL 3.51 OVER 4.0
6. "HOW TO USE THE MAILING LIST"
*Instructions on how to subscribe, sign off
and change addresses.
"EDITORS CORNER"
Hi All,
This is an NTools E-News special: All the hot news from the
Windows World Show in Dallas TX last week. Sunbelt had a booth
there and we spoke to 1,700 (!) people interested in Tools for
NT, and gave them their CD with the full Sunbelt Website.
There are a few very useful new tools announced, so read on!
Expansion News: you are 8,250 strong now :-)
And here for a little bit of humor that we received last week:
>subscribe NT-LIST
>Out the 10Base-T, through the router, down the T1, over the leased
>line, off the bridge, past the firewall... nothing but Net.
*************************************************************************
2. "WINDOWS WORLD SHOW BRIEFINGS"
* SMS REVIEWER'S GUIDE
One of the sessions at the show provided a hands-on intro to
Microsoft Systems Management Server done by Nelson Ruest from
Sisca, Inc. Very useful and a 58-page handout was distributed.
The handout was designed with you in mind, a system administrator's
guide to help you discover how SMS works and get it to help you
managing your desktops. In conjunction with the document he
referred to two Microsoft sites that have useful info as well:
http://www.microsoft.com/SMSMGMT/
and
http://www.microsoft.com/SMSMGMT/demodata.htm
Nelson and Sisca, Inc can be reached at:
Suite 240, 2144 King Street West,
Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada J1J 2E8
Tel 819.564.4003 Fax 819.564.0868
email: nelson.ruest@sisca.qc.ca
---------------------------
* MICROSOFT RELEASES OFFICE'97
October 30' Dallas - Today at the Windows World Office'97 was
introduced in a Small Business Edition. This version delivers
the latest versions of Microsoft's most popular programs:
Word97, Excel97, Publisher97 (with WebPage Wizard), Automap
Streets Plus, Small Business Finance Manager, Internet Explorer
and the newest product in the Office family: Outlook[tm]
Desktop Information Manager. It will be available Q197.
Outlook brings together email contact management, a task list,
scheduling and a calendar, all in one place on the desktop.
In addition users get a free month of connect time on MSN, and a
new website has been set up to keep users up to date:
http://www.microsoft.com/smallbiz/
-------------------------
* NTOOLS BEST OF SHOW AWARD: PARTITION MAGIC FOR NT
I'm going to spend a little more space than usual with this tool
as I expect each of you to be _very_ glad it's finally here.
Want to remodel your hard-disk? You would not be happy to buy
a house with just one 5,000 square-foot room would you? Yet
most NT-systems come with just one hard disk partition.
A partition is like a room in a house, it creates physically
separate locations on a hard disk. One partition is easy for
the PC vendor but has two major drawbacks: difficult to manage
and you can waste up to 40% of your drive. Hard disk partitions
are like walls in your house that help to organize the OS, apps
and most important, the data that resides on your disks.
Up to now modifying your partitions was a major exercise
involving more or less starting from scratch. No more with Partition
Magic! You can now modify hard disk partitions and FAT clusters
on the fly without destroying data. The best thing is that the
new release 3.0 also supports NTFS and FAT32. I saw a new partition
created within 30 seconds on an NT 4.0 notebook with a 1.2 Gig drive.
It basically replaces FDISK and FORMAT which are both destructive.
You can adjust the cluster size while you resize a partition
so that you reclaim unused storage space, and the developer has
licensed Boot Manager from IBM so that it gets easier to choose
which OS to load at boot time. Some of the features:
- Converts from FAT to FAT32 and back
- Partition Copy - copy from one drive to another
- Move Apps from one partition to another
- Cluster Analyzer - calculates disk efficiency and cluster waste
- Drive Mapper - helps update drive letter references for
partitions and peripherals such as CD-Roms and removable drives
- Support for: NTFS, FAT32, HPFS, FAT, and NT 64K FAT
I have personally fallen in love with this product and will
get a copy for my new Dell Latitude 133 laptop. Street Price is
$69 and your local Egghead should have a copy. More info:
http://www.partition.com
http://www.powerquest.com
magic@powerquest.com
------------------------
* IMAGEMASSTER 1000: FORMAT & LOAD NT IN < 60 SECONDS
No this is no typo, it really is "masster" :-) We normally
only mention software, but this is a device that most of you
are needing badly when cloning a couple of thousand workstations.
This little box has four drives sitting on top of it and a
fifth drive that has the OS on it. Here are some features:
- High speed software duplication simultaneously
- IDE and SCSI models available
- Formats & loads DOS, W95, NT, UNIX, OS/2 and Mac
- Drive size, geometry, manufacturer and model independent
- Ethernet option available for downloading software via LAN
- Supports notebook 2.5" hard drives
- and quite a lot more...
The company is Intelligent Computer Solutions and can be reached at:
http://www.scsn.net/~ics
**********************************************************************
3. "NT RELATED NEWS"
* YOUR SKILLS ARE NEEDED EVEN MORE
Computerworld reported in the October 28 issue that a whopping
80% of corporate IS technology managers plans to install NT in
the coming 18 months. 20% of them have NT already implemented
and the average number of network users per network staffer is
106 according to the study.
**********************************************************************
4. "THIRD PARTY NEWS"
* WHY START PERFORMANCE MONITORING NOW
Have you ever wondered...
- How am I going to do capacity planning on my NT Servers?
- How can I solve "Performance sucked last friday afternoon!"
- How do I answer this one: "What are the Top 10 busiest servers?
- How do I roll all performance into together for all 100 servers?
WHY START PERFORMANCE MONITORING AT ALL? Here's a few _very_ good
reasons why:
1) You can't manage what you don't measure
2) Sometimes millions of dollars are tied up in your environment,
but if your end-user suffers from performance degradation....
3) Senior Management is demanding more of a business case before
allowing staff to continue buying more hardware: you need ammo
4) Poor response times or even downtime that could have been
prevented cause users to get very upset with their IT group
5) If there is a solution that is automated and does not tie up
staff time, server space or network bandwidth, it should be
implemented.
WHY DO IT NOW?
1) Getting your NT systems management disciplines up & running
with less than 10 servers will allow a smoother growth to 50-100
servers
2) It is important to establish a baseline of good performance
on a server. That allows you to show the trends and understand
when performance is going to be unacceptable BEFORE it happens
3) Price Breaks - Get 10 for the price of 5 to get started
WHY DO IT WITH PERFMAN? (downloadble via Sunbelt Website)
1) Less overhead on the serves and network. The PerfMan collector
is usually only installed on one server and remotely extracts
data from the other NT servers, the overhead is very low compared
to other solutions
2) Ease of Use. With PerfMan you are able to understand the health
of all the servers in less than an hour of work per week. Really.
3) Exception analysis - set up thresholds so only servers with
impending problems are flagged for immediate attention
4) Less Cost: On a per server basis this product is BY FAR lower
cost than ANY other solution out there. And "home-grown" is
simply not worth it anymore
Download the brand new PerfMan 30-day eval copy and give it a spin.
This is a tool that was just last week licensed by Hewlett Packard
for 70 servers and you want to have a look at this puppy.
http://www.ntsoftdist.com
--------------------------------
* OCTOPUS NAMED FINALIST IN PC COMPUTING AWARD, V2.0 READY!
Octopus for Windows NT has been named a finalist in the networking
software category for the prestigious 1996 PC Computing Most
Valuable Product (MVP) Awards. Octopus is one of only three
products honored in the networking software category by
PC Computing.
"We are very proud that Octopus for Windows NT has been named
as a networking software finalist for PC Computing's MVP Awards,"
said Dave Crocker, President, Octopus Technologies. "It is an honor
to be chosen from a thorough review of networking products based on
the editors' comparative research. This nomination is a true
reflection of our product's significance in the enterprise network."
The new version 2.0 eval copy can now be downloaded from sunbelt:
http://www.ntsoftdist.com
----------------------------
* TOOL TO MANAGE AND MAINTAIN SECURITY REGISTRY
Managing and maintaining a security registry using DCE
commands can be a formidable task. Security Manager, part of the
DCE Cell Manager toolset, provides an easy point-and-click interface
to those commands that lets you:
-Add, modify, and delete organizations, principals, and
security groups
-Modify security group and organization memberships
-Control registry database policies
-Backup and restore the registry database
-Manage replicated registry databases
Security Manager features include:
-Customizable displays to show just the information you want
-Templates that speed up adding, adopting, and editing
principal entries
-Sort, filter, and search functions that help you target the
appropriate entries
-Multiple targeting that lets you operate on several selected
entries without complicated interactive command-line sessions
-Multiple access control list editing that lets you synchronize
permissions on several targets at once
-Individual entry updating that eliminates refreshing the
entire registry
-Task-oriented menus that display the proper options for the
entries you select
-One-step combination of underlying DCE commands whenever possible
to decrease your task-completion time
-On-line help that promotes hands-on learning and rapid task
completion
-An editable command history option that lets you save a
particular command set to a file
-Session information that lets you know when your current ticket
expires
-Built-in electronic postcard for sending comments and reports
to Customer Support
More info at:
http://chistech.com/products/dce-cellmgr/security.html
-----------------------
* NEW UTILITY TO RECOVER AND RESTORE CORRUPT NT DATA
You are all aware that Microsoft has left a gaping hole in the
area of data and system recovery. For instance, when NTOSKRNL.EXE
or NTDLL.DLL (and many others) are corrupt you are up the creek:
you cannot boot the system and get the valuable data off. This new
tool is called "NTSerialDisk".
NTSerialDisk is what System Administrators can really use. It allows
the disk drives of a faulty NT system (a client) to be mounted onto
a working NT System (a host) through a standard serial connection.
Once client drives have been mounted, they are treated by NT as if
they were local drives, so all standard utilities can be used on
them, including CHKDSK, explorer, command-line tools, etc.
If a file is corrupt on the client, the host user can simply copy
a fresh copy over. Or they can simply copy off valid data before
a reinstallation. They can even checkpoint the registry.
A read-only version will be posted on:
http://www.ntinternals.com
and a read/write version will be around 200 bucks. From my point
of view a must-have in big shops. Contact Mark Russinovich at
mark@meatball.osr.com for more info.
-----------------------------
* INTERNET SECURITY SYSTEM - NEW TOOL ADDS TO IIS
This utility enables you to write Visual basic CGI programs that
allow your Web Site Users to "register" with their account name
and password, and check for account name and password when accesses
to controlled websites are attempted. A product description can be
found at:
http://highsierra.com/highsierra.products.htm
-----------------------------
* SYMANTEC POSTS SNEAK PREVIEW OF WINFAXNT
Due to user pressure Symantec has posted a version of their
Fax product for NT on October 30-th. The preview has functionality
similar to WinFax Pro 7.5 for Win95 and also includes the talkworks
telephony option and Internet Fax capability. Check it out at:
http://www.symantec.com/winfaxnt
-----------------------------
* BROWSE THE WEB WITH HANDS FREE NT-DICTATION TOOL
In a fairly radical move designed to make this a nobrainer, Dragon
Systems has made the first fully featured speech recognition systems
available for less than $100.
The products are high accuracy, fast performance, speaker independent
models, supporting a large vocabulary and hands-free operation. All
editions support Netscape, and can be chosen for MS Word, Excel,
Lotus 1-2-3, Notes and Corel Word Perfect.
http://www.dragonsys.com
*********************************************************************
5. "HINTS AND TIPS"
* WHICH CD-WRITE FOR NT 4.0?
Dave Coe from the UK sent us this little gem... enjoy!
Ahh, CD-Writers and NT!
Now there's a happy topic for consultants and VARs - the more so because
peripheral suppliers are so keen to protect their backs on compatibility
when manifestly it can be done! For authoritative technology updates I
refer you to the CD Information Center on http://www.cd-info.com/ and
for anecdotal amusement and practical guidance on the HP 4020i and NT to
Anthony McCarthy's mini-FAQ on
http://www.compulink.co.uk/~xi/hp4020i.htm and its links.
Suffice it to say that (at any snapshot in time) it all depends whether
the particular CD-Writer, SCSI card, NT drivers and authoring software
you've bought quite work with today's version of the operating system.
My tale focuses on the HP 4020i CD-Writer, on the bundled Easy-CD and
additional Gear authoring tools. In all fairness, it's all "worked" for
me through NT 3.51, the various NT 4 betas to final release, but not by
any means out-of-the box!!
The HP 4020i CD-Writer is a Philips OEM'ed product (the CDD2000) which
can be bought (at least in Europe) both under its parent brand or under
various other labels. From HP, it's bundled with an Advansys
bus-mastering SCSI card which is not on the MS compatibility list and
some 16-bit Easy-CD stuff from Incat.
What you need for NT is to:
1. get the latest SCSI drivers from Advansys http://www.advansys.com/.
The NT 3.5 driver works on 16 and 32-bit authoring tools but you'll have
to put up with the odd SCSI time-out alert in the system event log.
Neither the 3.51 or 4.0 drivers recognize the CD-R on the bundled 16-bit
tools but the latest (beta) driver seems problem-free with 32-bit
software. Alternatively, you could just use an NT supported Adaptec SCSI
card!
2. find (included with your replacement Adaptec card, some HP Scanjets
or in various degrees of licensed legality on Adaptec / Incat and
Elektroson web-sites) the NT ASPI drivers.
3. download from HP http://www.hp.com/isgsupport/cdr/ the 32-bit Easy-CD
95 kit (this may well now be bundled in current product). You might also
need to keep tabs on the firmware version - 1.26 is fine - earlier
numbers had bugs of one sort or another including reversed left and
right channels. Well - use of formal methods and Ada are not widespread
in consumer electronics!
4. upgrade the authoring tools to taste. For my money, I've found the
Incat stuff works as described and their Web support and presence
excellent. Conversely (if it's not libelous) I've found Gear stuff buggy
and the technical support from Elektroson rather less than helpful. I
would like to think that bug corrections would be free and that
functional enhancements should cost more ... but then I always was an
idealist!
So it can all be done! I rather think I made life difficult for myself
by joining the game a year ago rather than waiting for things to settle
down a bit - but then that's life on the cutting edge.
Hope this helps.
PS. I find your newsletter really useful. Ditto your web-site which
despite it's distance from the UK has one of the fastest links I've come
across! Many thanks!
Dr David Coe
---------------------------
* DO NOT INSTALL 3.51 OVER 4.0
One of our developers ran into the following snag:
" If you have NT 4.0 on a machine, and then install 3.51 on it
(even to a different directory), your 4.0 install is screwed.
This from experience -- with my new machine. The main problem
is that when it installs NTLDR and other bootup stuff, it
doesn't check to see whether a newer version is already installed,
and 3.51's loader can't load 4.0. I'd already installed 4.0, but
wanted 3.51 on it for testing purposes."
USA: http://www.ntsoftdist.com
EUROPE: http://www.sunbelt.co.uk
Email for US sales information to:
ntsales@ntsoftdist.com
Email for US Tech support to:
daved@pssi.com
Email for European Sales to:
chris@sunbelt.fr
Email for European Tech support to:
robdixon@sunbelt.demon.co.uk
webmaster
Legal Stuff:
This document is provided for informational purposes only. The information contained in this document represents the current view of Sunbelt Software
Distribution on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Sunbelt must respond to changes in market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a
commitment on the part of Sunbelt and Sunbelt cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.
INFORMATION PROVIDED IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
FREEDOM FROM INFRINGEMENT.
The user assumes the entire risk as to the accuracy and the use of this document. This document may be copied and distributed subject to the following conditions:
1) All text must be copied without modification and all pages must be included; 2) All copies must contain Sunbelt's copyright notice and any other notices provided
therein; and 3) This document may not be distributed for profit. All trademarks acknowledged.
Copyright Sunbelt Software Distribution, Inc. 1996.
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