Well, we finally bit the bullet.  geekEleet is making the switch from BlogEngine.net to WordPress.  While BlogEngine served us well for the past 15 months, the community was no where near the calibre of the WordPress community.  

With that, we are now bringing a new look, feel, and address to the scene.  No need to worry though, all of the fantastic original content will be available, plus some great new stuff.  You’re going to see a more structured site with even more great content.  We’ll be bringing on a few new writers and increasing quality ten-fold. 

Please bear with us for a couple of days while we work out the kinks, and please feel free to contact us if you have any questions, comments or concerns.  If you subscribe to our RSS feed, you don’t need to do a thing.  We’ve already made the switch for you!

Don’t forget to bookmark the new site – http://www.geekeleet.com

Thanks,
geekEleet Staff

Yesterday we reported that a Zero-day exploit had been discovered in Microsoft’s flagship browser, Internet Explorer.  That report noted that only systems running Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 and Internet Explorer 7 were vulnerable.  That was a gross understatement.

This unpatched security hole in IE is now known to affect all versions of the browser up to, and including, the beta versions of Internet Explorer 8.  Microsoft is continuing to investigate and we expect an out-of-band security patch will be forthcoming.

To effectively protect your PC, Microsoft recommends setting the Internet Zone security level to High and using access control lists to disable Ole32db.dll.

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For the past three days I’ve been attending a very in-depth training session on IIS Critical Problem Management.  I have to tell you, in-depth might even be an understatement.

The course was held in Toronto at the TrainCanada training facility.  Ian Bennett, a Premier Field Engineer (PFE) with Microsoft, was brought in as an instructor to deliver the content.  I’ve worked with Ian before and he really knows his stuff when it comes to IIS.  I would go as far as to say that I’ve never met anyone with a greater understanding of the IIS world.

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Everyone’s favorite new browser, from everyone’s favorite search giant, is finally dropping its beta status.  You guessed it, just 100 days after the initial public launch, today is the day that Chrome will be released as a production release.

New users who download Chrome today will be the first to get the new release. While a small percentage of existing users will also be automatically updated today, the remaining 10 million (according to Google) Chrome-izens will get their update tomorrow.

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Even with all of the  fixes that Microsoft deployed with December’s Patch Tuesday, they failed to address a serious heap overflow exploit within the XML parser. 

The exploit creates an XML tag, then pauses for a 6 second delay as it attempts to avoid detection from antivirus engines.  Once the time has passed, the exploit could crash the browser and execute malicious code when the browser restarts.

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On Monday, Microsoft publicly unveiled it’s new open-source blogging platform called Oxite.  Microsoft officially describes the new platform as an open-source, standards-compliant, and highly extensible content management system. 

Oxite comes with all of the bells and whistles that you would expect from a blogging engine.  This includes support for pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting, gravatars (globally recognized avatars), and RSS feeds at any page level.

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As an admin, I generally cringe whenever I hear the word backup.  It’s not that backups are a bad thing, quite the opposite.  A good backup can save you from a lot of frustration down the road.  The reason I cringe is because backups fall into the category of un-fun things to do.  Nobody wants to setup and manage backups (at least I hope that’s true).

So, since we’ve established that backups are a necessary evil, it might be wise to point out that Hyper-V is no exception.  With the addition of Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and Windows Server Backup (WSB), it really couldn’t be easier.

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Server Core is a remarkable implementation that grows on me more and more with each use.  It’s a great way to secure your environment, but it does have downsides.  Administration of a core installation can be challenging at best.  We take the GUI for granted most of the time, like when it comes to adding features and roles in Windows Server 2008.  The GUI normally just walks us through that. 

With Server Core, we use a tool called OCSetup.exe to manage roles and features. 

OCSetup.exe (OptionalComponentsSetup)Read More…

RD Tabs is a great tool to help you manage your remote Windows installations.  It’s like Remote Desktop Client on steroids.  And it’s free.

Brought to you by Avian Waves, this handy little app brings all of your open RDP sessions into tabbed windows, so you don’t have to fill up your task bar while you manage the data center.  You get all of the great ease-of-use features that you’ve come to expect from tabbed applications. 

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If you have a system that was built within the last few years, odds are it has a SATA hard drive in it.  If you’re purchasing or building a new system, the odds are even better that you’ll have a SATA drive.  That’s not a bad thing.

SATA drives out-perform IDE drives in every capacity.  This article addresses one of the few shortcomings of SATA drives, or should I say the shortcomings of an operating system that doesn’t include out of the box SATA support.  You probably already guessed it, it’s Windows XP.  With all of the problems that plagued Vista from the get-go, it’s no wonder that people are still running Windows XP on their desktops. 

Microsoft stopped selling Windows XP on new computers in an attempt to increase the adoption rate of Vista.  This is forcing many buyers to run Vista whether they like it or not.  Since people are generally reluctant to change, many users are still fighting to keep XP alive. 

Windows XP does not provide drivers for all SATA controllers, in fact I have yet to discover a supported SATA controller on older motherboards.  This means that you’ll have to do an extra step if you want to do a fresh installation of Windows XP.  Now, as the title mentions, if you have a floppy drive then you can most likely insert the disk with the proper drivers and install without a problem.  If you don’t have a floppy drive, read on.

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