Dales Diary

Well last night I sat down with a view to getting the basics right on two topics:

Native Mode Groups
DSx command line tools

Both once I’d though about them for a while started clicking into place so I am going to outline groups a little here to reinforce my understanding.

Groups have 3 scopes Domain local, Global and universal. Best practice says that you need to assign resources to local, users to global and global groups to universal groups for multiple domains.

For example If I had a printer I wanted to assign to users in the admin department I would firstly create a domain local group (lets call it printerA for this) and add the printer into the printerA group.

Then I would create a domain global group (called adminUSERS for example) and add all the relevant users into it. Now to connect the two together I simply adding the adminUSERS group into the printerA group.

I suppose this all seems a lot of work for adding access to a printer if you have less than 50 users, but consider the implications for say 200 users, heck lets go crazy and say 10,000 users. Think of all that coming a going I don’t want to spend my time adding and removing access directly to the printers NTFS properties, and also what if the adminUSERS global group wasn’t just a member of printerA what if it was also a member of several file shares. All you would need to do is add a new user into the adminUSERS group and straight away they have printer and file share access, sounds good to me, it give me far more time to drink tea and browse the internet which is what all good network admins want right!

Hi all,

I just thought I’d take a few moments to advertise the applications and general handy little bits I’ve come across recently. They are in no particular order.

www.portableapps.com is a site where you can download various open source projects (openoffice, firefox for instance) and copy them onto your pen drive and run them from there. So it allows you to take your favorite/backup software with you where ever you go. There is quite a list at the moment and it appears to be growing at a decent rate too.

http://writer.live.com is something I am using right now to create this blog. Microsoft seems to be making good inroads with releasing free goodies to the masses at the moment. Live writer allows you create a publish a blog from a word style interface pictured below, so far its great.

www.logmein.com I’ve written about this before I think as I’ve been using it for a couple of years now. logmein allows you to remotely control a users pc regardless of firewalls proxies etc because it uses https rather than the more traditional MS methods. all that it requires is an account on the website and a small application to be installed on the target pc (remember to install it on those troublesome pcs first, as you know trying to explain something over the phone is somewhat difficult).

OFFICE VIEWERS MS have also supplied free viewer software for their office suite. amonst other things their are word,excel and power point viewers, the only notable absence is a project viewer, however a opensource software called openproj can act as a viewer and a fully featured project management suite.

FOXIT is an adobe reader alternative which to me seems to have all the same features but looks better and seems alot less of a resource hog.

Well thats enough to get on with but im sure I’ll think of others.

Reading a bit more about readyboost, im quite interested in its capability especially seeing as its first outing in an OS.

Readyboost uses USB devices to load commonly used files/programs into memory (abit like virtual memory). However its implementation is somewhat different.
The technology relies on the fact that USB seek times for random data is vastly quicker than conventional hard drives (although note that sequential data access will still be handled by VM as I understand it).

It is capable of handling any size of cache from 256MB to 4GB and the recommended ratio is 3 times the amount of system memory (which is similar if you think about it to the recommended ratio range of VM 1.5-3x). So for example a system with 512MB of ram should if recommendations are followed have a readyboost limit of 1.5GB give or take.

Readyboost also encrypts the contents of the drive so if you do take it out of the machine then it would be very difficult to access the data. Also the contents of the drive is replicated in VM so if you yank out the USB drive whilst the machine is switched on it will fall back to VM without loss of data.

The only thing I can think of that might rain of the parade is the upcoming uses of solid state drives, if the performance and availability of such drives increases then readyboost may have no advantage in the future.