So I looked out the window and saw ...

And then today I get sent this!

Only in Ireland!

Security notes

Been looking more and more at security recently and want to put out some nice links I've found.

I love this and tend to use it as a starting point for a discussion with people, especially non 
techie people.


10 Immutable Laws of Security

It was posted back in early 2000's and I think is still relevant.

Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not your computer any more 

Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it's not your computer any more 

Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer any more 

Law #4: If you allow a bad guy to upload programs to your website, it's not your website any more 

Law #5: Weak passwords trump strong security 

Law #6: A computer is only as secure as the administrator is trustworthy 

Law #7: Encrypted data is only as secure as the decryption key 

Law #8: An out of date virus scanner is only marginally better than no virus scanner at all 

Law #9: Absolute anonymity isn't practical, in real life or on the Web 

Law #10: Technology is not a panacea 

Another Microsoft product that I like is this

Microsoft Security Assessment Tool

Expect to spend at least 20 minutes filling it in. Then save the report off for comparison for again. 

Found this book, ISO 27001 in a Windows Environment, nice easy read by an Irish man Brian Honan Link

For passwords, Steve Gibson has a password generator on his site, very cool
Password generation
and a password checker (how long to brute force it)
Password Haystack
A port checker
Shields Up
And so much more, go check it out www.grc.com


Where did this all come from, ISO 27001 requirements.

Lync 2010 and Federation

We recently got Lync 2010 in-house and started looking to see what can be done to federate with some of the people we work and co-operate with.

To check if you can federate with someone, they need to have a DNS record on

While there are other requirements, the easiest to check is the DNS Service record named _sipfederationtls._tcp.domain.

This should point to a valid DNS A record to an Access Edge server formatted

access_edge_servername.domain and point to port 5061.

To see what it looks like here is Microsoft's record, open a command prompt and use the command

nslookup -q=srv _sipfederationtls._tcp.microsoft.com





To federate with Office 365 I tried using the Control Panel but it would not accept the information, so I ended up using a powershell command to add federation will all of Office 365

New-CSHostingProvider –identity LyncOnline –ProxyFqdn sipfed.online.lync.com –Enabled $True

I'm still looking into why this is not displayed in the Lync Control Panel!

WINs..... a large number

A good friend has been saying that WINs is dead, but the number is big and therefore will take some time to die.

Now it appears that it is yet another large number.

The number appears to be at least another 3842 days (10 years for the life of Server 8 and the extra for the RTM to appear)

WINs is dead, long live WINs.