Eddie Richards

Eddie Richards was one of my first students — in fact, he was in the first group of students I had as the lead instructor of what was then the Microsoft Support Engineer program.  Eddie had the requisite sick IT-sense-of-humor and, combined with his outgoing spirit and empathetic heart, he was truly a joy to have in class and I’m sure his classmates would all agree.

Why am I writing about a student I first had in 2004?

I just received word tonight that Eddie died last week at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville, apparently of cancer.  He was 40 years old.

Obviously, the news hit me like a ton of bricks.  No one seems to know anything about what happened with him, and since there will be no visitation or service, my questions will probably go unanswered.

Please be thinking of Eddie’s family as they go through their mourning.  I don’t know this for sure, but I think that his illness came on quickly and, while death is rarely easy to grapple with, sudden death at a young age is especially hard.

Eddie, you’ll be missed.

Marketing – 7/30/2008

What an interesting class today.

In what was probably our most spirited, discussion dominated class ever, we discussed chapter five, which dealt with consumer behavior.  In other words, what is it that makes customers buy the goods they buy.

We looked at a number of things, including differences in culture, occupation, stage in life cycle, etc.

Homework:

• Chapter Five: Company Case

Pro/Server – 7/29/2008

We had a rather large day today, covering four (count ‘em, four) chapters.

The first chapter dealt with creating users and groups.  We discussed the immense advantages to creating individual user accounts for each person who uses a Windows XP machine, as well as talking about the risks in leaving a user account set at its default setting — with administrative priviledges.  Not having admin rights adds a degree of inconvenience (think UAC in Vista), but the safety that it provides is well worth it, in my opinion.  Groups are also helpful, since we can manage security much more efficiently with groups instead of dealing with lots of individual user accounts.  Users and groups will play a large part in dealing with Server 2003 (starting next week).

The next chapter dealt with security templates.  As we saw, there are dozens of individual local security settings we can configure for our XP machines, and the hassle factor of configuring even 5 or 6 of these machines exactly the same is high.  We played with actually creating our own security templates and then examining how our XP boxes shaped up to them, and then configured our computers to match them.  Nice.

The next chapter, the chapter that will never die, was about data backup and restoration.  Along with the token backup lecture, we also looked at topics such as ASR, Last Known Good Configuration, Driver Rollback and System Restore.  All of these have saved my butt in the past, and I’d urge you to have a good understanding of what these features do.

Finally, we finished up the XP portion of this class by covering how to measure our computer’s performance via Performance Monitor.  In the lab, we experimented with setting up a counter and trace logs as well as setting up an alert to let us know when a one of our selected counter goes out of a predefined (by us) spec.

And that was it.  Next week, we’ll install Server 2003 on other drives and use our XP installations (which are virtual machines) to remote into our server installations.  Nice, real-world fun.  See you next week!

Homework:

• Chapter Thirteen: Review Questions
• Chapter Fourteen: Review Questions
• Chapter Fifteen: Review Questions
• Chapter Sixteen: Review Questions

Managing a Network Environment – 7/28/2008

Tonight we covered Chapter six, in what has to be the fastest a class has blitzed through this chapter.  I say this because chapter six covers command line tools that update AD, such as DSADD, DSMOVE, DSQUERY, etc.  Normally, the syntax of these labs hang us up and we have to make the class last two nights.  We finished in one!

Homework:

• Chapter Six: Review Questions

Designing NI/AD – 7/28/2008

Today we finished up the design course, ending with a discussion on designing a remote access policy.  In the afternoon, we took our midterm (actually the design final).  Next week, bring your MS Exchange books and get ready to start building an Exchange organization!

Homework:

• No homework!  Enjoy the week off!

Marketing – 7/23/2008

In this class so far, among other things, we’ve discussed what marketing actually is and four areas that we can manipulate in order to “maximize shareholder wealth” (isn’t that the whole point of business?).

That’s all well and good, but how we know which of the 4Ps to change and how to change them?  The answer lies in market research, which was the topic of chapter four, and of today’s discussion.

In researching, the first thing we must do is define the problem we’d like to solve.  Next, we have a couple of options: what kind of research do we need to get — primary or secondary?  Secondary research involves taking results from research that has already been performed to solve a separate problem than the one you’re working on.  We can get secondary research from individual data providers (more often than not on the web) and from our own past research projects.  The downside to this method is that the research is by definition older and may not exactly fit the exact problem that you have to solve.

Primary research, on the other hand, is designed to solve the specific problem that you have.  While it does cost more and takes longer (due to information gathering), it has the distinct advantage of being well, relevant.  We discussed several methods of gathering primary information, including focus groups, interviews, surveys, etc.

Just as a reminder, we will be having a checkpoint exam on August 13 which will cover the first six chapters of the book.  Make sure you study past quizzes, handouts and, of course, the text.

Homework:

• Chapter 4: Company Case

Pro/Server – 7/22/2008

Chapters 10 through 12 made for a networking-intensive class.  Specifically, we reviewed concepts such as IP addressing, DHCP, APIPA, sub/supernetting, etc.  We also discussed the differences rbetween Remote Assitance and Remote Desktop and when to use each.  Finally, in chapter 12, we experimented with IE and the various settings it has with it.

Homework:

• Review Questions 10-12

Managing a Network Environment – 7/21/2008

Tonight’s class was non-existent tonight since Cartney is in Texas on job training and Josh had his intern class to attend to.  See you next week!

Homework:

• Read and get ready for Chapter 6.

Designing NI/AD – 7/21/2008

Today we discussed various OU structures and when we would use those, based on what kind of administration model that our company operates under: centralized, decentralized, centralized with decentralized administration and outsourced.  We discussed the pros and cons of each of these systems and how to set up an OU structure based on this and our organization.  ’twas fun.

Next, firewall and NAT placement were on the agenda.  Items such as where to place servers, etc. that we wanted to be accessed from the Internet and servers that we did not want to be accessed from the internet.

Next week, we’ll cover chapter 9 in the morning and then take the Checkpoint exam to finish us up in the Design portion of class.  The week after, August 4, we will start in on MS Exchange.

Homework

• No homework that’s absolutely due, but…
• Chapter Seven – Review Questions
• Chapter Eight – Review Questions … will help you in your studying.

How to secure a Wireless Router (Rerun)

On Tuesday night, I gave a free “community-ed” class on how to properly secure your wireless router.  There were a decent number of people present, and we had some fun discussing some of the risks in keeping your router “fresh-out-of-the-box”.  Specifically, I showed how to make a router more difficult to find by disabling SSID broadcasting, how to enable MAC filtering, to allow only your computers to access the router, and how to enable encryption, so that anyone who wants to connect has to provide a special key.

I discussed this topic back in October, and so, for a trip down memory lane, check it out.