ROKUS.NET

Reading this post will save you ten bucks...

...because you won't have to go to the Navy Club for lunch to hear my farewell speech.

With Anteon starting work on the J6 Task on Monday, I anticipate that I'll be busy with transitioning incumbent duties and responsibilities to the new team next week. I've got a moment or two now to compose the all-to-common Farewell message, so I'd like to take a short amount of your time to say goodbye.

For the past 11 years, I've supported the two coalitions in Korea - the United Nations Command while on active duty and the Combined Forces Command as a contractor. I have learned the tremendous value of these organizations to defend the Republic of Korea against the ever-present-yet-oft-underestimated red menace.

There are quite a few people that have had a significant professional impact on me in the past decade, and I'd like to thank them publicly and hopefully not embarrass them too much:

The Other Steve taught me everything I know about both Koreas, the Armistice, and the United Nations Commmand. Tom let me run the show up north - undoubtedly to the dismay of the godforsaken communists. Another Steve and Robert made my transition to from active duty to contractor much easier - Steve, I appreciate the risk you took to hire me in the first place; Robert, I've learned more from you than I've ever given you credit. Tim and Scott taught me more about contracting, managing people, and "the bigger picture" than I hoped to learn. Rich gave me incredible latitude in the early days of the security division. Lastly, LCDR Wu not only shaped my (our?) vision for coalition C4I, he funded it as well.

As I transition to Hawaii for bigger and better things, I wish the best for the J64 and the Anteon team, and each of you supporting the Combined Forces coalition. I will return for a brief period in late February to finalize the lease on my apartment, ship out some household goods, and wander about Seoul like a tourist.

Those passing through Hawaii after RSOI are encouraged to shoot me an email at the address at the top right (you can figure it out). At a minimum, I'll buy the second round.

Reprinted from an "all-hands" email sent earlier this evening.

National Treasure (2004)

National Treasure, 2004, Nicholas Cage (it's on "CatchOn" now, sue me.)

According to the IMDB trivia page, "Good guys in the movie use Google and bad guys use Yahoo! search engines."

Art imitating life, no doubt.

Become your own webhost.

One of the biggest issues involved with becoming a web publisher is the question of hosting. With an internet clogged with false hosting review sites, hosting companies trying to rip you off, and hosting companies run by 14 year olds, the majority of web publishers are at the mercy of random chance when it comes to finding a quality host.

75 very detailed steps to install FreeBSD, PHP, mySQL on your own.

Mok-dong (Seoul) Immigration Office Hours

The Seoul Immigration office (in Mokdong) is open Monday-Friday from 0900-1800. Their phone number is ~~(02)650-2650/6339~~ SOFA: (02)650-6224, General affairs: (02)650-6212, Information: (02)650-6331/2/3.

You know, just in case you need to run down there next week...

Update 2006.01.03: Maps and directions added below...

Need to publish confidential documents? Microsoft Redaction tool may be for you!

So, you're tooling along, writing some document that will eventually be in the public domain (e.g. a contract, a lease, some Privacy Act document) and you need to "black out" parts of the document to protect the names of the innocent.

Back in the old days, you'd redact the document with a big black magic marker, and then photocopy them to make it difficult to decipher. Nowadays, you may be tempted to convert the background text to black (printing black on black). These solutions only work on printed copies - what about the electronic version?

Enter the Office 2003 Add-in: Word Redaction plug in.

The Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically. In the redacted version of the document, the redacted text is replaced with a black bar and cannot be converted back to text or retrieved.

Please note that:

In a redacted document, the black bar that replaces the redacted text takes up the same amount of space as the original text so that line spacing and line breaks are unaffected. As a result, readers may be able to determine the length of a redacted word based on the size of the blacked out area. To help protect your redacted document from attempts to recover information by using word length, avoid redacting single words. If you need to redact a single word, you can replace it with a longer or shorter word before you select it for redaction.

What this means - if you're redacting a Social Security Number, the length is fixed and a black bar that's exactly 11 characters wide will be inserted. However, if you're discussing two employees or companies, and one's named "Jim Doe" and the other one is "James Smith-Jones", the size of the bar may indicate who you're talking about. It's better to replace all instances of "Jim Doe" and "James Smith-Jones" with a single word ("REDACTED TEXT") and then redact that text, so that each black bar is exactly the same length.

Font gurus: I understand that SSN 111-11-1111 takes fewer pixels in proportionally-spaced fonts than SSN 888-88-8888, ergo the blacked-out bar would be shorter. Yes, it's probably feasible to meaure the exactly length in pixels of a word, figure out the font in the surrounding text, and then run some sort of dictionary attack against the black bar to see what matches would make sense in context. That's why I suggested changing all redacted text to a common phrase with a single length.

RSS and XML: Seoul Computer Club Presentation.

The slides from my presentation to the Seoul Computer Club (their homepage here) (and .gifs of all the slides) are available for your review.

Operations Guides

· Active Directory Product Operations Guide
· DHCP Service Product Operations Guide
· DNS Service Product Operations Guide
· File Service Product Operations Guide
· Print Service Product Operations Guide
· WINS Service Product Operations Guide
· Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Operations Guide
· Microsoft Operations Manager 2000 SP1 Operations Guide
· Microsoft SMS 2003 Operations Guide
· Microsoft SMS 2.0 Operations Guide
· Monitoring Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server with MOM 2000
· SQL Server 2000 Operations Guide
· SharePoint 2003
· MIIS at a Glance
· ISA Configuration and Administration

Cool Optical Illusions

A couple neat optical illusions under "Read More"...

Microsoft releases SNARF - an email relationship tool

Microsoft Research released "SNARF" - the Social Network and Relationship Finder.

SNARF (ugh!) "...was built around the notion that social network information that is already available to the computer system can be usefully reflected to the user: a message from a manager might be seen differently than a message from a stranger, for example. SNARF applies this idea to email triage: handling the flow of messages when time is short and mail is long."

Apparently threads your email ala GMail, which I find pretty annoying.

Link Dump / Exchange

Tips for Disaster Recovery: From the EHLO team, a couple of tough questions to ask:

1) Which one is more important to my users: Restoration of Mail Flow or Recovery of Historical Data?
2) How long can we afford to be down with out any Mail Flow?
3) How long can we afford to be down with no Historical Data Recovered?
4) If Historical Data is our top priority at what point does Mail Flow become more important and vice versa?

Send an email to all users created today: From the ExchangeCookBook site - lots of great scripts over there.

Exchange Dump tutorial from MSExchange.org. ExchDump can be downloaded from Microsoft.com (here) for free.

WINS and Exchange: Scenarios where Exchange 2003/Exchange 2000 still require NetBIOS/WINS name resolution:

· The Exchange Server 2003 Setup program and the Exchange 2000 Server Setup program, especially on clustered servers.
· Exchange Mailbox Merge Wizard (ExMerge) on an Exchange 2003 computer and on an Exchange 2000 computer.
· Changing a password for an Exchange 2003 mailbox or an Exchange 2000 mailbox through Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA).
· Exchange System Manager on an Exchange 2003 computer and on an Exchange 2000 computer.
· Microsoft Outlook clients that are earlier than Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 also require NetBIOS name resolution.

Exchange 2003 SP2: Unless you were buried under a rock, you already knew this was published. Make sure to check the release notes before installing.

Hidden Features of OWA: More from the EHLO team. Favorites:

· Putting an = in front of the e-mail alias that you are trying to resolve when composing a mail will automatically resolve it to any exact matches.(Outlook, too!)
· Sort on multiple columns at once by holding down shift and clicking on the column headers you want to sort on.

Exchange Server Management Pack: "Provides a graphical user interface to configure Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 Management Pack, including test mailboxes, message tracking, and monitoring services." Nuff said.

Exchange Disaster Recovery Analyzer (ExDRA): "...designed for administrators who need to troubleshoot database mounting issues."

Exchange Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer (ExPTA): "...designed for administrators who need to determine the root cause of Exchange Server performance issues"

MS Webcast: Setup and Deployment Changes "...discuss the changes made to the local computer and to Active Directory by the Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 setup process, and how its deployment differs from Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server." Includes link to download (rather than stream).

Exchange 2003 Common Criteria Certification: EAL 4 + Systematic Flaw Remediation. If your eyes just glazed over, don't bother clicking.