RunAs Radio

Richard talks to Mark Minasi about the events of 2011 that happened and didn't happen. The conversation starts with Windows 8 and the Build conference - is it going to succeed? The debate drills into the role of the tablet in the enterprise. Next topic is IPv6. 2011 is the year that IANA ran out of IPv4 addresses, but the world didn't end. When will IPv6 ascend? Finally, Mark and Richard chat abou...

Richard talks to Todd Lamothe about how to use Windows Server 2008 to secure WiFi. No, this doesn't replace encryption, it just adds to it - with WPA2-RADIUS to have your access point communicate with the Network Policy Service in Windows 2008. Now every user on your WiFi connection is specifically associated with an active directory account. Todd talks through the challenges of certificates, conf...

Richard talks to Mitch Garvis about System Center Essentials (SCE). SCE brings the power of System Center Configuration Manager, Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager to the small-to-medium business. It limits to 50 servers (physical and virtual) and 500 workstations - plenty for lots of businesses! Mitch digs into a few tricks of the trade for being successful with SCE - check out his bl...

Richard talks to Tony Redmond, formerly of Hewlett-Packard, about the state of affairs for Office 365. At the time of the interview Office 365 had been shipping for only five months. Tony talks about the outages suffered by Microsoft and Google for their cloud offerings, noting that Microsoft is still in the early days of learning how to run a massive multi-tenancy infrastructure. He also compares...

Richard talks to Steve Syfuhs at TechDays Toronto about IT Pros providing security services for developers using Active Directory Federated Services. IT and development talking to each other willingly? Perish the thought! But in truth, Steve makes it clear that ADFS provides a great wrapper for developers to access active directory or any other service that has security claims that an application...

While at TechDays in Toronto, Richard talks to Rodney Buike about virtualizing desktops. Rodney digs into how Citrix's XenDesktop can let you use Windows 7 applications on your iPad! The conversation also explores the use of application virtualization to minimize storage use and simplify software updates, as well as an approach to using desktop virtualization to keep older workstations up and runn...

Richard talks to Rick Claus just before lunch on the second day of TechDays Toronto about diagnosing problems with DNS. Rick admits that much of his session was derived from Mark Minasi's session on DNS - but Rick adds his own twist. The conversation dives into the tools you can use to understand what's happening with DNS on your machine and the common problems that crop up with DNS. It's a tour b...

Richard flies solo at TechDays Toronto talking to Tom Moreau about some of the new T-SQL features in the next version of SQL Server, code named Denali. Tom waxed poetic about sequences and their advantages (and disadvantages) compared to identity columns. Other features Tom digs into include Lead and Lag and the new Throw feature that further extends the Try Catch capabilities in T-SQL.

While at TechDays Toronto, Richard talks to Jeff Woolsey about virtualization in the SMB space. Jeff walks through a scenario where a branch office with three servers in different roles sets up Hyper-V, uses P2V migration to virtualize the existing roles into the hardware and then repurposes the hardware to create failover and redundancy. The conversation continues into the role of Cloud and even...

Richard and Greg talk to Geoff Citron about the choices IT pros can make today around running applications on-premise, with a hosting provider or in the Cloud. Geoff discusses how small hosting providers are thriving in a Cloud world by providing great customer service and customizing services for their customers.

Richard flies solo to talk to Mike Laverick about VMWare. Mike starts out talking about the history of virtualization, from the early days of virtualization for testing into the later generation production virtualization. The conversation moves into the upcoming release of VMWare vSphere 5, including a discussion about the rather controversial new licensing model. Mike also talks about the relatio...

Richard and Greg talk to Susan Bradley and Kevin Royalty about the latest edition of servers from Hewlett Packard specifically made for Small Business Server. Susan and Kevin talk about the ultra-small form factor of the HP ProLiant MicroServer, priced with Small Business Server Essentials for under a thousand dollars. You can see more about MicroServers and SBS at the SMB MVP Community Roadshow a...

Richard and Greg talk to Tim Barrett about Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server. Originally for the academic market only, MultiPoint Server is now available for small businesses, allowing up to 20 users to share a single computer simultaneously via Remote Desktop. Tim talks about using MultiPoint to provide access to applications for iPads and other third party devices, as well as extending the lif...

Richard and Greg talk to the one-and-only Rhonda Layfield about the beta 1 of Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2012. MDT 2012 is a free tool for doing operating system, driver and software deployments. Rhonda talks about how MDT is becoming more closely integrated with System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), to the point that you need to use MDT with SCCM to do zero touch deployment. The con...

While at the Build conference in Anaheim, California, Richard sat down with Mark Minasi to get his first impressions of Windows Server 8. What happens next is almost an hour of high speed brain dumping, so hold on to your hats. For even more information about Windows Server 8, check out Mark's newsletter (which you should be subscribing to anyway).

Richard flies solo to talk to Barry Dorrans, now at Microsoft, about the recent spate of security breaches at Certificate Authorities like Comodo and DigiNotar. What can you as an IT Pro do about this recent set of hacks? Other than replacing your potentially exploited certificate, not a lot. Barry talks about how these exploits have happened, what Microsoft, Google and others are doing about it a...

Richard and Greg talk to Donald Farmer about his new role over at QlikView. Don spent ten years working on Business Intelligence technologies at Microsoft and now has taken his experiences into QlikView and their business analytic products. Don also digs into how business analytics has evolved, reducing the cost of systems and making BI 'disposable' - low cost, agile and easily replaceable. Toward...

Richard talks to Mark Russinovich and Aaron Margosis about the newly released Sysinternals Administrator's Reference. SysInternals is a vital part of any IT administrator's toolkit, but has never been well documented. The administrator's reference is that documentation, including details on every SysInternals tool as well as troubleshooting examples and a detailed overview of core Windows concepts...

Richard flies solo to talk to Laura Hunter, now working at Microsoft IT about the identity infrastructure at Microsoft. Laura talks about the scale of the identity problem at Microsoft, the challenges of using smart cards instead of passwords (the passwords won). The conversation moves on to talking about identification in general, talking about different ways of recognizing users, the shared auth...

Richard talks to Jeremy Moskowitz about his latest version of PolicyPak. PolicyPak provides Group Policy templates for third party applications. This is one of those products that once you understand what it does, you can't live without it. There's a free community edition as well as a paid version that is ten bucks per PC! Check it out at www.policypak.com.

Richard and Greg to talk Yong Rhee from Microsoft Premier Field Engineering. Yong talks about optimization and health checks for Windows clients. He focuses on using the Windows Performance Analysis Tools (WPAT) which includes three tools: xperf, xperfview and xbootmgr. WPAT works with Event Tracing for Windows (ETW), available for Windows Vista and 7.

Richard and Greg talk to Cameron Fuller about System Center Operations Manager. Operations Manager is the instrumentation part of System Center - centralizing the status of all your servers into one console. The conversation moves into the concept of server and application health... looking beyond ping times and into knowing how healthy your application is. Cameron also helps us understand how Ope...

Richard flies solo to talk to James Bannan about System Center Configuration Manager. Configuration Manager pulls together the administration of operating system, driver and application installs working alongside tools like Microsoft Deployment Toolkit. Check out James' blog at http://www.jamesbannanit.com/.

Early one morning at Kim and Paul's place, Richard sat down for a conversation about how they go about helping their customers make SQL Server go faster. The conversation wanders over index tuning, hardware issues and learning issues. Also listen for a special guest visit from Paul's nine year old daughter who knows that auto shrink is evil.

Richard and Greg talk to Stephen Foskett about storage technologies. Stephen gives a history of storage technologies from RAID arrays to SANs, including Microsoft's Storage Server. The conversation ranges over a huge number of storage technologies, including the new generation of low cost iSCSI targets, lamenting the death of Microsoft Home Server and even diving into obscure concepts like (get th...