Standardization for Nimble I.T.

One of the things that both frustrates and amazes me is the difficulty I often face in getting I.T. Departments to standardize. From my perspective, it seems to me that standardization is a no-brainer; if, on any machine, you know what the settings should be, then it becomes a lot easier to troubleshoot problems. If you are remote and trying to walk a user through something over the phone, it’s a huge advantage to know that all the icons and settings are the same so you can visualize what that user sees. If your hardware is all the same, it becomes easy to keep spare parts on hand. These are just a few of the many advantages that any I.T. department can reap if they implement standards on their networks.

Yet even with all the advantages, I’ve found it hard to sell Standardization to I.T. Staff in general. I suspect that this may be partly due to the common misconception among some I.T. professionals that by keeping things complicated and difficult they are making their position more valuable and achieving some level of job security, even though in practice this is rarely the case, and often has the reverse effect of making one “too valuable” to promote.

In my experience, I.T. Teams are far more effective when they are able to collaborate well, and by having a level and understood playing field (which is another advantage that standardization provides) everyone is able to understand how things are set up and contribute to mitigating risks, increasing efficiency, and solving any problems that crop up on the network.

Speaking of problems, another advantage to standardization is that it makes anomalies a lot easier to identify. When everything on your network is set up the same, rogue machines or applications stick out like a sore thumb.

Lastly, having standards makes mergers or acquisitions a lot less painful. It’s far easier to integrate when at least one side of the network is standardized.

If you are ever in the position to start a network from scratch, or if you are ever put in charge of a network redesign or upgrade, these are perfect opportunities to implement standards, and I would strongly encourage anyone in this position to consider setting and documenting standards right from the start. It will make your life a lot easier down the line.

Don't Toss That Drive... Yet!

One of the more common questions I am asked is "How do I dispose of my old computer parts safely?" Usually this question is more about the proper disposal of e-waste (hint: you don't just throw it in the trash can), yet there is another side of disposing of old hardware that the average user rarely considers; how does one make sure that the information stored on this device does not fall into the wrong hands?

You may not know it, but when you delete a file from your computer it doesn't actually go anywhere. Deleting a file essentially just deletes the location ("address") of that file from the table ("phone book") on the disk drive that tells the computer where the file is located. Much like having an unlisted number in a phone book doesn't actually remove your house from its location, it just unclutters the phone book and makes it harder to find.

For someone with experience working on computers, it is relatively simple to read the contents of a disk and see the remnants of these files and the information contained in them. There are those unscrupulous individuals who actively search out old hard drives and computers in the hopes of uncovering personal information about the former user that can then be used for identity theft or other unsavory things.

You can see why it's not a good idea to just throw away your hard drive or donate your computer even if you've deleted your files (note: on most computers even formatting your hard drive only destroys the "phone book", leaving all the data intact on the drive). So are we all doomed to slowly fill up our garages or cupboards with old hard drives that we don't dare dispose of? How do we protect this data?

One way to do this is called "wiping" the hard drive. What wiping does is it actually goes to the file location on the disk and overwrites it multiple times with random data, making it harder to recover. Working off my prior allegory of the phone book and the house, you can liken this to bulldozing your house and then unlisting your number... no one will find your house then! There are several applications that you can download that will do this type of wiping for you:

One of my favorite open-source options is Darik's Boot and Nuke. If you prefer a full-featured program that can even be used on individual files BCWipe by Jetico will do Department of Defense level wiping. There's even wiping software built directly into your hard drive that you can use (I'll leave that to be explained by Robin Harris).

Once you successfully wipe all the data off your hard drive, you can safely donate it to your favorite charity or sell it at your next garage sale without worrying about your old Quickbooks data or tax returns falling into the wrong hands.

Update Your Firefox

Firefox has released version 3.6.2 which addresses a major vulnerability that was disclosed on Monday. Update your Firefox immediately!

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Internet Explorer Exploit "In The Wild"

Microsoft released an Internet Explorer Security Advisory two days ago, and today security expert Moshe Ben Abu released exploit code for this vulnerability. This means that we'll likely see malware starting to use this vulnerability to infect computers pretty soon.

Microsoft recommends (as do I) that if you are running an old version of Internet Explorer it be upgraded to version 8 (you can get that for free, here). This will protect you from this new exploit.

Surf safe!