Green IT Magazine hosted their annual awards for Green IT in London last week. The evening started with a drinks reception which allowed everyone to catch up with old friends and start to make new ones. Following a short speech from Richard French from BCS The Chartered Institute for IT.

After a bit of fun entertainment from British comedian Stephen Grant, who admirably made the best out of a very tough niche subject to make light of, the awards followed presented by Sarah Fraser from Rainforest Concern, this year's proud sponsors of the Green IT Awards.

Sarah advised that this year, instead of a plaque or commemorative trophy award, the winners were awarded the sponsorship of one acre of rainforest in The Choco Andean Rainforest Project in northwest Ecuador to help to preserve the bio-diversity found in the region.

This means that the winner of each category not only helped in part by making the IT industry more eco-friendly but were also sponsoring an acre of rainforest in Ecuador.

1E are proud to say that we are now among one of the several organizations that has won a Green IT Award, sponsor an acre of rainforest in Ecuador, and are also one of the two companies to have won a Green IT Award for four years consecutively since it had begun!

Energy Efficiency Solution of the Year

Winner: 1E – 1E NightWatchman Enterprise

Runner Up: Energy Software Solutions – ESSaver PUE

We’d like to thank all those who had voted for us and you can click here to check for a full list of winners.

If you have not heard of NightWatchman before, Nightwatchman Enterprise is a PC Power Management solution that helps you to reduce your energy consumption and your CO2 emissions.

It dispels common misconceptions around PC power management with its user-friendly approach and helps to give admins accurate power consumptions reporting across the entire estate taking into account any complex power tariffs or schemes.

A lot of hard work has gone into making this solution and we're extremely proud to have so many customers enjoying NightWatchman and winning another Green IT Award.

Here's a picture of me proudly sporting our award:

Henry Truong | Technical Audience Executive at 1E

1E Blogs

Also for the fourth year, 1E will be there.

Nominations opened on December 19th, 2012 when this year's categories were announced. Successful companies have gone through to the finals of which 1E are proud to be one of them. We we’re up for three categories:

Energy Efficiency Solution of the Year: 1E – 1E NightWatchman Enterprise

Green IT Magazine Product of the Year: 1E – 1E NightWatchman Enterprise

Green IT Magazine Company of the Year: 1E

Fun fact: Did you know that 1E and one other organization are the only ones to win an award every year since the Green IT Awards first began?

Let’s hope we can keep that trend going.

Henry Truong | Technical Audience Executive at 1E

1E Blogs

If you pass the /REALLYSUPPRESS switch to msixec then that means that if msixec determines that the installation needs a reboot (for example, if a required file was in use during the install/upgrade) then msiexec will not initiate a reboot; instead it will suppress the reboot and return an exit code of 3010.

SCCM 2012 Deployment Types define a 3010 as a "Soft Reboot". There does not appear to be any definitive documentation online from MS regarding the meaning of "soft reboot" but it is generally taken to mean to put the machine into a pending reboot state and not actually reboot the machine.

However, I have found that despite exiting with a 3010 code, the CM agent had initiated a system reboot.
This reboot can happen around the time the install finishes or, on some systems, can get deferred for up to an hour depending on how group policy is configured.
I have not managed to verify whether such machines had a pre-exiting pending reboot state or not, but neither case is good.

There are two workarounds:

1. Change the User Experience settings in the Deployment Type to stipulate that SCCM will take no specific action when the program completes, or
2. Go to the Return Codes tab of a Deployment Type, edit the entry for 3010 and remap it from "Soft Reboot" to "Success"

I recommend option 1 since it means that if you decide to do any reporting on those return codes you can get accurate data- after all, you may actually want to know that some machines are now stuck in a pending reboot state

Luis Johnstone | IT Systems Admin, 1E

1E Blogs

The SP1 ConfigMgr WOL proxies address the unicast weakness by ensuring that at least one client on each subnet has the MAC addresses for all its peers and is ready to send magic packets in response to the unicast packets. It never drops the MAC addresses and therefore should be ready at any time.

WOL proxies are a good concept but in this version both the community’s and 1E’s observations are that they have several weaknesses for most organizations. Security weaknesses are the most obvious, but amongst other issues the current implementation is also very counter-productive if you have a computer power management strategy in place. We’re pleased to see Microsoft improve their WOL solution for some organizations but we encourage you to consider whether this implementation will work in your environment considering the details in the linked document.

For organizations that use 1E NightWatchman, or are considering doing so, we also detail how this feature compares with NightWatchman’s Wake-on-LAN (WOL) feature (also known as WakeUp).

Sumir Karayi has just ran his first London Marathon in charity for BAAF on Sunday and, with the help of all of those of you out there who have charitably donated, has managed to raise more than £11,000. Whilst most marathon runners have a lot of time to fit in a regularly scheduled training regime – others unfortunately do not have that kind of luxury.

With meetings across continents, busy schedules, and not to mention the blur of activities that is called the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas the week before the London Marathon, Sumir found it a challenge to find the time to properly train.

Sumir acknowledges that the hardest part of the marathon was the final few miles where he had to really reach deep within to keep his motivation up to keep running. With many people walking the last section of the marathon route, it would have been easy to just follow the rest of the crowd and just walk the final stretch but Sumir was resolved to carry on and finish strong.

Thanks again to all those who have contributed and those who supported Sumir’s run.

Henry Truong | Technical Audience Executive at 1E

1E Blogs

I’m very pleased to announce the release of 1E’s globally renowned PC power management solution - NightWatchman Enterprise 6.5.

Version 6.5 officially supports Microsoft Systems 2012 Configuration Manager SP1 as well as Windows Server 2012, SQL 2012, Office 2013 and Windows 8.

Also included in this release is a unique new feature which looks at actual utilization of PCs in an organization:

The PC Estate Profiler is a strategic decision making tool for organizations which monitors and reports hardware utilization of all PCs across your estate.

 This can enable key stakeholders to make intelligent business decisions, including:

•       Allocating resources by location
•       Eliminating hardware waste
•       Applying power policies for periods of inactivity
•       Reducing energy footprint
•       Assessing required floor space e.g. in an office or retail outlet

Read more about it in our press release on the 1E Media Center.

Michelle Hazelton | Product Manager, 1E

1E Blogs

After launching PowerShell (this can be done from the ConfigMgr Admin Console), you can avoid all of these clicks with just a few commands.

If you just simply want to remove a package without using the console and have to click through all dialogs, simply use the following command:

Remove-CMPackage -Name "Test Package" –Force

The Name parameter does take wildcards, so if you have multiple packages with a common name (i.e. Test Package 1, Test Package 2, etc.), then you can simply add the asterisk:

Remove-CMPackage -Name "Test Package*" –Force

Using –Force means that it will not prompt you for confirmation to delete the package.

Now, say you want to delete all packages that don’t have an empty Manufacturer field, 1E packages or Microsoft packages.  Use the following command to get all of the package names:

$pkgs = Get-CMPackage | Where-Object {$_.Manufacturer -ne "" -and $_.Manufacturer -ne "1E" -and $_.Manufacturer -notlike "Microsoft*"} | Select Name

You can then just type $pkgs at the command prompt to see all of the packages that meet the criteria.

If you want to check to see what will happen before deleting all of the packages (in other words, there is no undo ), run the following command:

$pkgs | % {Remove-CMPackage -name $_.Name -WhatIf}

This will display what kind of damage will be done before anything happens.

When the results are what you expect, run the following command:

$pkgs | % {Remove-CMPackage -name $_.Name -Force}

If you want to confirm each package deletion, simply leave the –Force off and it will have you confirm each one.  Remember, there is no Recycle Bin so use this with extreme care.

A recent paper from the Center for Strategic and International Studies contains some striking cyber security statistics. It included the fact that more than 90% of successful corporate network breaches required only the most basic techniques and that 75% of them exploited known vulnerabilities in commercial software. In summary, hacking is easy because computer systems have widely known vulnerabilities that can be exploited by anyone possessing basic computing skills and access to the internet.

Why updating your software is so important

Research from the DOD Defence Signals Directorate has established that just four mitigation strategies can prevent more than 85% of attacks. These strategies are:

1. Implementation of application whitelisting
2. Effective Operating System patching
3. Effective software application updates
4. Restriction of administrative privileges

Note that two out of the four mitigation strategies are about updating the software that is already installed on computer systems.

Operating System patches are issued by the vendor when a software defect has been fixed. Generally patches are classified in order to indicate the severity and impact of the problem they resolve. Rather than issue them individually most vendors collect their patches together in the form of periodic updates to their Operating Systems.

Using patch classification to prioritize the deployment of security patches is vital since hackers will start exploiting new vulnerabilities once they are known. As soon as a security fix is available the clock is ticking…

Keeping desktop applications up to date is as important as patching the underlying Operating System. The difference comes from how updates are packaged and delivered, with less distinction made between the type of fix and its severity. In terms of deployment, some applications incorporate a self-update feature and others rely on the end-user or system management tools.

Reasons why patching is incomplete

Large organizations typically automate the task of software deployment using management tools such as Microsoft System Center. This should result in updates being deployed to all devices in a timely manner however there are still reasons why this fails, for example:

• Devices are switched off at the time of the update
• End-user intervention is required such as a reboot
• Software must be deployed over slow network links or to remote users
• The computer system is considered business critical and therefore updates must go through an approval process

These issues can be solved using modern systems management tools such as Nomad and NightWatchman however the challenge for most organisations is that the problem is hidden. Why not benchmark your organization to find out how you are doing?

In my next article I will look at the final mitigation strategy – restricting administrative privileges.

Organizations that are not yet off the starting blocks or only a little way down the track are highly unlikely to complete before the Microsoft deadline. Whether the delay is because they misunderstood the sheer scale of the project, or that they are coming across myriad technical hurdles – from application reinstallation to gotchas around device drivers – which they never encountered before, it means they cannot confidently predict when they will finish the project or how much it will cost them. Ultimately the challenge of such a project is that few IT teams will have ever experienced such a complex migration.

The most common approach to tackling a major OS migration is for IT departments to manage the migration process themselves. However, the challenge with moving to Windows 7 is that few have ever experienced such a complex migration, so are coming across myriad issues – from application mapping to gotchas around device drivers – which they never encountered before. They may think they are close to completion, but there will be many ‘unknowns’ they haven’t anticipated which will impact timescales.

The unknown pitfalls of a Windows migration

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we
know there are some things we do not know. But there are also
unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld

No single ‘unknown’ will be massively complex, but each represents a hurdle to be overcome and IT teams shouldn’t be duped into thinking that they are nearing completion just because they’ve cleared one jump. The reality is they still won’t know how far they are from finishing the migration. Projects become long, slow and complex and risk extending beyond April 2014.

The alternative: automation, automation, automation

Instead of just persevering with labor-intensive, increasingly lengthy manual migration projects, organizations need to look for newer, less painful, solutions.

Using automation to upgrade computers from Windows XP or Vista to Windows 7 will free up the engineering resource to train users on how to use the new OS and make the whole employee experience much more positive.

Traditionally a visit from an engineer would mean them taking over the computer for a few hours while the user does something (or nothing) else – in fact this can affect productivity for even longer periods, with the user unable to use their PC for the best part of a day. A better scenario would be that a user’s machine is automatically upgraded overnight (or at a time of their choosing when they won’t be disrupted) and then the IT resource (helpdesk and engineers) can focus on educating users about the new OS and productively use the newly installed applications. IT departments simply do not have enough time to do this today, as they are bogged down with cumbersome, manual processes and troubleshooting.

Talk to the Experts and beat the April 2014 deadline:

At 1E over the past 10 years we’ve been doing this year in, year out and each time we’ve encountered one of those problems we have automated it. If you would like to learn more or request a Windows 7 consultation, 1E consultants are available to discuss any issues around Windows 7 migration and help you overcome any Windows XP migration challenges you may come across.

We'd like to thank all of those who took part in the certification process and became ActiveEfficiency experts and you may have heard we teased a little bit about 1E Workspace. Phil Schwan wrote a pretty neat summary of his Sunday ahead of MMS at the 1E Academy Live experiences. If you have twitter, why not join in the conversation or see what was said using the hashtag #1EAL

We will be producing a nice little highlight video in due course so watch this space.

Henry Truong | Technical Audience Executive at 1E

1E Blogs