Some bright spark over at WinZip thought that it would be a great idea to build in an auto-update utility into WinZip so that users would be prompted to download the latest version of WinZip as they are released. Unfortunately, this updater prompts users when they first run WinZip even if they don’t have administrative access to their machine (I think the guy from WinZip and the guy from Adobe must know each other). Here’s the dialog that users see when they first run WinZip, not ideal in a corporate environment:

Last week Citrix released a hotfix for the Access Gateway 4.5. This hotfix fixes a number of issues, two of which are very interesting to me:

Microsoft have released an update for ISA Server 2006 to support publishing Exchange Server 2007. You will also need to install this patch on any machines running the ISA Server 2006 management console:

Microsoft have posted a whitepaper on utilising ISA Server as an IPSec gateway/proxy in a domain or server isolation environment to extend IPSSec protection to machines that do not support IPSec. This essentially involves ISA Server terminating the IPSec connection and passing traffic into a NAT’d network. It’s a 23 page document and applies to both ISA Server 2004 and 2006:

Adobe have released the Adobe Customization Wizard 8 to provide a method for customising the deployment of version 8 of the Acrobat products. This tool allows you to disable all of the most useless features included in the new release including Digital Editions, Adobe Online Services and even Adobe Updater 5. This means that you can get rid of the Updater5 folder that keeps appearing in your Documents folder.

Microsoft have posted some updated NAP documents on microsoft.com/downloads today:

WindowsNetworking.com has posted an article about Network Access Protection: An Introduction to Network Access Protection (Part 1) by Brien Posey.This is a good overview and introduction to NAP. The next article will go into configuration details.

We all know that Windows is not case sensitive when it comes to the command line. Someone forgot to tell DELPROF though - you can use DELPROF in a script to automatically and silently delete user profiles. However it seems that you need to run the command in lower case, if you use upper case it just ignores the silent switch completely and prompts you to delete profiles. Check it out in this screenshot - What The?:

I’m working on a Presentation Server deployment project at the moment, and am deploying the servers with Windows PE 2.0 via Windows Deployment Services (WDS). I need to launch Windows Setup via WINNT32.EXE because the servers have two RAID sets and the client wants the user profiles on the second disk set. So before deploying the unattended setup to hardware, I’m testing the deployment in VMware Workstation. Unfortunately Windows PE 2.0 does not recognise the VMware network card out of the box, so I’ve had to create a custom WinPE image with the drivers in it. This is the first time I’ve done this with Windows PE 2.0 so there was a little trial and error. Here are the steps I completed to create my custom image:

Microsoft has posted what appears to be an updated document (version 1.1) from August 2005, Introduction to Server and Domain Isolation with Microsoft Windows. Server and Domain Isolation using IPSec is a great method for creating isolated networks to protect those networks from unwanted traffic. Domain isolation solves the problem where access to domain resources should only be from domain member computers. If you are considering implementing NAP with Windows Server “Longhorn”, you should be planning your domain isolation strategies now.