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TechDays 2011

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TechDays 2011 is coming up soon. Next week in fact. As in past years I’ll be presenting. This year I will be presenting in Toronto and Montreal and the subject will be Securing your Wireless Network using Active Directory and 802.1x

This year TechDays will be taking place in the following cities so make sure to register

  1. Toronto – October 25-26
  2. Vancouver – November 15-16
  3. Montreal – November 29-30

If you  register for TechDays 2011, use this promo code TDSPKR11CAN to get 50% off the conference admission!

My presentation is the first day, last session of the day. So it will be me that keeps you from the door. Be prepared to laugh a little in the session.

I look forward to seeing you all there this year and I will be hanging around all day probably in the experts lounge. Stop by and say hi.

 

Build two Windows Phone 7.5 apps, get a free device.

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Microsoft has announced a program, build two Windows Phone 7.5 apps, get a free device. Full details at http://www.microsoft.com/canada/offers-promotions/mango-app-challenge/

My first thought was, “I wonder if I could write a couple apps.”, followed by “I wonder if fart apps count?” Check my Twitter stream, I did actually ask that question.

The rules actually say those apps have to be quality applications. Which means, no fart apps which was Joey’s battle cry when he worked for the Empire.

Which means, probably no developing for me. Fart apps, flashlight, I probably could do. Something like Beiber smash, might be tricky but do-able. Quality, not a chance you’ll see anything by me.

But if you can develop, and actually make something good, go to http://www.microsoft.com/canada/offers-promotions/mango-app-challenge/ and take the challenge.

Bitlocker Administration and Monitoring Registry Edit

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I have been in the pilot stages of a Bitlocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM) implementation here at the school board. For my pilot, I am using a single server implementation. Now, in real life to implement MBAM you should be using a three server or five server implementation. I pinged @StephenLRose asking what the difference would be between three and five and the response was basically around where you would want the roles hosted and not about scalability. Size wise, 25,000 clients is what each MBAM implementation can handle.

So my pilot was to check out the implemenation guide, see how it works for encrypting the drive. The issue I did have so far was clients not checking in with the MBAM Server. What I found was a registry hack that needed to be done. The hack is this (from the TechNet forums):

Add a registry key on MBAM server under HKLM\Software\Microsoft
Create a new key called MBAM and then create a new Dword 32-bit value called DisableMachineVerification and set to 1

After you do this, on client restart the MBAM client service and then this issue should be resolved.

I performed that step and I was off to the races. The computer checked in to MBAM and then prompted me to encrypt the drive.  Another next step is to provide some automation for our imaging process.