Adding Value to expectation

Whenever I am developing an application for my clients, not only meeting the requirements, I used to add value to client’s requirements. For example..

Remote Desktop – Large Files Copy

Here’s a handy tip I just recently learned from the new intern on our team (see, you can learn something from anyone on any given day). I’ve long known you could access your local drives from a remote machine.

For example, start up a remote desktop dialog.

Then expand the dialog by clicking on Options, then check the Local Resources tab.

Make sure Clipboard is checked, and then hit the More… button.

Now you can select a local disk to be shared with the remote machine. For example, in this case I selected my C: drive.

As you can see in the screenshot, the file explorer has another drive named “C on HAACKBOOK” which can be used to copy files back and forth from my local machine to the remote machine.

But here’s the part I didn’t know. Let’s take a look at the desktop of my remote machine, which has a text file named info.txt.

One way I can get that file to my local machine is to copy it to the mapped drive we saw in the previous screenshot.

Or, I can simply drag and drop the info.txt from my remote desktop machine to a folder on my local machine.

So all this time, I had no idea cut and paste operations for files work across remote desktop. This may be obvious for many of you, but it wasn’t to me.

Courtesy: http://haacked.com

 

Collapsible Sections in SharePoint 2010 Customized Forms

If you have a InfoPath 2010 form where you have to show/hide sections or bring in Accordion effect on your customized form, please use this approach below.

Hide The Section

Add a section to your form from the controls choices

You can then add all the controls you want to hide within the new section

Now add a field to the form, but not in the section and call it ShowApproval

Set the default value for this field to No

Now select the section and click Manage Rules

Click the New button and select Formatting

Give the rule a name and select the settings shown below

This rule works by looking at the ShowApproval field and if it set to No (the default value) it hides the section and therefore all the fields within that section

Show The Section On Form Load

So the section is now hidden but we want that section to be viewable after the form has been filled in by the user so that the approval process can be completed by the people necessary. To do this we are going to set a rule on form load that looks to see if a certain field in the form has been completed and if it has, change theShowApproval field to Yes and therefore the approval section will not be hidden

You need to choose a field for the form load rule to look at, it needs to be a field that is automatically blank but has to be filled in

Click on the Data tab and select Form Load

This will load the Form Load rules task pane

This rule will look at a field within the form and if that has been completed it will change the value of theShowApproval field to Yes and therefore show the section. To do this click the New button and select Action and complete the rule as shown in the graphic

The condition on the rule is set to look at a field within the form and check it is not blank

If its not blank then it sets the value of the ShowApproval field to Yes, the rule details for that section is shown below

And Finally

If you follow these steps then you should now have a form that loads up and hides the section that contains the approval fields. Once the form is completed and saved the next time it is opened by the appropriate staff it will show the approval section.

While this method works what it doesn’t stop is the user re-opening the form and seeing the approval section, that is down to trusting the users.

Courtesy: http://blogs.msdn.com, http://www.edutechnow.com/

 

IT Professional and twins

An IT Professional gave birth to twins 

Guess what he named them?

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Exams are like cricket match

Exams are like cricket match.

Examination hall is the field.

Teacher is the umpire.

Question paper is the opposite team.

Answer sheet is the pitch.

Correct answers are the runs.

No. Of questions is the target.

Pen is the bat.

Wrong answer is out.

Time out is no ball.

Submiting answer sheet is result of match!

Corporate world….

) Project Manager is a person who thinks nine women can deliver a baby in one month.

2) Developer is a person who thinks it will take 18 months to deliver a baby.

3) Onsite Coordinator is one who thinks single woman can deliver nine babies in one month.

4) Client is the one who doesn’t know why he wants a baby.

5) Marketing Manager is a person who thinks he can deliver a baby even if no man and woman are available.

6) Resource Optimization Team thinks they don’t need a man or woman; They’ll produce a child with zero resources.

7) Documentation Team thinks they don’t care whether the child is delivered, they’ll just document 9 months.

8) Quality Auditor is the person who is never happy with the PROCESS to produce a baby.

And lastly…

9) Tester is a person who always tells his wife that this is not the right baby.

Windows Azure Platform- & Infrastructure-layer security protections

Port Scanning/ Service Enumeration

The only ports open and addressable (internally or externally) on a Windows Azure VM are those explicitly defined in the Service Definition file. Windows Firewall is enabled on each VM in addition to enhanced VM switch packet filtering, which blocks unauthorizedtraffic

Denial of Service

Windows Azure’s load balancing will partially mitigate Denial of Service attacks from the Internet and internal networks. This mitigation is done in conjunction with the developer defining an appropriate Service Definition VM instance count scale-out.  On the Internet, Windows Azure VMs are only accessible through public Virtual IP Addresses (VIPs).  VIP traffic is routed through Windows Azure’s load-balancing infrastructure. Windows Azure monitors and detects internally initiated Denial of Service attacks and removes offending VMs/accounts from the network. As a further protection, the root host OS that controls guest VMs in the cloud is not directly addressable internally by other tenants on the Windows Azure network and the root host OS is not externally addressable.

Windows Azure is also reviewing additional Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) solutions available from Microsoft Global Foundation Services to help further protect against Denial of Service attacks.

Spoofing

VLANs are used to partition the internal network and segment it in a way that prevents compromised nodes from impersonating trusted systems such as the Fabric Controller.  At the Hypervisor VM Switch, additional filters are in place to block broadcast and multicast traffic, with the exception of what is needed to maintain DHCP leases. Furthermore, the channel used by the Root OS to communicate with the Fabric Controller is encrypted and mutually authenticated over an HTTPS connection, and it provides a secure transfer path for configuration and certificate information that cannot be intercepted.

Eavesdropping / Packet Sniffing

The Hypervisor’s Virtual Switch prevents sniffer-based attacks against other VMs on the same physical host.Top-of-rack switches will be used to restrict which IP and MAC addresses can be used by the VMs andtherefore mitigate spoofing attacks on internal networks. To sniff the wire inside the Windows Azure cloud environment, an attacker would first need to compromise a VM tenant in a way that elevated the attacker to an administrator on the VM, then use a vulnerability in the hypervisor to break into the physical machine root OS and obtain system account privileges. At that point the attacker would only be able to see traffic inbound to the compromised host destined for the dynamic IP addresses of the VM guests controlled by the hypervisor.

Multi-tenant hosting and side-channel attacks

Information disclosure attacks (such as sniffing) are less severe than other forms of attack inside the Windows Azure datacenter because virtual machines are inherently untrusted by the Root OS Hypervisor. Microsoft has done a great deal of analysis to determine susceptibility to side-channel attacks. Timing attacks are the most difficult to mitigate. With timing attacks, an application carefully measures how long it takes some operations to complete and infers what is happening on another processor. By detecting cache misses, an attacker can figure out which cache lines are being accessed in code. With certain crypto implementations involving lookups from large tables, knowing the pattern of memory accesses – even at the granularity of cache lines – can reveal the key being used for encryption. While seemingly far-fetched, such attacks have been demonstrated under controlled conditions.

There are a number of reasons why side-channel attacks are unlikely to succeed in Windows Azure:

• An attack works best in the context of hyper-threading, where the two threads share all of their caches. Many current CPUs implement fully independent cores, each with a substantial private cache. The CPU chips that Windows Azure runs on today have four cores per chip and share caches only in the third tier.
• Windows Azure runs on nodes containing pairs of quad-core CPUs, so there are three other CPUs sharing the cache, and seven CPUs sharing the memory bus. This level of sharing leads to a great deal of noise in any signal from one CPU to another because actions of multiple CPUs tend to obfuscate the signal.
• Windows Azure generally dedicates CPUs to particular VMs. Any system that takes advantage of the fact that few servers keep their CPUs busy all the time, and implements more logical CPUs than physical CPUs, might open the possibility of context switches exposing cache access patterns. Windows Azure operates differently. VMs can migrate from one CPU to another, but are unlikely to do so frequently enough to offer an attacker any information.

External Verification

Microsoft contracted two top-tier penetration testing firms to conduct security assessments on different elements of the Windows Azure architecture before the Professional Developers Conferences (PDC) in 2008 and 2009. Each firm spent a significant amount of time examining hardened virtualization boundaries and probing for side-channel or I/O thrashing attacks. Neither firm was able to mount a successful attack against this design. That is not to say that such attacks are impossible to execute successfully, but six professional penetration testers working over the course of seven weeks were unable to do so. These tests supplemented required internal security testing.