Archive for January, 2012

Next generation file system ReFS hits Windows 8

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4 months ago
by Bart Timmermans in , ,

Source: Microsoft MSDN

ReFS, has been designed from the ground up to meet a broad set of customer requirements, both today’s and tomorrow’s, for all the different ways that Windows is deployed.

The key goals of ReFS are:

  • Maintain a high degree of compatibility with a subset of NTFS features that are widely adopted while deprecating others that provide limited value at the cost of system complexity and footprint.
  • Verify and auto-correct data. Data can get corrupted due to a number of reasons and therefore must be verified and, when possible, corrected automatically. Metadata must not be written in place to avoid the possibility of “torn writes,” which we will talk about in more detail below.
  • Optimize for extreme scale. Use scalable structures for everything. Don’t assume that disk-checking algorithms, in particular, can scale to the size of the entire file system.
  • Never take the file system offline. Assume that in the event of corruptions, it is advantageous to isolate the fault while allowing access to the rest of the volume. This is done while salvaging the maximum amount of data possible, all done live.
  • Provide a full end-to-end resiliency architecture when used in conjunction with the Storage Spaces feature, which was co-designed and built in conjunction with ReFS.

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Create a Root CA on Windows Server 2008 R2 core edition Part 1

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4 months ago
by Bart Timmermans in , , , , , , ,

This guide explains how to install and configure an offline Root Certificate Authority on a Windows Server 2008 R2 core edtion.

This guide is splitted in three seperate parts:

Main reason to configure the Root CA on a core edition is to lower the attack surface. The attack surface should be as low as possible to prevent hackers from stealing the private key of the root certificate. Therefore most of the time the Root CA will be shutdown and disconnected from the network. More about security hardening on an Root CA in a later article.

Prerequisites

The following must be available before using this guide:

  • A dedicated physical or virtual machine;
  • Root access to the server (ILO, VMware, vSphere console);
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 core edition already installed;
  • Hostname and network settings already configured;
  • Very complex password set for the administrator account;
  • Firewall must be on with no exceptions;
  • Access to Windows update, WSUS, SCCM or other patching mechanism.

Installation steps

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