In addition to my shortcut blog post about Meltdown and Spectre with regard of Microsoft Windows, VMware ESXi and vCenter, and HPE ProLiant, I would like to add some additional information about HPE Storage and Citrix NetScaler. When we talk about Meltdown and Spectre, we are talking about three different vulnerabilities: CVE-2017-5715 (branch target injection) CVE-2017-5753 (bounds check bypass) CVE-2017-5754 (rogue data cache load) CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5753 are known as “Spectre”, CVE-2017-5754 is known as “Meltdown”.

Change History 01-13-2018: Added information regarding VMSA-2018-0004 01-13-2018: HPE has pulled Gen8 and Gen9 system ROMs 01-13-2018: VMware has updated KB52345 due to issues with Intel microcode updates 01-18-2018: Updated VMware section 01-24-2018: Updated HPE section 01-28-2018: Updated Windows Client and Server section 02-08-2018: Updated VMware and HPE section 02-20-2018: Updated HPE section 04-17-2018: Updated HPE section Many blog posts have been written about the two biggest security vulnerabilities discovered so far.

Each of us has his or her personal tool chain. Depending on your job role, the tool chain will look different. My personal tool chain does not have changed much over the last few years, but if I added or removed a tool to my tool chain, this change was often influenced by other peoples tool chain. My primary work device is a Lenovo ThinkPad X250 (Intel i5 5200U, 8 GB RAM, 250 GB SSD) with Windows 10.

Exchange has known the concept of internal and external URLs for the different services (Outlook Web Access, OAB, EWS, ActiveSync etc) since Exchange 2007. And it’s still confusing people. The internal URL is the URL, that is used to access the desired service from the intranet. The external URL represents the URL that is used to access the service from the internet. Best practice is to use the same URL (the external) for both, use a certificate from a public CA, and use split DNS to access the external domain from the inside of your network.

Yesterday, a customer called me and told me about a scary observation on one of his Exchange 2016 DAG (Database Availability Groups) nodes. In preparation of a security check, my customer created a snapshot of a Exchange 2016 DAG node. This node is part of a two node Windows Server 2012 R2/ Exchange 2016 CU7 cluster. That something went wrong was instantly clear, after the first alarm messages were received. My customer opened a console windows and saw, that the VM was booting.

As part of a bigger Microsoft Exchange migration, one of my customers moved the in- and outbound mailflow to a newly installed mail relay cluster. We modified MX records to move the mailflow to the new mail relay, because the customer also switched the ISP. While changing the MX records for ~40 domains, and therefore more and more mails received through the new mail relay cluster, we noticed events from MSExchangeTransport (event id 1021):

Microsoft two different logins for their services: Microsoft Account (former Live ID) work or school account (Azure AD) Both are located in different directories. The Microsoft account is located in another user database at Microsoft, as a work or school account. Latter are located in a Azure AD, which is associated with a customer. Both account types are identified using the email address. Microsoft accounts are used for service like Skype, OneDrive, but also for the Microsoft Certified Professional portal.

In the last months I came across several customers that were in the process to evaluate, or to deploy Office 365. It usually started with a Office 365 trial, that some of the IT guys started to play around with. Weeks or months later, during the proof-of-concept or during the final deployment, the customer had to choose a Office 365 tenant name. That is the part before .onmicrosoft.com. Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.

Last friday I passed the 1Y0-351 (Citrix NetScaler 10.5 Essentails and Networking) exam with a pretty good score. The exam was necessary, not only because I will do much more NetScaler projects in the future, but also because Citrix has made it mandatory to have a CCP-N in your company to to sell Citrix NetScaler. Preparation My employer booked me a 5-day course (CNS-220 Citrix NetScaler Essentials and Traffic Management). Very nice, although I already had experience with NetScaler deployments.

Update On November 22, 2017, Ajay Patel (Senior Vice President, Product Development, Cloud Services, VMware) published a blog post in reaction to Microsofts announcement (VMware – The Platform of Choice in the Cloud). Especially these statements are interesting: No VMware-certified partner names have been mentioned nor have any partners collaborated with VMware in engineering this offering. This offering has been developed independent of VMware, and is neither certified nor supported by VMware.