India Blocks Internet Access

An interesting development in terms of government response to terrorism, India shut down access – applied filters to their MAE or backbone firewalls – to prevent access to terrorist blog sites and resource sites. This also shut down access to other more legitimate sites that have nothing to do with terrorism.

Article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13932372/

State intervention over Internet access isn’t new; certainly more compelling is the fact this happened in a modern democracy and not in China, Iran, or North Korea. Although the national security interest is probably a reasonable cause, the disasterous effect upon macroeconomic activity is troubling – I cannot imagine what work-around would be financially possible if interconnectivity via the web wasn’t available for business; entire business models would be turned on its head, completely affecting productivity and livlihoods. Is it in the state’s best interest to shut down a major highway for very long in interest of national security? The same parallel could be drawn to the Internet.

I wonder how long it’ll be before the US determines various chunks of the Internet ought be filtered in the interest of national security?

R
www.micklerandassociates.com

Small Business Server – REV Drive and Backups

I recommended an Iomega REV Drive solution for a client the other day. It installed fine. When running through the SBS 2003 backup configuration under the server management console, the backup wizard didn’t allow me to target the Iomega REV Drive for backups.

This was because the o/s reports the REV Drive as a CDFS (CD ROM File System) and the wizard is programmed to deny CDFS device targets for backups.

There were two work-arounds for this. One, I could configure the backup job manually through the usual NTBackup UI and schedule the job; no problems – the UI allowed me to target the Iomega normally. The bad news is that I don’t get the native reporting from the SBS in its morning monitoring email.

The other work around was to walk through the wizard and target a local hard disk, completing the selections and scheduling through the wizard. Then, I stepped into the registry and changed the following key: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Small Business Server\BackupLocation. This is the target location stored by the wizard – I changed the key to reflect the target of the Iomega. This allows the backup to be monitored and reported on using the Iomega.

R
www.micklerandassociates.com