User Profiles and Virtualism

We are in deep annoyance with Roaming Profiles. So we looked for alternatives and came up with RES Workspace Composer. A very capable product, with a nice user interface. But it requires a server backend, and here the complexity was simply too much for our small environment. Sigh.

Along the way I have stumbled into AppSense which looks good but also requires a server backend, and LiquidWare's profile unity - apparently some polish on an OpenSource tool called ScriptStart Community. These tools store the profile information in the file system.
The older tool is not upwards compatible beyond W2K3 and XP. I found out about it from a blog entry on using Roaming Profiles with a Samba server: Windows User Profiles with a Samba Server

Another odd issue is how profiles tend to grow in size. Helge at Sepago has written some very helpful articles on this, liked here: User Profile Design

Interesting stuff!

IE 9 First Impressions

IE 9 First Impressions:

Much cleaner than IE 8 (the ask me a million times browser)
No more 'accelerators' (you want to do WHAT?)
No more '20 questions'

However, it gives a Javascript VOID when pressing a simple submit button in blogger.

It's a lot better, but that means now I HAVE to load Chrome and IE9 to get through
life. Feh. Well, it was a nice try.

Tivo Disk and Tableau Imager

Drop Box

As part of this week's SANS 408 course, I have been looking for a hard drive to grab an image from. The several drives I brought to the class were clean.

Looking for an old hard drive to try mounting on my Write Blocker to grab an image...
Let's try the old Tivo! Cool, it mounts, but of course windows does recognize its Linux goodnesss...
But, even so FTK Imager can grab an image from the disk.

That's an improvement over the others so far. So an exercise for exploration, really.

My old Seagate (486 era) drive causes an error in FTK imager (byte offset).
The Tivo is unrecognized.

Perhaps the higher end commercial tools recognize these different types of drive formats?
But if not there is quite an opportunity to make software that can handle all these weird old formats.
(Non-IDE drives, what do you do with those?)

What about archival applications?