Getting ready for the second season of IT-classes for Immigrant Women

I would like to share some experience I have had recently with doing some volunteer community work, creating and running a computer class for Immigrant Women in Oslo.

Background
Last autumn my employer Steria had a vision of trying to help out in the local community by sharing some of the skills and resources the company possesses.
A local organization called the Church City Mission who does community work was contacted, and there were discussed different ways that the company might contribute.
The Church City Mission came up with the idea that we could hold computer classes for users of a center focusing on health and family-care they ran, with many immigrant women among the users.  
Many of whom are lacking basic computer skills.

An email was sent out to all Steria employees in Norway asking for people to contribute.
I decided to join in and see what this was all about.
At the first meeting with the volunteers I accepted the task of creating the class material, as well as holding the class for a group of Somali women (with an interpreter).
In parallel with this class we held classes in Arabic for Iraqi women and in Urdu for a group of Pakistani women, these classes where held by volunteer Steria employees who speak these languages. More

Moving my passwords from my wallet to the cloud

Stopping passwordreuse with Roboform Online and GoodSync

A lot of people have a handful of passwords that they keep re-using for more than one personal online account.
This is a habit that is as understandable as it is dangerous, since we are constantly creating more and more  online accounts and remembering unique passwords and where they should be used is not an easy task.
Even though most of us have been fine reusing the same half-dozen-or-so passwords over and over again for years, I think the days of innocence are coming to an end, as recent studies by  Kaspersky Lab shows that “Password reuse opens door to ID theft” .

Passwordmanagers are well and good but they have one big problem  – you are helpless when you do not have access to it.
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Payin’ my dues..

One of my first jobs when I started working with IT, was working as a one man IT-department, doing everything from configuring firewalls and setting up web hotel servers to helping the receptionist creating a two sided print of a document or replacing a noisy fan in the CEO’s computer.
As no man can be an expert on everything – I have found the answers to a lot of my tasks by searching newsgroups, various forums and personal websites.
People that are willing to share their knowledge and are willing to spend their time helping others, have many times made it possible for me to acquire the necessary skills to get the job done.

And to appear to regular users to be some kind of IT-MacGyver..

This blog will be part of my effort to share some of my own knowledge and hopefully help someone else find some answers or hints on where to look next.

I have been working as an IT-pro since 1997 when I first started out working at a call center helping Telenor customers get on the internet with dialup modems and ISDN.
A job I found quite stimulating both since it was nice to get the instant positive feedback from the people I helped but also because we had a ultrafast internet connection at the call center.

At night I would stay up all night surfing on the outskirts of the net looking for information about hacking and computer security, just out of sheer curiosity and interest. Learning stuff I use as background for the work I do today in keeping customers environments secure.

As one of the most important tasks in securing a computer network, I have been interested in different tools for vulnerability analysis and patch management, ever since St.Bernard Softwares SPQuery and the early versions of HFNetCheck.
Monitoring solutions have also been one of my special interests.
I have had the opportunity to go though quite a long list of them since I was once the sole person responsible for a small hosting company’s customers 24/7/365.
-You get to appreciate accurate reports and alarms, and grow to hate false positives that wake you up at night for no good reason.

Through working with operations in increasingly larger companies and later as a consultant, I have specialized on Microsoft management technologies.
SMS/MOM and SCCM/SCOM have therefore quite logically become my main tools for achieving what I consider to be a well managed network.

Over the years I have developed a growing interest in IT management process structures such as MOF and ITIL, and how they can be implemented together with technical tools to help organizations reach a higher maturity level, also known as Infrastructure Optimization.

The main scope of this blog will probably be focused around the Microsoft System Center Family, since that is where my main interest are, but will also contain small scripts I find helpful in my day to day work, as well as other tips and tools I find interesting.
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Terje Island