TechEd in Houston Texas; and other troubleshooting bits

Microsoft TechEd North America 2014 rolled though Houston, Texas last month.

I didn’t have the opportunity to attend, but thankfully, Microsoft’s Channel 9 had the event well-covered.

Almost every presentation or session has an online video and/or slide-deck material for your review.

I’ve picked out a handful of ones that I found particularly interesting considering my IT focuses and am listing them here for future reference and playback.

Enjoy!

• TechEd North America 2014 - Channel 9 main-page coverage of the Houston Texas event.
• TechEd North America 2014 - Listing of all available presentations and sessions - Channel 9 - five very-long web-pages of items to pick through!
• Defrag Tools: Live - TechEd 2014 - Mark Russinovich (~25 min) - Defrag Tools | Channel 9 - Mark spend some time highlighting updates to a selection of the Sysinternals tools.
• TWC: Sysinternals Primer: TechEd 2014 Edition (~1 hr) - Channel 9 - Aaron Margosis presents tutorials on advanced usage of some of the core Sysinternals tools.
• Case of the Unexplained: Troubleshooting with Mark Russinovich (~1 hr 20 min) - Channel 9 - Mark does his standard outstanding presentation on how to deep-dive into troubleshooting unusual Windows issues.
• TWC: Bulletproofing Your Network Security (~1 hr 20 min) - Channel 9 - “This session demonstrates the best tools and techniques to harden your devices—from your laptop, to your cell phone, to your servers and your services.”
• The State of Windows 8.1 Security: Malware Resistance (~1 hr 15 min) - Channel 9 - “Windows 8.1 offers an enormous leap forward when it comes to security, and when it comes to malware resistance that couldn’t be more true. … In this session we drill into the details of the malware threats that you’re facing and then show you how you can help your organization and users enjoy a malware free experience on Windows.”
• Windows 8.1: Black Belt Troubleshooting (~1 hr 15 min) - Channel 9 - New tips and tricks in troubleshooting Windows 8.1
• Windows 8 Security Internals (~1 hr 15 min) - Channel 9 - “Windows 8 extends the security and isolation capabilities of Windows to help build a far more trusted application experience. In this session, get a review of the Windows features that have been evolving since Windows Vista, and culminating in a whole new level of application isolation in Windows 8 Applications.”
• TWC: Social Engineering: Manipulations, Targeted Attacks, and IT Security (~1 hr 15 min) - Channel 9 - “…explore how social engineering has grown over time and examine lessons learned from the field on how to best mitigate those traps.”
• TWC: Pass-the-Hash: How Attackers Spread and How to Stop Them (~1 hr 15 min) - Channel 9 - “…deconstruct the PtH threat, show how the attack is performed, and how it can be addressed using new features and functionality recently introduced in Windows.”
• JitJea: A Windows PowerShell Toolkit to Secure a Post-Snowden World (~1 hr 15 min) - Channel 9 - “It is a Windows PowerShell toolkit that you can use to “man up and defend yourselves” by allowing admins to perform functions without giving them admin privileges.”
• Windows Performance Deep Dive Troubleshooting (~1 hr 10 min) - Channel 9 - “Join us for a deep dive on the free Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT), Windows Assessment Services (WAS) part of the Assessment and Deployment Toolkit (ADK), developed to help you troubleshoot and resolve these issues. Download the toolkit, and get ready to tackle performance issues that can impact organizations of all sizes running Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8.”

Not appearing at TechEd Houston, but very good presentations in line with the above topics.

• Defrag Tools: Live - TechEd 2014 - Paula Januszkiewicz Part 1 (~30 min) - Defrag Tools | Channel 9 - “…go through a wide variety of security topics. This episode focuses on the way you should behave on unknown networks, the use of USB sticks, and password retention.”
• Defrag Tools: Live - TechEd 2014 - Paula Januszkiewicz Part 2 (~50 min) - Defrag Tools | Channel 9 - “This episode focuses on the tools and techniques that Paula uses when penetrating systems.”
• Defrag Tools: #81 - Aaron Margosis (~36 min) - Defrag Tools | Channel 9 - This was a very exciting presentation by Aaron where he demos an “Application Installation Recorder” process using both Process Monitor and PowerShell. I can think of a number of deployment scenarios where this technique would come in super-useful rather than running a change-state capture application that does a before/after diff of system changes.
• The Case of the Unexplained Installation Failure (and an ill-advised registry hack) - Microsoft's USGCB Tech Blog - This one is a blog post but again shows how deliberate and structured troubleshooting techniques can get to the bottom of issues on Windows.

--Claus Valca