Welcome to Brendon Davis

Group Policy Center

Autor brendon | 21.01.2010 | Category 7, Server, TechStuff, VISTA

Alan Burchill, one of the organisers for the Brisbane Infrastructure Group and a speaker at last year’s auTechEd has started up a web site for the thing he loves most. The Group Policy Center is now online and answering all those questions you didn’t know you asked.

On a serious note though, Alan and Lilia did an awesome presentation at TechEd and I’m sure this site will show the same level of awesome-ness. Rock on Al.

BitLocker Command Line

Autor brendon | 04.02.2009 | Category TechStuff, VISTA

Now I know this is posted in several other locations. Since I have started playing around with BitLocker, I cannot for the life of me remember the command line. So here it is:

C:\WINDOWS\System32\cscript manage-bde.wsf -help

Enjoy

Good VISTA TechNet article

Autor brendon | 09.03.2007 | Category TechStuff, VISTA

I just finished reading Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 2. While this is very technical, I suggest that anyone who works heavily with VISTA have a read. There were a lot of ‘oh, that’s why’ moments through this article.

Have a great weekend ;-)

What Bitlocker on VISTA doesn’t do

Autor brendon | 06.02.2007 | Category TechStuff, VISTA

After reading an article on TheRegister I think some people have misunderstood the purpose for BitLocker. It is a ‘full drive encryption’ product. In most cases, the keys are stored on the hardware or on a removable USB drive.

Assuming your laptop with Bitlocker is stolen, the person can still turn the computer on and boot into windows. They can’t log on because they don’t know your password, and of course you use a complex password…. If they take the drive out of the laptop and try to read it on another computer or boot off an external drive in your computer. Your system partition will have an invalid file system, so they can’t access your data.

If they try to reset your SAM password using a Linux boot utility, it won’t work because the SAM is encrypted on the drive.

Further to this, BitLocker only works on the SYSTEM partition (not active partition). So any other volume’s on your PC will need to be encrypted using EFS. This is still secure because the encryption keys for the EFS files are stored on the system drive and are encrypted therefore unavailable.

BitLocker will NOT stop a person from gaining access to your data if you have weak passwords or they obtain the USB key.
It will NOT stop a forensic analysis from taking a copy of the encrypted drive.

It WILL stop someone copying your documents/ emails/ etc. off your stolen device.