The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.6. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 120 bug fixes, several of which are security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Further details about the PHP 5.2.6 release can be found in the release announcement for 5.2.6 , the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog for PHP 5.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.6:

• Fixed possible stack buffer overflow in the FastCGI SAPI identified by Andrei Nigmatulin.
• Fixed integer overflow in printf() identified by Maksymilian Aciemowicz.
• Fixed security issue detailed in CVE-2008-0599 identified by Ryan Permeh.
• Fixed a safe_mode bypass in cURL identified by Maksymilian Arciemowicz.
• Properly address incomplete multibyte chars inside escapeshellcmd() identified by Stefan Esser.
• Upgraded bundled PCRE to version 7.6

release announcement for 5.2.6

ChangeLog for PHP 5

LAS VEGAS — April 29, 2008 — Today, before an audience of more than 4,000 IT professionals and partners at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2008, Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft Corp., outlined the next phase in the company’s strategy to enable dynamic IT organizations. As part of this strategy, Muglia announced technology innovations that are designed to expand Microsoft’s virtualization capabilities and introduced its use of open source technologies and industry standards to broaden its ability to deliver automated management of heterogeneous IT environments.

“At Microsoft we are helping redefine what it means to do IT management in the enterprise with the new capabilities we are announcing today,” Muglia said. ”By taking our knowledge of the Windows environment and expanding it to address heterogeneous management needs across platforms, applications, hardware and virtualization, we are opening up a new level of opportunity for companies to drive greater efficiency, responsiveness and value for their business.”

As IT environments grow more diverse and complex across desktops, datacenters, physical and virtual deployments, and heterogeneous infrastructures spanning Windows and non-Windows environments, Microsoft has worked closely with customers to deliver a comprehensive enterprise strategy for an integrated management solution. The announcements today build on the strong, existing Microsoft System Center presence in the datacenter with key additions in the areas of cross-platform, expanded interoperability and multivendor virtualization management solutions, which are further extended by the contributions of a strong and growing partner ecosystem.

Extending Cross-Platform Management for the Datacenter

Microsoft today announced the availability of a public beta for System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, which build on the existing Operations Manager 2007 technology and capabilities and are designed to help customers extend the value of their Microsoft System Center investments. Providing customers with a comprehensive management solution, this new end-to-end IT systems monitoring capability incorporates industry standards and proven open source technologies, including Web Services for Management (WS-Management) and OpenPegasus, extending the capabilities across both physical and virtualized Windows and non-Windows operating systems and applications. Microsoft delivers the core foundational cross-platform support out of the box for HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun Solaris and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems so that partners can focus on adding their deep domain expertise in the form of management packs. Companies such as Novell Inc., Quest Software Inc. and Xandros Inc. have demonstrated their support by working to deliver monitoring abilities for applications made by organizations such as The Apache Software Foundation, MySQL AB and Oracle.

Further demonstrating support for its commitment to OpenPegasus, Microsoft also announced today that it will be joining the OpenPegasus Steering Committee and contribute code back to the open source community under the Microsoft Public License, an Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved license.

“The System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions have already delivered exciting results for Xandros,” said Andreas Typaldos, CEO of Xandros. “They enabled us to cut our expected development time in half as we created our management packs for Apache and MySQL running on Linux and Solaris, resulting in quicker time to market and delivery of betas to our customers today. This new foundation from Microsoft enabled us to focus on the development of high-level management functions for applications, with the knowledge that the Cross Platform Extensions were providing the necessary underlying interfaces to System Center Operations Manager, enabling heterogeneous management from a single location across customer environments.”

Microsoft also delivered a beta of the updated System Center Operations Manager 2007 Connectors, based on many of the same extensible open source technology and industry standards as the Cross Platform Extensions, which provide an integrated administrative experience and the ability to interoperate and exchange System Center monitoring data with third-party management offerings such as HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console.

Single Pane of Glass for Managing Virtualized and Physical IT Assets

Also delivered today was the public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly code-named “Virtual Machine Manager vNext”), which enables customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and to centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure, whether running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMware ESX Server.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 tightly integrates with Operations Manager 2007 to deliver a new feature called Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO). Using deep knowledge of the IT environment including operating systems, applications and hardware, Operations Manager identifies opportunities for more efficient physical and virtual resource allocation and generates “PRO tips” within the Virtual Machine Manager console. Administrators can implement these PRO tips and dynamically optimize their datacenter based upon pre-defined policies and the real-time, changing demands of users. When used in conjunction with the broad System Center management suite, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 enables customers effectively to manage both their virtualized and physical servers and applications across their desktops and datacenters with a single set of consistent, compatible tools.

“Deploying, monitoring and managing applications across a heterogeneous IT infrastructure can present many challenges and complexities, all of which are compounded when consolidating servers, optimizing desktops and applications, or creating business continuity solutions using multiple virtualization solutions,” said Jerry Phillips, senior director of Systems Operations at Clear Channel Communications Inc. “Our experience with System Center solutions has demonstrated that Microsoft not only recognizes our need to manage our Windows datacenter infrastructure, but also non-Windows and virtual servers from other vendors. Being able to do so through a single administrative console will provide improvements in productivity and reductions in our cost of IT operations, enabling us to improve overall organizational contributions.”

A number of partners, including Brocade, Dell, EMC Corp., Emulex Corp., HP, NetQOS, QLogic Corp. and Quest, announced they will deliver management packs enabled for PRO. These management packs enable partners and customers to integrate their domain-specific knowledge directly into Virtual Machine Manager and further integrate physical and virtual management.

“Dell’s focus is to simplify IT for our customers and drive complexity out of the datacenter, and virtualization is a key technology driving this effort,” said Laurie Tolson, vice president of systems management at Dell Product Group. “By working with industry leaders like Microsoft on advances in systems management between Dell OpenManage and Microsoft Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and Windows Server 2008, we’re able to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual management spaces, providing an optimized solution that helps our customers get the most out of their hardware and virtualization investments.”

“New ways to lower energy costs, reduce server sprawl and optimize datacenters are provided by the collaboration between HP and Microsoft as virtualization goes mainstream,” said Scott Farrand, vice president of Industry Standard Server Software at HP. “Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager used alongside HP Insight software on HP ProLiant servers, and HP Server Automation software, allow customers to seamlessly manage physical and virtual environments. The combined solutions also allow customers to maximize availability, performance and flexibility of physical host servers, virtualized guest operating systems and workloads.”

Beta software of System Center Operation Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, Connectors and Virtual Machine Manager 2008 were made available to attendees at the conference and can be downloaded at http://connect.microsoft.com. Customers interested in finding more information on the System Center offerings or in evaluating them through trial offerings can visit http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter and the System Center blog at http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Microsoft came out with a preview of new interesting product, Live Mesh

What is Live Mesh?

Live Mesh is a “software-plus-services” platform and experience that enables PCs and other devices to “come alive” by making them aware of each other through the Internet, enabling individuals and organizations to manage, access, and share their files and applications seamlessly on the Web and across their world of devices. Live Mesh includes:

§ A platform that defines and models a user’s digital relationships between devices, data, applications, and people—made available to developers through an open data model and protocols.

§ A cloud service providing an implementation of the platform hosted in Microsoft data centers.

§ Software, a client implementation of the platform that enables local applications to run offline and interact seamlessly with the cloud.

§ A platform experience that exposes the key benefits of the platform for bringing together a user’s devices, files and applications, and social graph, with news feeds across all of these.

What differentiates Live Mesh is its underlying platform. As a platform company, Microsoft believes in the power of the operating environment—and that if that environment is built correctly, the entire ecosystem will benefit. Live Mesh is built on the Live Services Platform, providing a Web-centric Mesh Operating Environment that evolves the user experience from one of “My Computer” to one of “My Mesh,” with the user at the center of that experience.

While many existing offerings may appear similar in that they utilize hosted services for storage, sharing files, or peer-to-peer connections between PCs, most of those products fulfill only one specific need. Live Mesh is unique in that it takes a more robust approach, bringing together all of this functionality in one offering. By weaving together the best of software and Internet services, Live Mesh delivers a platform and experience that is comprehensive yet simple and open.

Further Information

Live Mesh Official Site

Live Mesh Blog

Live Mesh Review by Liveside

Situation

Microsoft IT knows that unanticipated downtime can have a significant negative impact. Loss of critical systems or services can reduce productivity, sales, and confidence from staff, partners, and customers.

Solution

Microsoft IT deployed the Server Core installation option of Windows Server 2008 where it needed a server to be dedicated solely to the roles and features that a Server Core installation supports.

Read the whole case study here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc500983.aspx

LAS VEGAS — April 17, 2008— At RFID Journal LIVE! 2008, Microsoft Corp. today unveiled Microsoft BizTalk RFID Mobile — a lightweight platform for a variety of mobile devices, which simplifies the development of mobile applications that expose relevant, real-time business information. BizTalk RFID Mobile enables delivery of relevant information from mobile devices to core business processes for a variety of scenarios, whether for a dock worker verifying a shipment or a pharmacist verifying that the right medicine has been stocked.

Microsoft today made available a private beta with general availability expected in late 2008. Customers and partners can participate in the BizTalk RFID Mobile Technology Adoption Program (TAP) by registering at https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?S...eID=65.

“Given today’s fast-paced environment, customers have asked for business process technologies that enable real-time decision-making to help drive measurable business results,” said Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft. “Together, with leading industry partners including Motorola Inc., Intermec Technologies Corp., Unitech, Samsung and Psion Teklogix Inc., we will deliver a cost-effective, mobile RFID platform that works with existing business processes and systems.”

As part of the Microsoft BizTalk product line, Microsoft BizTalk RFID Mobile underscores the company’s long-term commitment to deliver extensive service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) capabilities as part of the overall Microsoft application platform. The platform is a set of compatible, mission-critical technologies and development tools that enable customers to develop applications that work with existing systems.

“BizTalk RFID Mobile represents an exciting opportunity for Motorola to build on our track record of delivering innovative products to meet customer needs,” said Joe White, vice president of RFID business development for Motorola Enterprise Mobility. “Motorola is actively working with Microsoft so that our customers will be able to reliably and seamlessly run applications on BizTalk RFID Mobile.”

Microsoft BizTalk RFID Mobile when used with BizTalk Server 2006 R2 enables real-time decisions by extending business process to Windows CE and Windows Mobile 5.0 applications. BizTalk Server 2006 R2, Microsoft’s core SOA and BPM technology, which was generally available in September 2007, included advancements for fixed RFID readers including device management, data filtering and business rules, electronic data interchange (EDI), and interoperability with line-of-business adapters for manufacturing, finance and healthcare.

“It’s only natural that Microsoft extends BizTalk RFID out to mobile devices, and it complements its mobile hardware partners’ very well,” said John Fontanella, vice president of Research at AMR Research Inc. “The ability to operate at the edge in real time opens up opportunities that can only further enhance RFID’s value.”

Today, Microsoft also announced the BizTalk RFID Standards Pack, for customers to seamlessly integrate their RFID solutions with Electronic Product Code (EPC) global ratified standards, including Tag Data Translator (TDT) and Low Level Reader Protocol (LLRP) standards.

SAN FRANCISCO, April 7, 2008 - HP today strengthened its security portfolio, HP Secure Advantage, with the introduction of several products that increase data protection and compliance in storage environments.

New to the portfolio are a secure fabric switch; an encryption kit for tape autoloaders and libraries; integration of compliance and key management appliances; and, an online security assessment tool.

These offerings provide customers with a holistic approach to data security, from evaluating existing security strategies to identifying and combating potential security threats. As a result, companies can reduce the risk of security breaches, achieve regulatory compliance and safeguard against lost intellectual property, revenue or corporate reputation.

“Companies of all sizes are grappling with how to handle increased business risks associated with data center sprawl, network attacks and new regulatory pressures,” said Jon Oltsik, senior analyst of Information Security at analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group. “The breadth of HP’s Secure Advantage portfolio, combined with its services strength, addresses evolving challenges with security and compliance.”

In a recent survey of technology security professionals, respondents cited data protection as their No. 1 priority for 2008. The survey revealed that the number of company records exposed due to security breaches increased threefold in 2007 over the previous year.⁽¹⁾

HP has been protecting the majority of the world’s financial transactions for the past 35 years, safeguarding ATM, point-of-sale networks, credit card information and electronic funds transfers. HP Secure Advantage bolsters this effort by delivering a portfolio of servers, storage, software and services that provides customers with integrated security solutions – from the desktop to the data center.

Data protection and compliance in storage environments

HP added new storage encryption, key management and compliance capabilities to its Secure Advantage portfolio, including:

• The HP C-Series MDS 9000 Storage Media Encryption (SME) fabric switch secures data stored on tape drives and virtual tape libraries in a storage area network environment. The SME feature is designed to run on the MDS 9000 family, offering encryption and key management functionality for legacy tape devices to ensure maximum protection of existing product investments.
• The HP StorageWorks 1/8 G2 & MSL LTO-4 Encryption Kit offers small to midsize businesses data encryption capabilities. This easy-to-install encryption accessory kit is designed specifically for the HP 1/8 G2 Tape Autoloader and MSL Tape Libraries with LTO-4 tape technology. It generates and retains encryption keys so critical business information remains private in the event that tapes are lost or stolen.
• HP has integrated the HP StorageWorks Secure Key Manager with the HP Compliance Log Warehouse to deliver a comprehensive compliance validation solution for LTO-4 enterprise tape libraries. The combined solution provides a secure audit trail through features that centralize event log collection and long-term retention. The HP Compliance Log Warehouse also collects the business intelligence needed to generate regulatory reports for forensic investigations with a single click of the mouse.
• The HP Storage Security Assessment tool, available on the HP website, enables customers to gauge their most critical storage privacy vulnerabilities online and free of charge. Customers answer a series of questions and receive a personalized report to better manage risk, protect sensitive data and comply with data privacy regulations. This tool was developed by the HP Consulting & Integration Security and Risk Management Practice.

Information about additional new solutions and services that bolster the HP Secure Advantage portfolio is available at www.hp.com/go/secureadvantageadvisory.

Pricing and availability⁽²⁾

The MDS 9222i switch combined with the SME License to Use (LTU) is now available with a U.S. list price of $83,500.

The HP StorageWorks 1/8 G2 & MSL 2024/4048/8096 LTO-4 Encryption Kit is expected to be available in June with a U.S. list price of $2,500.

The Secure Key Manager cluster has a U.S. list price of $100,000 and the Compliance Log Warehouse has a U.S. list price that starts under $125,000. Both are currently available.

Littleton, Mass. — March 24, 2008 — Marathon Technologies Corporation announced everRun VM, the world’s first fault-tolerant, high availability software for server virtualization. Based on the same everRun® automated availability software employed by over 1800 organizations, everRun VM prevents outages and data loss in Citrix XenServer virtual infrastructures. The significance of this new software for the IT industry is threefold:

1. Companies can now reliably run high value production applications in virtual machines, gaining the benefits of virtualization across a much broader range of applications
2. It will now be practical to make high availability and DR a standard part of the IT infrastructure for midsize and larger companies
3. A key component is in place to accelerate the next wave of server virtualization adoption

Enabling Virtualization of Production Applications 

To date, companies that have deployed virtualization have not migrated many of their highest value, business critical applications to virtual servers. This is due to a variety of reasons, primarily performance concerns and a lack of true high availability. everRun VM delivers reliable protection for virtual workloads by providing redundant virtual machines and synchronized mirroring of the whole system. The integration of XenServer’s superior “bare-metal” performance and everRun VM’s unique architecture gives IT professionals the confidence to virtualize business critical and other production applications. “Marathon has a superb software product that is seamlessly integrated with XenServer. The combination allows companies to virtualize a range of applications that they wouldn’t even consider previously,” said Peter Levine, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Citrix Virtualization and Management Division. 

Making Availability Mainstream 

Availability solutions have remained a niche application because they are complex and expensive. Through tight integration with Citrix XenServer, everRun VM breaks through the availability bottleneck by providing:

• Completely Automated VM Availability - everRun VM automates VM availability setup and configuration - usually deployed in thirty minutes or less. It also automates fault and policy management – it literally maintains itself.
• Flexibility to Dial-in Availability by Virtual Machine – everRun VM lets IT administrators select the availability protection for each virtual machine (VM) so they can match the right availability level for each application running in a VM. The end result – optimal availability price/performance because companies only pay for the protection they need.
• Application Independence – everRun VM supports all Windows applications without any modifications.

everRun VM removes the burden of availability for IT professionals and makes automated HA and DR practical for midsized companies. 

“Based on our research, high availability solutions, including clustering software and proprietary hardware, have never exceeded 20 percent deployment rates,” said John Humphreys, Program Vice President, Virtualization Software for IDC. “The reason: they are too complex to setup and too complex to manage. The combination of easy to use virtualization and availability software could bring availability to the masses.” 

Accelerating Adoption of Server Virtualization 

According to industry analysts, server virtualization has achieved a less than 10 percent deployment rate on x86 servers to date. everRun VM can help accelerate the adoption of server virtualization by allowing:

• Enterprises to deploy virtualization across a much broader range of applications
• Midsize companies to use virtualization as a tool for automated availability and DR

“everRun VM presents a dramatically more reliable approach to virtual server availability through selectable, automated, FT-class availability,” said Gary Phillips, president and CEO of Marathon Technologies.  everRun VM is the first in a line of virtualization availability and DR products from Marathon that are so simple, transparent and cost-effective that every application can be protected.” 

everRun VM is currently in beta. General availability is scheduled for April. 

About Marathon Technologies
With over 1800 global customers, Marathon is the world’s first and only provider of fault-tolerant, automated, high availability and disaster recovery software for physical and virtual servers. Marathon’s everRun® software prevents outages and data loss – without IT intervention. Organizations using everRun achieve uninterrupted availability, 100% data protection, and rapid recovery – all through “one-click” operation. The company won a “Best of VMworld 2007 – New Technology” award for bringing fault tolerant availability to virtual servers. CIO.com recently named Marathon Technologies one of “10 Virtualization Vendors to Watch in 2008.” For more information visit www.marathontechnologies.com

NetworkWorld published a list of the 20 most useful Microsoft sites for IT professionals.

WindowsNetworking.com is rated as number one!!! MSExchange.org and ISAServer.org are also included in the list reaching number 2 and 6 respectively.

It is great to receive this rating from such respected resource as NetworkWorld. The TechGenix team is happy to appear on this list of useful sites and will continue to provide fantastic content for our visitors.

HANOVER, Germany-March 4, 2008-Seagate Technology (NYSE:STX) announced it will begin shipping its new Cheetah® 15K.6 hard drive this month. Designed for the world’s most demanding enterprise storage environments, the Cheetah 15K.6 drive is Seagate’s highest-performance hard drive ever in a 3.5-inch form factor, with a 28% increase in sustained data transfer rates compared to previous generations. With this new performance on tap, the Cheetah 15K.6 drive remarkably consumes significantly less power, using up to 61% less watts/GB at idle.

Major OEM system builders, including HP, are working to design in the new Cheetah series hard drive, equipped with its leading Fibre Channel interface for HP’s SAN storage systems. “HP’s Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), incorporating Seagate’s latest Cheetah 15K.6 drive will fulfill the needs of our most demanding customers running mission-critical business applications,” said Kyle Fitze, director of Storage Works SAN Marketing, at HP. “The improvements in performance, reliability, power savings, and capacity will collectively help enable our own EVA systems to deliver greater overall value to our customers.”

The Cheetah 15K.6 drive also ships in Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), which has become the mainstream enterprise interface of choice for companies including Super Micro Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI). “Many of our customers require top-of-the-line performance and system efficiency,” said Charles Liang, CEO and president of Supermicro. “Integrating Seagate’s Cheetah 15K.6 drive into our 85%+ high-efficiency, earth-friendly SuperServers™ and Server Building Block Solutions® delivers not only superior performance, but also power savings, scalability and significantly reduced TCO.”

About the Cheetah 15K.6 drives
Using second-generation perpendicular recording technology and available in capacities of 450GB, 300GB, and 147GB, the new Cheetah 15K.6 drive provides an unprecedented blend of storage capacity and performance. Add to this the highest 3.5-inch hard drive reliability in the industry at 1.6 million hours MTBF (0.55% AFR), a choice of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces, and a 5-year warranty, and the Cheetah 15K.6 drive becomes the clear drive of choice for 3.5-inch SAN, NAS, and other transactional processing and internet applications.

The Cheetah 15K.6 drive includes Seagate PowerTrim™ technology which dynamically optimizes drive power consumption at all levels of activity. With PowerTrim™ technology, the Cheetah 15K.6 drive delivers the highest performance in its class without increasing power consumption. The Cheetah 15K.6 drive lowers idle and operational power requirements from its prior generation - as much as 61% in watts/GB at idle - while increasing overall sustained data transfer rates by 28% at 164MB/sec.

For more information about Seagate’s Cheetah family of products, visit www.seagate.com.

Microsoft announced availability of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. This version is primarily for web developers to test new technologies available in IE8. Also it is great to check your existing sites against IE8 new rendering engine. However, nothing stops anybody from testing new IE.

There are versions available for Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), Windows Vista, Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server
2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2).

You can select your version on this page: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamil...ll.htm

More on new features here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamil...es.htm