Dell Launches ITNinja to Provide Best Online Community Experience for IT Administrators

Dell Launches ITNinja to Provide Best Online Community Experience for IT Administrators

Date : 3/21/2012

Round Rock, Texas

·         As part of Dell’s new Software Group, ITNinja will serve as a product-agnostic go-to resource for front line IT administrators with over 200,000 software application topics

·         ITNinja will build on the success of AppDeploy, the leading community for application and OS deployment.

Dell Software Group in conjunction with Dell KACE announced today that it will upgrade and expand its popular online IT community site, AppDeploy.com, under the name, ITNinja. The new community reaffirms Dell’s commitment to providing forums for the community to engage and share ideas; and validates the results of a new Dell KACE sponsored Dimensional Research survey, “The Value of IT Communities,” which revealed a vast majority of IT professionals are turning to online communities to help do their jobs more efficiently.

The announcement marks a significant milestone for the Dell KACE AppDeploy.com community, one of the leading IT community resources for software deployment best practices, with more than 450,000 monthly visitors, and a community knowledge base that is continually updated by IT professionals. The community will continue to be one of the only product-agnostic communities where anyone can join and share information and answers to the thousands of common problems that make critical IT decisions and support tough.

ITNinja is a deep, content rich community with a strong focus on software topics such as application deployment techniques, configuration settings, and management solutions. Users will be able to leverage the community to find answers and best practices on a range of complex issues.

“ITNinja builds on Dell’s established social media success to deliver a valuable community hub in which IT professionals can not only share tips and information but also form new connections with their industry colleagues,” said John Swainson, president, Software Group at Dell. “With one of the largest knowledgebases of software application topics on the Web, ITNinja will help the IT community find the answers to their software questions quickly so they can focus on innovation and do more.” 

The launch of ITNinja comes at a time when online communities, particularly within IT enterprise, have never been stronger. An online survey of IT professionals sponsored by Dell KACE in February 2012 revealed 80 percent of IT professionals engage in online communities with 70 percent of them visiting several times a week.^[1] And 95 percent of front-line professionals say they save time and do their job more efficiently by using these same online IT communities.^[2] As online IT communities have extended their connections through social media networks, they have become an easy, cost-effective way for IT professionals to engage with companies, access support and knowledge and participate in relevant discussions with peers. 

Content from ITNinja can also be leveraged by Dell KACE customers directly through the Dell KACE Appliance Management Console, providing expertise contextually saving IT teams time on common computer administration tasks.

"ITNinja is like having a subject matter expert available 24/7. I use it every day to figure out how to solve common systems management challenges and get even more value out of our Dell KACE Appliance,” said Matt May, service desk analyst with Black Diamond Equipment. “It’s extremely rewarding to be part of such a passionate community exchanging ideas, tips and information to help us all do our jobs better, it’s truly a value add to being a Dell KACE customer.”

The new ITNinja upgrade will expand the features and scope of the original AppDeploy community making it easier for users to share and find information, including:

·         An ever-growing database of hundreds of thousands of software applications serving as topics of discussion for users wanting to contribute questions, deployment tips, shared links and blog posts.

·         A new activity feed highlighting users’ contributions and providing a customized view of all software, topics, contributors and blogs that they follow to keep them up-to-date on the content they care about most.

·         An engaging user reputation management system with gamification elements that reward users with points and prizes for their contributions (past and present). Points determine one’s “belt” level which is attached to their identity on the site.

·         A new Q&A system that includes rich features for crowdsourcing solutions to technical issues faced by IT professionals.

·         Integration with Dell KACE Appliances - Any systems administrator, regardless of what tool they may use, can access this information through ITNinja.com, but KACE customers can access the same information directly through the interface of their KACE Systems Management Appliance Console offering users a quick reference for common system administration tasks.

To learn more about ITNinja and the impact of online IT communities, join ITNinja’s founder Bob Kelly for a free, introductory webinar, “Introducing ITNinja.com: Community-Enabled Solutions for IT Pros” scheduled for March 22 at 10 a.m. PDT/1 p.m. EDT. Register here.

Sandia to Help IT Professionals w/ DNS Vulnerabilities

News release from Sandia Labs:

January 11, 2012

Sandia cyber project looks to help IT professionals with complex Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerabilities

LIVERMORE, Calif. — Sandia National Laboratories computer scientist Casey Deccio has developed a visualization tool known as DNSViz to help network administrators within the federal government and global IT community better understand Domain Name System Security (DNSSEC) and to help them troubleshoot problems. (Click here to see a short video of Deccio discussing the DNSViz tool.)

Sandia computer scientist Casey Deccio developed a software tool called DNSViz to help network administrators with Domain Name System (DNS) vulnerabilities. DNSViz provides a visual analysis of the DNSSEC authentication chain for a domain name and its resolution path in the DNS namespace. 

DNSSEC is a security feature mandated for all federal information systems by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The 2008 mandate requires that “the top level .gov domain will be DNSSEC-signed, and processes to enable secure delegated sub-domains will be developed.”

The entity that serves to translate the hostname of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) into an Internet Protocol (IP) address is known as the Domain Name System (DNS). A DNS “lookup” is a prerequisite for doing almost anything on the Internet, including Web browsing, emailing or videoconferencing.

Although the mandate made perfect sense, said Deccio, there soon emerged a problem when .gov organizations actually began deploying DNSSEC.

“DNSSEC is hard to configure correctly and has to undergo regular maintenance,” he said. “It adds a great deal of complexity to IT systems, and if configured improperly or deployed onto servers that aren’t fully compatible, it keeps users from accessing .gov sites. They just get error responses.”

The still-new DNSSEC security feature is designed to allow user applications like Web browsers to ensure that the IP addresses they have received from the DNS have not been “spoofed” by anyone with ill intent. As such, Internet-connected systems within the government can verify that the responses are authoritative and have not been altered. Still, the hiccups with implementing DNSSEC convinced Deccio that there was a need for a tool like DNSViz.

DNS, said Deccio, is inherently insecure. Without DNSSEC, tampering by third-party attackers could go undetected, thus redirecting online communications to unwanted destinations. This represents a particularly troublesome problem for .gov addresses owned by government organizations guarding national security information and other vital data.

Deccio believes DNSSEC is of little use if network administrators don’t know how to configure or use it.
He describes DNSViz as a “tool for visualizing the status of a DNS zone.” It provides a visual analysis of the DNSSEC authentication chain for a domain name and its resolution path in the DNS namespace, made available via a Web browser to any Internet user at http://dnsviz.net/. It visually highlights and describes configuration errors detected by the tool to assist administrators in identifying and fixing DNSSEC-related configuration problems.

DNSViz brings together all the components that work together for DNSSEC to function properly into a single graphical representation. The resulting visualization is a collection of configuration data and relationships that are otherwise difficult to assemble, assess and understand.

To help network administrators in their DNSSEC deployment, Sandia’s DNSViz tool functions in two primary ways: It actively analyzes a domain name by performing pertinent DNS lookups and it makes the analysis available via the Web interface. The active analysis occurs periodically to build a history of DNSSEC deployment over time and provide a historical reference for DNS administrators.

Currently, the Web interface is the primary source for viewers to observe data, though Deccio intends to expand DNSViz functionality to allow access via other means. For example, alert mechanisms might be used to inform affected parties, and application programming interfaces (API) can be designed to allow administrators to programmatically access the information instead of manually browsing the DNSViz website.
Deccio has the tool running in the background on Sandia/California’s servers, monitoring a list of some 100,000 DNS names. It performs an analysis a couple times each day and offers a situational awareness of what the DNS configuration for each name looks like from top to bottom.

Though the functionality provided by DNSViz could potentially be included in a marketable software product that’s sold by a for-profit company, Deccio says he envisions it as an open-source tool available to anyone who needs it. With further funding, he hopes to expand the tool so that it can analyze DNS health and security on a continuous basis, essentially creating a full-blown monitoring system that is scalable, versatile and more informational.