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RB | August 1, 2019

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The Secret to F-Keying at Work

We use keyboards at home, work and the car. The first keyboard to feature function keys was the 1965 Singer/Friden 2201 Flexowriter Programmatic as a standalone word processing system. Each of the function keys was programmable. The familiar 12 F-Keys were introduced in 1984 with the second generation Model M keyboard for the original IBM PC. It had 12 function keys in 3 blocks of 4 at the top of the keyboard. Over the years, various operating systems and applications have made use of function keys in different ways.

After you learn this list of F-Key secrets, you can improve your fun at work by F-Keying around in your cube as you work on your project.

• F1 – Universal – Opens a help or support menu in most programs.
• F1 – Apple macOS X – Reduces the screen’s brightness.
• F1 – Some computers – Used it to enter BIOS setup during startup.
• F1+WIN – Microsoft Windows – Opens the Microsoft Windows help and support center.

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• F2 – Microsoft Windows – Renames a highlighted icon, file, or folder.
• F2 – Microsoft Excel – Edits the active cell.
• F2 – Apple macOS X – Increases the screen’s brightness.
• F2 – Some computers – Used it to enter BIOS setup during startup (Acer, Asus, Dell, eMachines, Gateway, Lenovo, Sony).
• F2+CRTL – Microsoft Word – Displays the print preview window.
• F2+ALT+CTRL – Microsoft Office – Opens the Documents Library.

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• F3 – Microsoft Windows – Opens desktop search feature.
• F3 – MS-DOS or Windows command line – Repeats the last command entered.
• F3 – Browsers (Firefox, Chrome and IE) – Launches the Find bar.
• F3 – Apple macOS X – Opens Mission Control.
• F3 – Other programs – Will find the next search value after an initial search is performed.
• F3+CTRL – Microsoft Word – will lowercase any highlighted text.
• F3+SHIFT – Microsoft Word – Toggles between capitalizing each word, lower case and upper case for the selected text.
• F3+WIN – Microsoft Outlook – Opens the Advanced find window.

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• F4 – Microsoft Windows 95 to XP – Open find window in Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer.
• F4 – Apple macOS X – Accesses dashboard.
• F4+ALT – Boss key – Microsoft Windows – Immediately closes the current program without saving. It can be used in an emergency to close browser windows you don’t want others to see.
• F4+ALT – Microsoft Windows – When no program is running it launches the Shutdown dialog box.
• F4+CTRL – Microsoft Word – Repeat the last action performed.
• F4+WIN – Closes the open window or tab in the active window.

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• F5 – Microsoft Windows – Reload the page, document, or contents list in a folder.
• F5 – Microsoft Office – Open the find, replace, and go to window.
• F5 – Microsoft PowerPoint – Starts a slideshow in PowerPoint.
• F5 – Browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and IE) – Refreshes a web page from the cache.
• F5 – Apple macOS X – Increases the keyboard backlight.
• F5+CTRL – Browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and IE) – Forces a hard refresh of the web page from the server instead of the browser cache.
• F5+CTRL+SHIFT – Microsoft Word – inserts a bookmark in Word doc.

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• F6 – Microsoft Windows desktop – Tabs from desktop files to the taskbar and the system tray icons.
• F6 – Browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and IE) – Move the cursor to the address bar.
• F6 – Apple macOS X – Decreases the keyboard backlight.
• F6 – Reduce laptop volume (on some laptops).
• F6+CTRL+SHIFT – Microsoft Office – Opens to another document.

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• F7 – Microsoft Office Suite – Spell and grammar check a document.
• F7 – Mozilla Firefox – Places a moveable cursor in web pages, allowing you to select text with the keyboard (Caret browsing).
• F7 – Apple macOS X – Can be used to rewind media content.
• F7 – Increase speaker volume (on some laptops).
• F7+SHIFT – Microsoft Office Suite – Runs a Thesaurus check on the word highlighted.

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• F8 – Microsoft Windows – Enter the Windows Start Menu, to access Windows Safe Mode (if pressed during the boot process).
• F8 – Apple macOS X – Can be used to pause media content.
• F8 – Used by some computers to access the Windows recovery system, but may require a Windows installation CD.

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• F9 – Microsoft Word – Refresh document.
• F9 – Microsoft Outlook – “Send and Receive All folders” email.
• F9 – Reduce laptop screen brightness (on some laptops).
• F9 – Apple macOS X – Can be used to fast forward media content.

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• F10 – Microsoft Windows – Activates the menu bar of an open application.
• F10 – Browsers (Firefox and IE) – Shows the Menu bar.
• F10 – Apple macOS X – Can be used to mute the speaker.
• F10 – Some computers – Increase laptop screen brightness.
• F10 – Some computers – Used it to enter BIOS setup during startup (Compaq, HP).
• F10+SHIFT – Microsoft Windows – The same as right-clicking on a highlighted icon, file, or Internet link pops out the context menu.

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• F11 – Microsoft Windows Explorer – Enter and exit full-screen mode.
• F11 – Microsoft Excel – Adds a graph of highlighted cells.
• F11 – Browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and IE) – Enter and exit full-screen mode.
• F11 – Apple macOS X – Can be used to decrease the speaker volume.
• F11+CTRL – Microsoft Excel – Adds a new macro to the workbook.
• F11 – Used to access the hidden recovery partition when pressed during boot (Compaq, HP, Dell, eMachines, Gateway, and Lenovo).
• F11+SHIFT – Microsoft Excel – Adds a new sheet to the workbook.

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• F12 – Microsoft Office – Open the Save as window.
• F12 – Browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and IE) – Opens browser debug tool.
• F12 – • F11 – Apple macOS X – Can be used to increase the speaker volume.
• F12 – Used to access the list of bootable devices on a computer when pressed during boot, allowing you to select a different device to boot from (e.g., hard drive, CD or DVD drive, floppy drive, USB drive, and network).
• F12+CTRL – Microsoft Word – opens a document.
• F12+SHIFT – Microsoft Word – Saves the Microsoft Word document (like Ctrl+S).
• F12+CTRL+SHIFT – Microsoft Office – Prints a document (Like Ctrl+P).

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Newer Apple keyboards have F13, F14, and F15 keys for even more F-Keying around – in place of the Print Screen, Lock key, and the Pause key. They also have F16 – F19 keys above the number pad. Early IBM keyboards had F13 through F24 keys, but these keyboards are no longer used.

To access all the fun of F-Keying you may need to access Fn Lock key or the “Fn key”+“Fn Lock” key to strike F-Keying gold.

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There’s nothing like F-Keying at work to make you more efficient. It may feel somewhat strange the first time you try to control your computer from the keyboard since we’re so used to navigating with the mouse. But, you can’t beat the ability to keep your hands on the keyboard.

Keyboard Viruses (Bach Seat)

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: 2019, AAPL, Acer, Apple, Business, Chrome, Dell, eMachine, F Key, Firefox, Flexowriter Programatic, Gateway, HP, Keyboard, MacOS, Microsoft, PowerPoint, Shortcut, Windows, Word

RB | June 9, 2019

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Password Reset Practices “Obsolete”

Followers of the Bach Seat know that passwords suck. And now Microsoft (MSFT) has joined me in that revelation. The boys in Redmond recently recommended that organizations no longer force employees to change their password every 60 days.

In a TechNet blog penned by Aaron Margosis, a principal consultant for Microsoft, the company called the practice – once a cornerstone of enterprise identity management – “ancient and obsolete” as it told IT, administrators, that other approaches are much more effective in keeping users safe.

Periodic password expiration is an ancient and obsolete mitigation of very low value, and we don’t believe it’s worthwhile for our baseline to enforce any specific value

In the latest security configuration baseline for Windows 10, which allows administrators to use Microsoft-recommended GPO baselines for improving the overall security posture of a system and reduce a Windows 10 machine’s attack surface, “May 2019 Update” (1903) – (available as a ZIP file for download here) Microsoft dropped the idea that passwords should be frequently changed. Previous baselines had advised enterprises to mandate a password change every 60 days. (And that was down from an earlier 90 days.)

Mr. Margosis acknowledged that policies to automatically expire passwords – and other group policies that set security standards – are often misguided. He wrote,

The small set of ancient password policies enforceable through Windows’ security templates is not and cannot be a complete security strategy for user credential management … Better practices, however, cannot be expressed by a set value in a group policy and coded into a template.

Among those other, better practices, Mr. Margosis mentioned multi-factor authentication – also known as two-factor authentication – and banning weak, vulnerable, easily guessed, or frequently revealed passwords.

ComputerWorld points out that Microsoft is not the first to doubt the convention. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) made similar arguments as it downgraded regular password replacement. “Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically),” NIST said in a FAQ that accompanied the June 2017 version of SP 800-63, “Digital Identity Guidelines,” using the term “memorized secrets” in place of “passwords.”

Then, the institute had explained why mandated password changes were a bad idea this way:

Users tend to choose weaker memorized secrets when they know that they will have to change them in the near future. When those changes do occur, they often select a secret that is similar to their old memorized secret by applying a set of common transformations such as increasing a number in the password.

Both the NIST and Microsoft urged organizations to require password resets when there is evidence that the passwords had been stolen or otherwise compromised. And if they haven’t been touched? “If a password is never stolen, there’s no need to expire it,” Microsoft’s Margosis said.

John Pescatore, the director of emerging security trends at the SANS Institute told ComputerWorld;

I agree 100% with Microsoft’s logic for enterprises, which are who uses [group policies] anyway … Forcing every employee to change passwords at some arbitrary period almost invariably causes more vulnerabilities to appear in the password reset process (because there are now frequent spikes of users forgetting their passwords) which increases risk more than the forced password reset ever decreases it.

Like Microsoft and NIST, SAN’s Pescatore thought periodic password resets are the hobgoblins of little minds, “Having [this] as part of the baseline makes it easier for security teams to claim compliance because auditors are happy,” Pescatore told ComputerWorld. “Focusing on password reset compliance was a huge part of all the money wasted on Sarbanes-Oxley audits 15 years ago. A great example of how compliance does not equal security.”

ComputerWorld notes other changes in the Windows 10 1903 draft baseline, Microsoft also dropped policies for the BitLocker drive encryption method and its cipher strength. The prior recommendation was to use the strongest available BitLocker encryption, but that, Microsoft said, was overkill: (“Our crypto experts tell us that there is no known danger of [128-bit encryption] being broken in the foreseeable future,” MSFT’s Margosis told ComputerWorld.) And it could easily degrade device performance.

Microsoft is also looking for feedback on a proposed change that would drop the forced disabling of Windows’ built-in Guest and Administrator accounts. Microsoft’s Margosis hedged a bit;

Removing these settings from the baseline would not mean that we recommend that these accounts be enabled, nor would removing these settings mean that the accounts will be enabled,”Removing the settings from the baselines would simply mean that administrators could now choose to enable these accounts as needed.

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We have covered this before, forcing users to change passwords over short time-frames inevitably leads to users choosing the simplest, most memorable, and most crackable passwords possible. Things have changed over the years, including technology that now enables threat actors to crack simplistic passwords easily.

MSFT is now actively pushing MFA in the enterprise so it is not surprising they are going away from this general password policy.

MSFT changing its security baselines won’t change requirements made by regulatory authorities (PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOX, NERC) and auditors. It takes years and years for them to change.

The change does not affect home users – but maybe it will make them think?

Slowly the world of passwords is starting to come under control.

Systems administrators: You need to know about this Windows 10 1903 patching change (ZDnet)

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: 10, 1903, 2019, 800-63, Bitlocker, Compliance, Encryption, HIPAA, Microsoft, MSFT, NIST, Passwords, PCI-DSS, Security, SOX, Windows

RB | May 1, 2019

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Mitel – Avaya Hook Up?

Updated August 28, 2019 – Rumors confine to swirl about the future of Avaya. Channel Partners is reporting there are 2 offers on the table. They cite reports from Bloomberg that Avaya is considering a bid by Mitel and Reuters is reporting that Avaya is considering an all-cash offer from private equity firm Clayton Dubilier & Rice.

Channel Partners speculates that the Mitel-Avaya deal would “…result in a company with a market share that would rival key industry players Cisco and Microsoft.”

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Avaya buy-out rumors are back. Last month it was thought that a PE firm, possibly Searchlight Capital Partners was going to buy Avaya. The unknown private equity firm valued Avaya at more than $5 billion, including debt.

The newest report is that Ottawa-based Unified-Communications-as-a-Service provider Mitel is looking to acquire Avaya in an all-stock merger valued at between $2.2 billion and $2.4 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The reported deal would value communications equipment and software provider Avaya at $20 to $22 per share, a premium based on its current stock price of about $18 per share on Monday 04/29/2019. If Avaya and Mitel are able to strike a deal, the merger could happen as soon as next month, the WSJ said, citing mysterious people familiar with the matter.

CRN says that the Avaya-Mitel deal could help the two companies compete against their larger UC competitors. Mitel typically plays well in the small to midsize market, while Avaya has a large install base of enterprise customers because of its legacy in the UC hardware arena.

Zeus Kerravala at NoJitter points out that the reported $2 billion purchase price doesn’t into account Avaya’s roughly $3 billion in debt. With debt included, the offer would have to come in for a total enterprise value of $5 billion to be of interest to shareholders.

Mr. Kerravala believes that a successful merger between Avaya and Mitel would create a behemoth of a company, bringing the number two and number three voice vendors together. He cites Synergy Research Group data that shows Cisco (CSCO) the leader with about 44% market share, Avaya second at 10%, and Mitel third at 8%. He believes a combined Avaya and Mitel would hold the industry’s biggest installed base.

Synergy enterprise voice market share estimate

Source: Synergy Research Group

The merger would also be beneficial as the industry becomes more artificial intelligence (AI)-centric, data and scale are must-haves. Mr. Kerravala believes Avaya and Mitel are stronger together than apart on AI. That said, if a deal doesn’t happen, the companies should still be fine continuing down their current trajectories, optimizing their internal resources while leveraging partners for AI. They can still do this, although it would be easier as a bigger company.

An investment group led by private equity firm Searchlight Capital Partners acquired Mitel in April 2018 with a $2.6 billion deal that took the company private. Mitel has a history of growing via acquisitions. In 2017 the company completed the acquisition of competing UC provider ShoreTel for $530 million. The move helped Mitel become one of the largest UCaaS providers in the world. The company lost out on its deal to acquire videoconferencing provider Polycom in 2016 to Siris Capital Group.

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This is just more of the same for Avaya. The crowning jewel in this deal is Avaya’s corporate call center business. Avaya’s call center business is the product of the acquisition of Nortel assets, after the Canadian networking giant’s bankruptcy in 2009.

This deal is really about the cloud. TechCrunch notes that Searchlight has a strategic stake in Rackspace, another legacy company that it took private for $4.3B in 2016.

Will Searchlight leverage its investments in Rackspace, Mitel, and now Avaya to build a cloud-based UCaaS juggernaut to take on the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, Slack, RingCentral, 8×8, even Google and Amazon?

Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) Market Worth US$79.3 Bn by 2024 (PRNewsWire)

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: 2019, Artificial intelligence, Avaya, Business, Cisco, Cloud, CSCO, Microsoft, Mitel, MSFT, Private equity, Rackspace, Shoretel, UCaaS

RB | April 8, 2019

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Chapter 11 Reboot for Sungard AS

Updated 11/18/2022 – 11:11 Systems has completed the acquisition of Sungard Availability Services’ Recovery Services and Sungard AS’ Cloud and Managed Services business’.

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Updated 05/08/2019 – Sungard AS emerged from bankruptcy on 05/07/2019. The firm’s turnaround is described as the fastest pre-negotiated restructuring in US corporate history. The result is Sungard AS debtors having taken an $800 million haircut, the recovery service received $100 million of new liquidity from its creditors and a new CEO.

The firm’s new ownership and largest shareholders now include Angelo, Gordon & Co., LP; The Carlyle Group Global Credit; FS Investments and GSO Capital Partners LP.

However, the quick fix did not solve the problems that forced the firm into bankruptcy, as described below.

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Data infrastructure and disaster recovery company Sungard Availability Services (AS) announced it was filing for bankruptcy on April 01, 2019. Sungard AS, which helped keep Wall Street running through 9/11, says its customers include 70 percent of Fortune 100 companies. It boasts 90 hardened IT facilities connected by a redundant, dedicated network backbone, along with 18 mobile facilities staged in strategic locations is saddled with hefty debt from its private equity backers.

In addition to a huge debt load, the once high-flying Pennsylvania-based firm faces falling margins as it struggles with growing competition from cloud rivals amid a shift away from on-premises/co-location backup. These factors forced the firm to seek relief from the courts.

The Sungard AS Chapter 11 plan is expected to be filed in New York during May 2019. The bankruptcy plan reportedly includes a write-off $800 million of the company’s $1.25 billion debt. Chapter 11 protection is a part of the US Bankruptcy Code that allows a company to reorganize its assets while handing over the business operations of the company to its debtors.

Under the Chapter 11 proposal, hedge fund creditors that specialize in turnarounds and liquidations, sometimes dubbed “vulture capitalists” — including Blackstone Group’s LP’s GSO debt investment unit, Angelo Gordon & Co., Carlisle Group, and Contrarian Capital Management — will take control of Sungard Availability.

The hedge fund will replace the buyout investors who bought the formerly publicly traded company for $11.4 billion in 2005. The original private equity sponsors include: — Bain Capital, Blackstone Group, Providence Equity Partners, KKR & Co., Silver Lake Management, and Texas Pacific Group (TPG) Capital.

Despite claims that most creditors back the bankruptcy plan and that Sungard AS would emerge from the wreckage a stronger, more competitive business, the move rocked the industry. Hedge funds are not typically long-term investors causing alarm among SunGard AS employees about the company’s future. Employees fear the company will be asset-stripped and not survive, as hedge funds seek to recoup money lost on the debt haircut. Sungard AS insists that won’t happen. Sungard employs over 3,000 people according to its website.

Sungard AS’s data center model, “shared infrastructure,” of physical locations for backup IT systems, has become outdated as cloud-based infrastructure, led by Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure have grown to dominate firms’ IT backup operations.

Andrew A. Stern, Chief Executive Officer, Sungard Availability Services said.

There’s no question the shift to cloud is part of what’s challenged us. But even before the cloud, by the late 2000s, “the approach the company had taken to disaster recovery really hadn’t changed in 20 years — and the world had moved on. … We had been slow in recognizing the business had to change.

Sungard initially tried to meet rival remote-server “cloud”-based systems with its own “private cloud” solutions. But its large corporate clients by 2016 were migrating to the large, secure cloud systems maintained by Amazon, Microsoft, and other giant companies. CEO Stern added, “We suddenly found ourselves competing with much bigger environments at much greater scale.”

Sungard couldn’t beat them, so it signed up as one of 130 Amazon-audited managed service partners, recruiting and customizing Amazon Web Services for corporate disaster-recovery customers, including, most recently, government agencies in England. Mr. Stern added, “But that change has taken time.”

Philly.com summarizes Sungard’s history. Sungard’s lineage starts in the mainframe days. It started off as Sun Information Systems, founded in the 1970s as a backup for early data systems at oil and chemical plants run by the former Sun Oil Co. In the 1980s, founder John Ryan diversified the company, offering backup services to banks as they computerized deposit, loan, and investment records. In the tech boom of the late 1990s, publicly-traded SunGard Data Systems was worth more than Sun Oil’s parent company, Sunoco.

During this time SunGard Data acquired competing systems in the same market sector and let them continue competing for a time. In the late 1990s then-chief executive, Cristobal Conde began combining SunGard products into large groups focusing on recovery (Availability) and was using its profits to buy dozens of financial, government, and college software services across Europe and Asia, and North America.

The 2005 acquisition of SunGard Data by the buyout firms was one of the biggest deals of its kind before the 2008 financial crisis. In 2011 sales peaked at over $5 billion and employment topped 20,000.

But with its owners mostly concerned with pulling cash out of the company, it lost what its leaders admitted was a “tsunami” of corporate customer cancellations as the disaster-recovery market changed, and the company didn’t keep up. In 2011, SunGard Data sold its main college business to Virginia-based Ellucian for $1.75 billion.

In 2014 SunGard Data split in two. In 2015 the larger SunGard Data Systems Inc., with sales of $2.8 billion was sold for $5.1 billion to Florida-based Fidelity Information Services. As a standalone unit, Sungard AS struggled to gain profitability leading to the bankruptcy announcement.

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Indeed the Cloud has significantly changed disaster recovery in multiple ways.

The hyperscale cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure have entered the market as both competitors and partners.

Cloud disaster recovery has changed the way disaster recovery services are delivered adding flexibility and remote working.

We have seen the same thing with the demise of KMart and Sears. Sungard was still reliant on brick-and-mortar DR services.

Let’s see how many Sungard AS customers will continue to invest the DR dollars into a company whose CEO admits they “hadn’t changed in 20 years” and is willing to write off almost a billion dollars.

Windstream, ISP with 1 million customers, files for bankruptcy (ars technica.com)

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: 2019, Amazon, AMZN, AWS, Azure, Bankruptcy, Business, Cloud, Disaster recovery, Microsoft, MSFT, Private equity, Sungard AS

RB | March 26, 2019

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Avaya LBO Buzz

Avaya is back in the news. Followers of the Bach Seat will recall that Avaya declared bankruptcy in 2017. Now the buzz is that Santa Clara, California-based telecommunications equipment and software firm is considering a leveraged buyout offer.

Reports are circulating that Avaya’s (AVYA) board of directors is evaluating an offer from an unnamed private equity firm. Reportedly the offer values the Lucent spinoff at more than $20 per share, people in the know told Reuters. The private equity firm values Avaya at more than $5 billion, including $3.2 billion in debt.

Avaya is one of the world’s largest providers of telephony systems. It was spun off from Lucent Technologies Inc in 2000, which used to be part of AT&T (T). The LBO comes 15 months after Avaya emerged from bankruptcy protection, with a $8.3 billion debt legacy from a previous leveraged buyout by private equity firms TPG Capital and Silver Lake in 2007.

Avaya has tried to shift its revenue model to focus on cloud-based communications solutions with recurring software and subscriptions fees and not its traditional hardware business. Its legacy business is becoming more commoditized and dated. Much of Avaya’s new focus involves cloud services like unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). A new Device as a Service (DaaS) offering has also surfaced.

Avaya’s contact center business has also attracted acquisition interest in the past from private equity firms, including Clayton Dubilier & Rice LLC, Hellman & Friedman LLC, and Permira Advisers LLP. Hellman & Friedman and Permira own Genesys an Avaya competitor.

As of September 2018, Avaya had about 8,100 employees worldwide, including 2,800 in the U.S.

Private equity firms have recently focused on communications businesses. Among those companies are Aspect Software, Mitel, and PGi, each privately held by such firms. Note, too, that Polycom had been a Siris Capital property until its recent acquisition by Plantronics.

What Are You Really Getting with Your Cloud Solution? (No Jitter)

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: 2019, Call center, Cisco, Cloud computing, CSCO, Genesys, Merger, Microsoft, Mitel, MSFT, Plantronics, Polycom, Private equity, UCaaS

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