MAILBAG - Letter to the Editor

Weighing All the Options

I am responding to Paul Christian Nelis' "Hardware Is Half the Battle" (May 21). I found the article refreshing and full of useful information, especially about the RDISK/S syntactical line. But one thing to point out is that Microsoft already has a fix for its RDISK utility in Windows NT V4.0 for requiring a CD-ROM.

In regard to creating a separate partition for a bootable Windows NT system, I offer an alternative. STAC has a backup solution that performs a complete sector-by-sector disk backup of Windows NT, thus allowing a complete restore, from streaming tape, of a failed NT system. SUre, you still need to install the OS kernel first, but I feel it provides more flexibility.

Jim Kunysz
MCSE

Paul Christian Nelis replies: I'm glad you found the article interesting. Yes there was a hot fix at the time of the article's writing. That hot fix has now been folded into Service Pack 3 for Windows NT V4.0. I generally don't like advertising hot fixes, because they are complicated to administer and track in a large organization. Coherent service pack revisions are much easier to maintain for the administrative staff.

There are a couple of STAC-like solutions on the market that could help restore a machine directly from tape. Though these solutions are nice to have in the event of a catastrophic failure, the much more simplistic event of having a DLL out of revision could necessitate a global wipe of the hard drive, and its associated down-time, with these tools. Nothing prevents us from using these tools with the article's suggested secondary copy of Windows NT. I, too, would recommend these tools, but not as the only means of recovery. They are too cumbersome and too time-consuming if they are the only alternative.

Adding It Up

I have a question about the percentages on the chart on page 48 included with the story "Infections Surge, Worse to Come" (May 21). The percentages add up to more than 100 percent. The 1996 column adds up to 110 percent and the 1997 column adds up to 152.63 percent. What does this data mean?

Scott Soulages, CCLI
Systems Technician
Portland, Ore.

ENT replies: Because sites were being hit with multiple viruses over the course of a year, survey respondents were permitted to indicate more than one avenue of virus infection. For the survey question "Means of Infection," respondents were asked to identify the means of infection for their most recent virus incident and could indicate more than one avenue of infection (source: National Computer Security Association, Carlisle, Pa.).

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