Hei! Welcome to our session today. I'm Hunter Jeffreys and this is my colleague Non-Scandal Bay. We are from the University of Hampshire. I'm based in the School of Computer Science and Non is based in the Library of Computing Services, which is actually quite an interesting combination after our keynote speaker has the answer. We're looking at academic and library services combining on a research project. won't we want to share with you today so we're delighted to be here sharing our recent research into our student digital experiences and can I just at this point say, this session links directly, perhaps there's a bit of a taster of a university case study of student digital engagement it's going to link with the gysg presentation of the whole data set four-thirtieth this afternoon into Room 2.220. So, if you like, this is what it's like on the ground at one particular university, and then you can see the whole, actually 39,000 students, the results from that later this afternoon. So, over to you, Nod. Well, we're also interested, we're going to do a little poll in a minute to see how many of you participated in the track and project this year yn y rym ni, ond, yn ni'n fawr, yn ymwneud yn ymwyno'r ddweud. Ond, o'r gwneud yw'r ysgrifennu, y byddwn yn ei gweithio'n gweithio, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio, mae'n dweud y project, y project fawr ddaeth ddaeth yn y universitydd, o'r ddiddordeb cyfafol yn ymddiadau ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Mae'r ffordd. Mae hyn o'r rai o'r organau cyffredinol. Mae'r ffordd wedi'u gweld cyfrifio ar lawer o'r bod yn ymdwylliant y mynd i'r ffordd. Mae'r ffordd wedi'u gweld cyffredinol ar y mynd i'r organau cyffredinol. Mae'r ffordd yn ymdwylliant, sydd wedi'i gweld gwahanol gyda'r gyfnodol. Roeddwn ni wedi'i bod yn ôl o'r ysgrifennu ar gyfer y ffordd ymdwylliant, around developing a framework of digital capability development. If you don't know much about that, then visit the GISC stand and they'll tell you all about it. So they've basically started off with this framework, for some frameworks work, for others they don't, we felt that we could work with this and adapt it to our own needs. ac mae'n dweud i ni i gael i gael eich bydwyr o'r cyfnod, ond yn ystafell o'r ddiogelio cyfnod ar y stafell hynny o'ch cyfnod i gyfnod. Ond efallai, mae gennym ni'n gwneud yn y cyfrifol Ftraca digital yma. Mae'n gwneud bod ni'n gael yn gwybod am hollwch gyrfaen gwael yma i'r gwneud. curved. So we were sensitive to that fact, but we did get absolute support from our PVC for the students for this. So having that endorsement at a senior level also was enormously helpful for this. So we were aware that there were lots of digital opportunities for students to get involved, but it's not always coherently delivered in that way, which again was something that we were hearing very much about this morning in terms of the context of using this. We were also very much aware that there were assumptions by many thinking that just because they're young people and they're constantly on phones and various devices that they had a level of digital expertise, which actually once we started asking them questions and interviewing them, as well as some of the focus group work we did, that there was obvious gaps and particularly in terms of how they apply the use of digital to their learning experiences and their confidence in using some of these technologies. So at the moment, where we are, is thinking about well, how do we develop this further? Felly, os ydych chi'n ddweud o'r gweithio? Rydych chi'n ddweud o'r cyflwynt ar y ddweud? Yn y modd ar beth yw'r gafodd yma, ond mae ymgyrch yn ddweud i gafoddau a gweithio'r llwythau i'r ystafell? Felly, mae'n gofyn ar y projettrach, ac mae'n gwaith i gydag i chi i gydag i'r gwaith i gydag i'r poldd yn Ymwythu. Os ydych chi'n gwybod oedd ym ni wedi'n gwybod, Mae'r gweithio, ac mae'r gwnaeth o hyn yn ymgynnu fawr yn y projiect y taeth? Y 10 sefydlu? Daeth hyn yn ddechrau, ac mae'n gweithio i weld yn ymgyrch. Mae'n gweithio. Felly mae'r gweithio, mae'n gweithio. Mae'r gweithio'n gweithio, ac mae'n gweithio i weld yn gweithio i weld y fawr. Wrth gwrs, dyma, yn y cyfroedd y cyfroedd ymgrifennu ar hyn o'r cyfroedd, mae'r cyfroedd ymateb o rhai a'r cyfroedd ymgyrchaf i'r cyfroedd ymgyrchaf. Mae'n rhaid i'r gweithio gweithio gwylltu oherwydd yma ymlaen nhw'n gweithio'r cyfroedd o'r cyfroedd ymgyrchaf, ac mae'n cyhoedd ymgyrchaf i'r gweithio'r cyfroedd yn y cwntex. So, ddweud am ychydig i'w ffordd, i'w pethu'n dda. Okay. So, mae angen i'n fath o'r cymdeithas, mae'n cyfrifio'r pethau, ond mae'r cyrnyddau r嘿 yn fawr iawn, o gwblwch i'r ddwyf yn cyfrifio'r ddisodol, rydych chi'n gweithio, yn ei gwybodol i'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio, o'r cyfnod digital, yn ymgyrch yn ei gynhyrchu. Felly, mae'r cwestiynau yw'r cyfnod o'r cyfnod ac mae'r cyfnodau yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch ar gyfer ymgyrch ar gyfer ymgyrch ar gyfer ymgyrch ar gyfer ymgyrch, ac mae'r cyfnodau yn ymgyrch ar gyfer ymgyrch. Felly, mae rhywun wedi fawr munaf i'ch gynhyrchu i neud i'r hunain yn ymgyrchu ac yn ymgyrch ar gyfer ymgyrch mae gennym hanesu b breeding a gennym hynny ac mae'n peithio i fathio a fydd ei bod yn glywed a'u gwneud i'w ymgyrch ar gyfer. Felly, findiwch gofyn mae'r cyfnod ddydd i ddim ni'n gafodau mae'r cyfnod ymgyrch ar gyfer ymgyrch gyda'r cyd-dweud o'r ffrindigol yr hyn. Rwyf wedi bod nôl yn cael ei gwaith oherwydd ar ei bod yn gweithio'r gwaith. Mae'r ddaeth yng Nghymru yn y gweithio'r gweithio, a rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r gweithio ar gyfer gwasanaeth. Rydyn ni wedi'u gweld ar y dyfodol yng nghylch yn y gweithio. Yna rydyn ni'n meddwl i'r gweithio. Yma, Amanda i gyd yn ymgyrch am ystod o'r rhan o'r peir, ..focwswydd yn jaelwyr. A gofyn o'n gwneud, yn gallu'n lleol i wneud fawn bydd wedi'i cyflwyno... ..lawer o ffordd o eu gyrfa cael eu cyfforddau dysgu... ..y sydd wedi gweld i'r hoffo ar gyfer clyfodol yn ei gwneud. Mae'n gefn i'r target i gweithio â'i nhw, hanfyddech chi'n cael eu cyfforddau... ..di gwybod yn yr un blynydd iawn i'r cyfforddau a theropodau... We were out and about doing all sorts of things as well. Running opportunities for people to come along and assign in and take the tracker. Head full set of Chromebooks available, so we were able to go out and about in different for Hurry book, so people could actually sit down and do it then. We also offered an incentive, a prize draw, which was supported by the chief information officer as well at the university, and at this point I'm going to hand over. Well actually, we've got another move to do that we want you to do. So what we'd like to ask you all here is if you'd participate in building a moodle, a wordle, I've got a moodle on the brain after seeing the last presentation. So if you would please actually take part in building our wordle around some of the digital activities that you actually use in your modules. There are just some examples up there but we'd like to hear if you've got anything at all that you'd like to contribute to that. You can see lots of typing going on from here. So the reason behind this, perhaps we can close the poll now, thank you. The reason behind this is that one of the questions in the digital student tracker was actually to ask our students what kind of digital activities they were doing. Hey, and here we are. Thank you. Actually it's really hard seeing it for a month and a year. Well and it's really interesting to see quizzes coming up so prominently. Yes, but the interesting thing is what our students said. So should we go to this? So which digital tools do students find useful for learning? And basically we just captured the data here. So they didn't know that we were going to use it as wordle. It's not particularly well edited. We've just taken their words. YouTube, interesting. Canvas is our new MLE from this year. We also use StudyNet. So our first year students who were actually the majority of the students participating would have said Canvas. And StudyNet, which appears just above YouTube, is actually the VLE that the second, final and master students would be familiar with. Okay, so that was one of the interesting questions that the students were asked. And that gave us lots of new information. And we're just going to work through some of the questions that we asked. We just picked out some which we found particularly interesting. So we're looking at this student reaction to when digital technologies are used on their course. And do they understand things better? Yes, over 72% agreed. And very few disagreed with that. I enjoy learning more. It's just so encouraging for us. For those of us who have been plugging away, either as academics or as professional staff, I enjoy learning more. And then this issue of being more independent in my learning. A lot has been written about this in the research. Do we just make students more dependent? But actually the students here are saying, that's nearly 78% saying, I'm more independent in my learning when digital technologies are used on my course. I feel more connected with my lecturers. I think we would have liked to seen that pushed up a bit, but still that connection. Again, the challenge in a previous question was whether the students stopped coming to lectures. Well, actually using digital technologies implies they feel more connected. Digital skills are important in my career. So there's a lot of emphasis on using their course towards employability. We were encouraged at the perception by students that digital skills are going to be important. But doesn't their course prepare them for the digital workforce? We would have liked to have seen this a little bit higher, obviously. It's just under 50%. That's mitigated by the fact that the majority over 30% of the participants were from our first year. Typically we don't emphasise the employability of the courses in their first year, unless it's something vocational like nursing. That message we have taken back to help us for the future in our planning and our learning design. Drawing in some consequences and some conclusions, we are encouraged that this actually shows from this relatively small sample that students are keen to engage digitally with their learning. These are things that we're taking back to our staff. We promoted it at the learning and teaching conference back in June. This perception that online they learn better and more independently is encouraging and the benefit of digital skills for future employment. I think that message is loud and clear. And this connection with the lecturers. We feel this is something we can build on and I hope others will be encouraged as well. How we develop this as part of the strategy is what we're asking ourselves now. We've got ideas. That's very much something that non is taking forward in the next year. At the same time, we're encouraging staff to update their skills to support student learning. You may have remembered from our own wordle of the student feedback about lynda. We have subscribed to that as a university and it's one of the areas that non has been putting forward. Sorry, I missed that last one. Developing our digital capability strategy for our students. I'm just going to, I forgot this one was there, sorry. That's it. We would ask you for your take away just to acknowledge all those who've helped us. Thank you very much. If you're on the board, you can actually read it from the tablets as well. I made this mistake too. Right. Start at the bottom if you want. Which is simple to introduce must-haves? Would you advise academics to begin experimenting with? Any ideas? It depends where you're starting from. I think it's looking to see what you've got in your MLE, what support, what tools, and actually engaging with your staff to see where they feel they are lacking in digital tools, digital capabilities. But when you get feedback from students, the feedback that the students would like more digital engagement, I think having been involved in researching this area for over 10 years, it's very much as a push from the students to have more choices and more available in a variety of online environments. One thing as well that's been absolutely key that the Learning and Teaching Innovation Centre have been spearheading is the guided learner journey. So again, this is the whole idea actually building the learning experience first rather than focusing too much on the tools. But again, the tools are an essential component of the course delivery. And I think we're probably fair to say it's a bit of a mixed economy. We've got some brilliant case studies of where it's been actually delivered really well. And we've got some other cases very similar to what Tracey was saying this morning where people have just been using Canvas more as a kind of document repository and moving, transitioning their content that way. So it's a journey that we're all on. The other thing is Office 365 is seen as a key component. It's something that we offer free now to staff and students to be able to download onto their own devices. So we're just about to launch a programme of blended learning events. So we're going to have a mix of face-to-face delivery through the library link-up programme, which we're just launching this semester. And there's also going to be some playlists developed as well within Linda that we're going to share with the whole enterprise. I think our philosophy generally has been both face-to-face and online, the blend of it's not one or the other, but it's working out as academics what works for your students. The question there, how did staff respond to the results? Well, I mean, as you can understand, we are earlier doctors, we're some of the enthusiasts, but we are building that enthusiasm within the different schools. And each school has got their Canvas supporters and a network of colleagues who are supporting the academics and there's, as we said, a huge development of the support for students so that people don't feel left behind. Just a final comment a bit. Yes. Yes, somebody picks up that it's interesting that students see Google as a digital tool, but don't mention library catalog, e-books, e-journals, et cetera. There was a separate question on e-books, which were quite one use, I can't remember the facts. Well, the key thing as well, I think, and that's going to be one of the essential things we're going to deliver through the link-up programme, is not just simply how people find and engage with e-books, but it is the actual note-taking again, which follows on from the previous presentation. And these are very, you know, key digital challenges because we don't have standard platforms, so if you, you know, some publishers will link you into their platform and won't let you take your notes anywhere else, and then you've got other tools like Blue Fire, or Eda, for example, those kinds of things which will allow you to keep notes from all sorts of different places in one place. So knowing the right tool for the right job and working through all the constraints that we still find ourselves in, we're still transitioning to this new world, but one thing's for sure, doing it together, doing it collegially and collaboratively is essential if you're going to build that engagement and get people involved and involve students all along the way. Fantastic message to finish. Thank you very much indeed. Thanks to all our speakers. So we have an hour's break now. There is lunch down in the exhibition area, and sessions start at 1.30. I'm John Wilson, I'm the CEO at Agenta. We're a technology company that focuses on education and learning. We build, manage and operate platforms for education, for video collaboration. Externally we prefer to work with what we feel as ethical industries. Obviously education, teaching, learning, healthcare. We feel that we can really contribute to these industries by creating exciting platforms, easy to use platforms, secure platforms that people can utilize. What we feel is one of the most important things for Scotland to boost economic growth is investing in rural areas. By investing in broadband in these local areas, we can attract more talent, we can attract more companies, and we can drastically improve the delivery of education and learning within these schools, within disparate regions within Scotland. I'm John Wilson, I'm the CEO at Agenta. We're a technology company that focuses on education and learning. We build, manage and operate platforms for education, for video collaboration. Externally we prefer to work with what we feel as ethical industries. Obviously education, teaching, learning, healthcare. We feel that we can really contribute to these industries by creating exciting platforms, easy to use platforms, secure platforms that people can utilize. What we feel is one of the most important things for Scotland to boost economic growth is investing in rural areas. By investing in broadband in these local areas, we can attract more talent, we can attract more companies, and we can drastically improve the delivery of education and learning within these schools, within disparate regions within Scotland.


It is now time for Python on Hardware News. Blinker! Blinker! Blinker! So some significant news in my opinion, as someone who works on this newsletter and watching this thing called CircuitPython. Serpentay is now a success story. The title of our newsletter this week was CircuitPython Empowering Makers to Make Businesses. So this is a Serpentay, it's from Arturo. You can see it's 15 bucks a pop. We sell them on Adafruit. They're also on Tindi.com. They have pretty much universal five-star reviews. Arturo was able to make hardware and not have to worry about the software as much because Arturo used CircuitPython. So CircuitPython, much like Python, is one of those batteries included every time there's an update. She gets an update. And one of the things, because I wrote this up as one thing, as far as like a little mini case study, as they say in the biz world, Arturo sold 400 of these. So they've done it without the awesome power of CircuitPython. And it is something that we see taking off. For open source hardware makers or pretty much anyone, Sony today, they're their board, the Spresens. They get all the new features of CircuitPython every time there's an update. So they just send their customers over to circuitpython.org slash downloads. There's a picture of the board. And it's literally just as easy as dragging and dropping a file. And now you've got the latest version of CircuitPython. Yeah. And we're adding more and more. We just added microlab. It's going to be coming out in a new release. We're working on adding RG matrices. There's a lot of stuff that you don't have to worry about if your board is ported to CircuitPython and is part of our build platform. We have like a hundred and plus boards that are already in there. It's very easy. I expect this is going to be very similar to what I saw when I was writing about Arduino. So a million years ago I wrote an article, why Arduino, why it's here to stay. And at the very end I said the things that are that make an electronic platform successful, that's going to happen no matter what the shape of the board. And this reminds me of that. So what I'm seeing is people that do hardware, they're like, how can I focus on the hardware? How can I keep the cost down? How can I make something that has Bluetooth? How can I make something that has Wi-Fi? How can I make something that has a display? All that stuff just delays your ability to ship hardware unless you can get something that's baked in open source. And there's a big community behind it so there's frequent updates. So this is the, every news article about the world right now has a chart and like I don't want to make a chart like this. But it looks like CircuitPython is following the number of boards that we have. There's over 116 boards, the number of libraries, there's over 200. It has that same adoption curve that you see for really large electronic platforms. So what do we need? Speaking of, so while the open hardware summit is gone virtual, there are still things going on with the hardware. So this is a tray. This is from SparkFun. If you look really, really, really, really close, you can see Blinka in there. So some of the badges have Blinka on it. Here's the tester and here's a pack that was getting shipped off. Let's go to the overhead real quick. We have one. Thank you, Drew. This arrived today. This is the QR code where you can get the information about the badge and it's a wearable. You can see the size. This would fit well on a radiator wrist or any wrist. And this is, I think, one of the first prototypes that were made because eventually there was these. You can see the little purple, yeah, little Oshpark niblets. We'll probably be doing some projects with this and more. It's very similar to the Clue. So probably a lot of the things that you do with Clue will work on this. And then this particular wearable platform badge and all the things it does will always be updated as we update CircuitPython. So this is a really neat thing that will last a very, very long time. The Open Hardware Summit physical one will be next year. I fully expect people to be hacking on these badges over the next year. So we'll probably see a lot of cool projects. That is the open hardware badge. There is a new extension community made for Visual Studio Code. This is from Joe. Joe wanted to bring the entire CircuitPython workflow into a single place in VS Code. This was inspired by Scott Hanselman's blog post in the VS Code Arduino extension. And it's in the Visual Studio Marketplace right now. The open serial console will prompt you for a serial port to connect to. Then I'll display the serial port output from the board attached to the board. So if you like tools like Mew but you like to use things like Visual Studio Code, this is for you. This looks really nice. I might try this out. I love how there's like, it's not too much.  I like how this is, it's very simple. Like the simplicity is important. Next up, Jay made a really fantastic tutorial on how to make a CircuitPython GPS locator. So these are my favorite. These are single serving devices.  Well, a phone's not going to work all the time. And a phone can get turned off in a variety of ways. Or you can install an app where now you have the overhead of a phone and you have a monthly service plan and all that stuff. This is a very straightforward, easy to make GPS that displays all sorts of things. 3D printed case. Very cool project. Thank you for sharing it, Jay. Biggest news, I think, microlab. You can crunch numbers fast with CircuitPython. Jepler worked on this. And it is one of the neatest things I've seen to come to CircuitPython. Because now you can do a bunch of number crunching tasks in CircuitPython. And about 10 times as fast. Yes, for sensors. For doing like stuff that you want to visualize. I mean, CircuitPython, it's powerful, but it's interpreted. So if you have, you know, an array of 100 numbers and you want to perform an operation all of them, you would normally have to go through and iterate through that array, which, you know, it takes more time in Python. Using uLab, it's like NumPy. It's the same thing. It's like you have an array type. And they can perform operations very quickly in all of them. And because it's low level written in C instead of doing the interpreter for every step, it's very, very fast. You can do a lot of mathematical features. It's not exactly like NumPy, but it's heavily inspired by NumPy. So if you use NumPy, you'll be like, oh yeah, I know what this does. It's familiar. But obviously we couldn't fit everything. We did the IoT design week with Microchip, wizard of make Bob Martin. So if you want to see this, you can go to Microchip's YouTube channel and see the entire hour long session. Thank you so much Microchip for broadcasting this. This was a virtual event planned ahead of time and it was not because something was canceled, by the way. So handy. We were ready to go. Yeah, we already did it. Last week we did IonMPI and we did an introduction to the ESP32 S2 and talked a little bit about how we're going to run Circuit Python and tiny USB on it. Check out that segment. It's also newsletter in beta, adafruitdaily.com. And we're going to have the newsletter, the blog post and everything go out about the same time each week. So check that out if you want to get the latest and greatest on where you can get these new chips and more. And of course, some of the things that we're doing with Circuit Python. This is kind of cool. This is a Game of Life made with Circuit Python. Brandon made this and it's on a screen and it's staring, starring the one and only Linca. Yeah, look at the tile action. So this is using the built-in tile capability of DisplayIO. You can't tell. This is the Feather M4 airlift featherwing plus Ethernet Circuit Python. It snakes its way to Cat5. That's right. We got that working this week. Kevin made a video on panelizing Circuit boards using KeyCat. This one happens to be the Circuit Brain board powered by Circuit Python. This is another business example of using Circuit Python. This crowd supply is going to be going live and you'll be able to purchase these boards that Kevin made and Circuit Python is built right in. Yay. This is from Ben, who makes these really cute Lego minifig looking Circuit Python things. And if you look at the video really closely, he was like, oh, Circuit Python 5 came out. New version. Let me see how long it takes. And it was about the same time it took to tweet. That's how fast. This is kind of cool. Greg got the Circuit Python REPL that Zobbs ported over to FOMA running on the Orange Crab. That's exciting. Liz is working on this very cool step counter based on Clue, Circuit Python. Special shout out and thanks to Novelbits. They do an excellent Bluetooth industry report. And this is like when like a Bluetooth celebrity, you know, SEMPA, I noticed us. This is neat. They are the standard for I think the best Bluetooth newsletter. I do subscribe to a bunch and it was great to see our board in there. So if you haven't already, check out the Novelbits Bluetooth industry report, especially if you're into this stuff. Another thing that was posted, this is from GojimiPy. They published their quest to get Circuit Python on a soft RISC 5 CPU on the ECP5 FPGA for the RIDONA ULX3X. That was not far. I got through it. Anyways, Circuit Python for RISC 5. FPGA running RISC 5 and then Circuit Python on top of that. Yeah. This is a really neat Circuit Python based light up glove complete with Iron Man Paul ring. Nice. Fancy. And then Ladyita, what do you call a gathering in a group of crickets? Do you know? I heard, I don't know. An orchestra. An orchestra. Yeah. So this is an orchestra of crickets and Circuit Python. This is kind of cool. Sam posted up some great X-rays of some boards including the Feather Compatible Orange Crab. We're sending Sam out a bunch of our boards and hopefully we'll have some cool X-ray photos of them soon. Oh, it had posted up a delightful creation. This is a feather wing prototype using the Bantam tools mill. It's a classy way to display seven segments. Toot. This is a feather adapter for the Onion Omega by Tisham and the files are available on GitHub. This is the clue running on a Gigglebot and this is from ClioQC. So all of the micro bit accessories that we've been testing out have been working out so far and a lot of people in the community has been testing them as well. Microbit released kind of good time in classroom.microbit.org. You can do this virtual or in person and have kids learn about Python or make code all inside their interface. It works really well. We have a guide that we also just published. Can you post it up a new guide? This is for putting Badger, our series of programs and more that lets you make name badges and anything for any type of event that you want. Post it up a video on doing Morse code between a couple of different clues. What can the clue do? And last up, we're working with our teams. We're expecting PyCon to make announcements. So far, PyCon is still on. It's April 15th to the 23rd. We'll see if that continues to happen. However, we are prepared for anything, including making sure people can tune into anything if it goes virtual. And that is the Python on Hardware News for this week.


So, the potential Chinese supply chain attack is still pretty unanswered. I feel like we're playing a really high stakes game of poker here. We have security researchers such as Snire, Krebs, Tavis Ormandy, Apple, AWS. Every company, our own government, denial. But Bloomberg is doubling down and says it's true. Now what's at stake here? It's reputation or the reputation of security researchers and the trust of all these people involved that are denying it. So either AWS and Apple are completely blissfully unaware or are in complete denial about it. We just don't know. And I've had people ask me because I did post about this before and this is something I think a lot about when it comes to security and supply chain is a huge problem when it comes to security. It is the most likely place for these attacks to happen. And I'll leave links to all the things we're going to talk about here below. But let's start with people getting things wrong, especially well-respected security researchers who have a lot of credibility to market. And that leads me all the way back to bad bios. This is a few years ago when Dragos Rui, I think they say his last name, he's the organizer of Pone Owned, well-respected security researcher and became convinced there was a persistent threat called bad bios. Biosas could talk to each other via a sound transmission. This is almost absurd and turned into a giant hoopla back just like this did of what do you mean my system can be hacked when it's air gapped like it's just sitting here. And a sound of ultrasonic nature can be sent to it beyond my range of hearing cutting through interference and being able to do this. The good news is security researchers went to work on this concept. It is wildly crazy, but turned out to be plausible. And I say plausible because let's break something down real quick. Provided the people involved in let's say they could create this bad bios theory and they were able to somehow use the PC speaker to send bios information across. So you need a transmit system, you need a listening system, which most computers do have a microphone and speaker attached that the bios could access provided it could somehow fit the drivers in here and everything else. And then we have to have another one that's also infected waiting for the next part of the control to come to it, which by the way, bios is by default don't listen to speakers. But then someone did a whole paper on it and calculated, OK, how much could that transfer be? And we calculated, OK, let's say a six megabyte bios, 20 bits a second was the max transfer rate ideal conditions means it would take about 27 days of these two systems sitting next to each other, cutting through interference in an ideal situation to get the data from one bios to another. So you're back to plausible and we all went to sleep on this and we realized bios is are still a potential for attack. It prompted a lot of security researchers, a lot of articles, but the reality is no one ever proved this that was absolutely possible or that it was occurring. And it's been five years. And I don't know if this took a notch off Drago's credibility, but he hasn't really talked money more about it like and say, I found it. I proved it. Let me show you these companies are doing it. It just became a plausible idea versus his original claim was it's real. It happened in my lab. So you can see how these are things have happened before. It makes us look deeper, which I think is usually important at the security. But they're not always plausible. And that's kind of how I'm starting to feel with this whole thing here. So I've read through Brian Krebs, his whole breakdown of it. And I've read through Bruce Schneier's breakdown of it. And we've at least had an update from one of the sources that they mentioned where they said Apple removed servers because of a problem. And there's an update on this article that I referenced before. And it says a source familiar at Apple told ours that a compromised firmware affected servers in Apple's design lab, not an active series service. The firmware, according to the source, was downloaded directly from Supermicro support site and a firmware is still hosted there. So there's a problem with the firmware. This is different than that. Now, is this an attack on there? Maybe someone goes, well, you need the updated firmware. And that's what activates this as a BIOS update. We just don't know. But it just seems more and more implausible. Tavis Armady, I've been following him for a long time. He's an amazing security researcher at Project Zero has had a ton of really deep technical security flaws that he's found and properly does it. And he's tweeting that it doesn't think it's real. He just, it's one of those, we're going to have to lay the cards down. And we've got an Apple insider says nobody internally knows what's going on with Bloomberg story hack. It just seems like if this was a real thing, someone would step forward. Someone's been sitting on this information, waiting, you tell. And Bloomberg gathered up the research. Now, Bloomberg is a big news organization. So their credibility is in line. Their basis for this is pretty incredible, but they're going to have to show their cards. You can't just say anonymous sources. This isn't how security works. When people like Tavis, who's a White Hat hacker for Project Zero, find something that goes through a disclosure method and we discuss it. Everyone scrutinized the bad bios until we kind of realized it wasn't quite the thing we thought it was. So there's a lot going on here. And I think part of the other side of it is we've seen super microstock take a big hit. And I don't know if this is related at all. This is just Bloomberg reporting on the markets, but it is interesting. Everyone's fleeing China stock is for understump 1.4 billion. So there's also the stock angle to this. Do these people have some vested stock in this whole thing? Were they perhaps short selling? I don't know. A lot of times follow the money. Is it journalism here or is there something else at play? And I don't like to sound conspiracy theorist at all. But it's just so interesting to me that Bloomberg has this bombshell of an article. They're doubling down on it. The denials are all the way around. So either we have some giant conspiracy, but even general security researchers that are not, you know, tinfoil hat in terms of the way they look at things like Bruce Schneier, like he's very conscious of security, talks about some of the problems related to this. But the other side of it is everyone is just saying, OK, it's plausible, but you're going to have to show some proof. And I think there's good coming out of it that it's plausible. Do I think you should rip out every super microserver you have? This is the other confusing part. I'm not sure which servers were affected if I'm to believe the illustrations on the Bloomberg article. It looks like it was some of the blade servers. I am not 100% sure. And I wish they listed which models. I wish they listed something because let's tell you, this is from a few years ago, which means these servers have been probably changed out or on the open market and we can get ahold of them. Let us at least know the server numbers so you don't even have to tell us the anonymous sources. Just tell us where to look and people will look and I don't understand why they're not doing that. You drop us where to look. You'll find security researchers de-soldering, decoupling, and removing all the components piece by piece and examining needs. Once we get that information, just throw it into general public like that. That's generally what a news article can do. You don't have to reveal your sources because they want to remain anonymous for reasons they have, which may be very valid because there's a lot at stake here, but please let us know the motherboard model. And if you're not going to, you're going to fold your deck. You're going to say, well, we just published a story, but we can't provide any evidence. Providing the motherboard model would not compromise these people's identity. It would actually validate the claim. I don't know. Let's show your cards is kind of what I'm feeling here. It makes me feel more and more that this is just an implausible idea and a really big hit piece, but I don't know. We got to see something here. It's really interesting, but hopefully we will get some more auditing of the supply chain because that's ultimately what I think we're going to get out of this. I'm not feeling it as much as I did when I first read the article because, well, no evidence has come forward. Give me a few days. Throw me some evidence. Throw something out here, and they haven't so far. All right. Thanks. I'll keep you updated. I'll be doing this as more of this information comes out. So it's pretty deep and fascinating. Thanks for watching. If you like this video, go ahead and click the thumbs up. Leave us some feedback below to let us know any details which you like and didn't like as well because we love hearing a feedback. Or if you just want to say thanks, leave a comment. If you wanted to be notified of new videos as they come out, go ahead and subscribe and the bell icon that lets YouTube know that you're interested in notifications. Hopefully they send them as we've learned with YouTube. Anyways, if you want to contract us for consulting services, you go ahead and hit launch systems.com. And you can reach out to us for all the projects that we can do and help you. We work with a lot of small businesses, IT companies, even some large companies. And you can farm different work out to us or just hire us as a consultant to help design your network. Also, if you want to help the channel in other ways, we have a Patreon. We have affiliate links. You'll find them in the description. And you'll also find recommendations to other affiliate links and things you can sign up for on launch systems.com. Once again, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.


Really, Gigi, we have to believe her. We have to believe the woman who's made these videos.  In the days following, Trisha Paytas, coming out as trans, there's been a lot of reactions. And this may leave some of you wondering, how does Trisha Paytas say so oblivious to why the community is reacting the way it is? It seems perfectly clear, but it's like she's not seeing it. It makes you wonder how something could be right in front of you without even realizing it. And how could someone who has so many videos being made about them from members of the trans community still not understand? In this video, we're gonna try to get to the bottom of it. What is up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul, where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, what I try to do is take different topics going on in the YouTube community, try to see what lessons we can learn from them, and get the wheels turning a little bit with a nice little blend of philosophy and psychology and all that. And tomorrow I will be making a video about how Blair White's Trisha Paytas video landed me as a subscriber to Blair White. So anyways, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell because I'll be making that video tomorrow and I make a bunch of other cool content, all right? And those of you who are new here, every video that we do, we donate 20% to a good cause. So this video, 20% will be donated to the Trevor Project and they're all about helping the LGBTQ youth, all right? So not only will 20% of the ad revenue from this video go towards the Trevor Project, but I've also provided a link down in the description and the pinned comment below if you would like to donate to them directly. All right, so as most of you know, by now chances are while you're here, you know that Trisha Paytas came out as trans just a couple of days ago and there's been a big reaction from the community. And since then, she's actually made two follow-up videos. All right, one of them, she was crying in it, the next one, she titled I'm Questioning. The one before that, yeah, it was an apology video, which wasn't really an apology. But anyways, if you watch them, you're watching these and you're just like, how is she not understanding? How is she not getting why people are so upset with her? And some big creators, like I mentioned, Blair White made a video, Calvin Guerra made a video.  Many from the trans community have made videos and they've garnered an accumulative hundreds of thousands of views. So like we just discussed, Trisha Paytas has come out with not one, but two more videos since then. And if you watch them, it doesn't really address the valid concerns that the trans community is actually bringing up. So you would think with members of the trans community discussing this, placing their criticisms, you would think that Trisha Paytas would kind of rethink what's going on, but she isn't. Why is that? So it's easy to look at Trisha Paytas and say, that was a dumb decision. And why would anybody do that? But the reality is, all of us make really dumb decisions.  And something that I try to do and something I try to teach others is, how do we minimize the amount of dumb decisions that we make, all right? So one of the awesome books that I picked up a few months ago when it came out was Mental Models by Shane Parrish. But the most recent book I finished was Thinking in Bets from Annie Duke, all right? So Annie Duke is a professional poker player, but she also goes out and she talks to different companies and different organizations and things like that to try to help people make better decisions, right? Like I don't care who you are, don't you think if you could make some better decisions with your life, like it would be good? Like there's none of us. I can't think of one person out there whose life is just so perfect where they couldn't benefit from making some better decisions, all right? But one of the things I love about Annie Duke's book, Thinking in Bets, is that she dives into so much psychology in this book. And something that she brought up was the psychology of moral reasoning, all right? Something I'm always curious about when I'm looking at Trisha Payness's situation, if I'm looking at the decisions I'm making, when I'm looking at how people defend their beliefs and their ideas and don't really see what's going on, I'm like, why is that? And moral reasoning is actually a fantastic explanation for it. And here is a little bit of what it's about. This comes from an article from Psychology Today. It says, motivated reasoning operates in much more personal spheres as well. For example, it is seen as a mechanism people commonly use to persevere a favorable identity, particularly in Western cultures. To maintain positive self-regard, people unwittingly discount unflattering or troubling information that contradicts their self-image. Individuals engage in motivated reasoning as a way to avoid or lessen cognitive dissonance.  Rather than reexamining a contradiction, it's much easier to dismiss it. So what does that mean, all right? Motivated reasoning is not a mental illness. It is not part of a mental disorder.  All of us do. Something that I've really been trying to pay attention to, not only with my videos, what I say, and my own opinions, but I've been monitoring other people as well. And something I find fascinating is how many people like to toss around the word objective and things like that, right? Most everything is subjective unless you're talking about the laws of physics. But anyways, this explains why it's so hard to change our minds about something. This explains why we can look at different situations and say, how are you not seeing what I'm seeing? Based on the psychology of moral reasoning, we are so easy to dismiss the new evidence that is presented to us.  Oh, this person doesn't truly understand what I'm going through. All these other things, it's so easy for us to zone it out, right? We become these magnets for things that confirm our beliefs. So if you want a great example of what this looks like, here's some clips from Trisha Paytas' most recent video. I should say, I should actually say, there was a couple of people, a few emails and DMs from people who've felt the same way. I wanted to read them word for word, but I don't think it's by place to share other people's stories, but there were so many people, just one off the bat. I just want to read this little paragraph. It doesn't say too much about the person, but identity isn't always clear to us in a way that we can fully understand or explain. It's sometimes the words don't come to us in a way that other people can comprehend, only we can truly feel the way that we feel. You're correct in stating that people don't always transition because it's a hard and very depressing thing to go through. I myself don't think I can, and they say fully transition. I know that's a lot of people don't like that term, but they say I don't think I can fully transition. And even I still make up in hair and looking cute in Delta from time to time that doesn't necessarily make us women. That's just an occasional preference as far as style and appearance goes. It doesn't make the inside any less valid. It will take a lot of time for you fully to get used to talking about yourself in a way that isn't how you were raised. By that I mean it'll be a while before you even see yourself as a boy. There are times I misgender myself because I'm so used to having to wear the girly costume that I was given at birth as part of your journey and it doesn't make you any less of what you say you are or how you feel. So when it feels like people are against us and we're trying to hold onto our belief with that kung fu grip, we gravitate towards comments, towards people who confirm our beliefs, right? So in your situation, in my situation, maybe this is finding people in our friend groups or in our family that will just agree with us.  And I was a full blown drug addict and alcoholic. So this is one of the reasons why we need to discuss this and learn about this because in some situations, it can be deadly. When we start pushing away factual evidence, right, or other points of view, just so we surround ourselves with ideas that already confirm our beliefs. And the strangest part is that we start to really hone in on other things going on in the world and maybe it's something a complete stranger says that also confirms our beliefs. I think talking about these things is important. And I'm not victimizing myself but I think in general, we just all need to be more accepting and loving. I just watched something on Ellen the other day about her being friends with former President Bush, George W. Bush. And I just thought what she said was really amazing and important and I have it on my Instagram story. So let me just see if I can play this real quick. Well, we don't share the same beliefs that I have. We're all different and I think that we've forgotten that that's okay that we're all different. Just because I don't agree with someone on everything doesn't mean that I'm not gonna be friends with them. When I say be kind to one another, I don't mean only to people that think the same way that you do, I mean be kind to everyone. So like right there, right there, when you're going through a certain experience like Trisha Paytas is, it's easy to see what Ellen DeGeneres said and said, oh my God, this fits perfectly with my experience. Like you ever been listening to a song and oh my God, it is just fitting perfectly with what you're going through. The way our brains operate is that we are looking for that. We are looking for these connections, especially because we are wired to try to find some kind of connection. And this typically happens when we identify with music, sometimes movies, sometimes TV shows, sometimes books and things like that. If we're feeling lonely, it's a lot easier to kind of pick out lyrics or storylines or characters and connect to them, right? They understand how we feel, all right? So the point of this video is you, me, all of us, we need to start recognizing when moral reasoning is coming into play. Is it crowding our judgments? Is it crowding the decisions that we're making? Is it making us oblivious to other points of view? You see what I mean? All right, but anyways, that's all I got for this video. But before I let you go, I just want to send out a huge thank you to everybody who watches my videos like I have been happier making content the last, I don't know, week or so since I started doing videos like this and just, I love taking what I learn about psychology, philosophy and things like that and just kind of intertwining it with everyday lives and using different things to give context. Like, I don't know, I love it, makes me really happy. So all of you who have been leaving like good comments and stuff and you're enjoying this too, maybe it's my motivated reasoning going into it but I really appreciate it and I'm having a blast and I'm glad you enjoy it. All right, anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And don't forget, tomorrow I'll be making a video about how Blair White's Trisha Pay this video made me a subscriber. All right, and before I let you go, I want to send out a huge, huge thank you to everybody who supports the channel over on Patreon as well as everybody who supports the channel by buying books and merch and everything like that. And make sure to follow me over on Instagram and Twitter at the Rewired Soul because yesterday I did a sale on my books Rewire Your Anger and Rewire Your Anxiety. So if you're not following me on social media, you might have missed it, baby. All right, but anyways, thanks again for watching. I'll see you next time.


Hi there, my name is Ken Mayer and I'm gonna be your instructor for this course. Over the last 30 some years, I've been working in some field of information technology. Whether it was with mainframe systems, operating the old dumb terminals back in those days, to the fledglings of Microsoft back when all they had was DOS to Windows from all varieties, you know, from going through 95, well, well before that with Windows 3.1, but then 95 and then ME and all the rest, all the way up into our current technologies. I've done a lot of work in the virtual environment with Hyper-V and with some other competitor products. I've done a lot of work in the security field over this time as well. So I hope that as we talk about this system center, that I will be able to share with you the skills and the knowledge and the work that I've done into helping you understand what you need to know about the design of this private cloud. Well, we're gonna talk about exactly what is system center and all of the components that make it up. So that's our goal is to kind of give you this preview of all of the different technologies we're gonna talk about throughout our course. So we're gonna start off first by having a discussion of what is system center. First of all, it is a suite of management tools. No longer can you purchase just one or two of the components. When you purchase system center, you're licensing it for the entire suite, although you can choose which ones you want to install, which of those components you'd like to look at or use. What our goal here is gonna be is to take you through, as I said, a preview. So you have an understanding about what each of these components does as we get into each of these modules that are gonna talk about them and how we use them in the management of the cloud. So we'll have our discussions about operations manager, the configuration manager, the service manager, orchestrator, the data protection manager and the virtual machine manager. Now as I was saying, the system center is a suite of components licensed as the entire suite and it's up to you what you use. We no longer have to go through the hassles like we did in some of the history of managing multiple servers or multiple databases like we did before. It wasn't unusual if you were running something like the system management server, SMS and trying to deal with that and then figuring out how can you use configuration manager at the same time to help you or can they talk to each other? Can we make them work or do I have to have different administrators in the different databases and the different servers and have to take my single job that I'm trying to accomplish and find a way to split it out and to utilize these different technologies and that's what we went through. Microsoft has spent a lot of time fully integrating this product together. It's not what it was when they first imagined some of these products, some of them up to eight years ago. So now what we're gonna look at as we talk about it is how they work together and what they do as individual components and hopefully give you at least the preview of the cross integration benefits that we have now with this as a suite of components. The main focus I would say of the operations manager is monitoring of the ongoing health of whatever it is that you have running within your network. Whether it's looking at the cloud, looking at the components of a cloud, just watching a couple of servers, it's designed to basically help us as we focus on the health of our systems and the health means more than just an outage, it means poorly performing as well. So it goes by the name system center operations manager and basically as an organization when you lay down that base configuration of your systems and keep them patched and updated, operation manager's job is to just monitor the ongoing health as well as the applications that are installed on the systems. What basically you could think of is for all of these servers that we may be wanting to monitor, whether it's a server, maybe it's a Hyper-V host that I usually draw a little bit longer with the indication that there's virtual machines running inside, whether it's an individual computer component, maybe it's the switch that they're all connected to, maybe the routers, the network devices. It is a full, as I said, suite just of itself tool of being able to monitor everything that's out there. It's crucial that we are able to track and be proactive and to have something that can react to issues as they occur. We can create specific rules that look at normal operations and if something falls out of the standards, at minimum somebody gets notified. What you're gonna see is that as you put operations manager together, there are many components, but it does start with the first root management server. And you may, depending on the size of your network, have other management servers that are assisting and working on the capabilities of this process of gathering information. But I wanna focus, just as I said, to give you this preview of what happens. So RMS is gonna work as you're gonna discover by installing software on all of these devices that they call an agent. The agent's job is to return information as it detects problems, as it's monitoring processes, as it's monitoring the hardware, and it logs that information to the RMS server. As an administrator, you, of course, have the ability to connect into this thing through a console screen, whether the console is directly on the server or sitting at your desktop. If you're out in the world of the internet with the web, you can connect to this thing through that internet to an web-based server that can run a web console so that you can still look and maintain all of the information that's happening. But as you take this, and just as an example of what RMS can do, it can be programmed to respond to events that occur, whether it's an actual event or if it's an alert, if it's a status change, it can respond to these things to help us understand when there's a problem in the network and to help us with as quick a remediation as we can. As a matter of fact, we did say you can create a series of rules. We could have a rule that was designed to detect, let's say that a service has stopped, and if the service has stopped, we can write a rule that says to go out there and go turn that service back on so that we can get that operational again if we wanted to. Now that's a very simplistic form of what this service and server can do. As I said, one of the other rules may have been to go hit an exchange server and send out emails to those people who need to know about things that have gone wrong. So there's plenty of options that we can use with RMS. It can even look for that person who is at home. As I said, if I had to go through the internet, we have gateway services that you can use to still have that agent talk to the gateway and then relay your information to the RMS server so we can manage those things that are remote from our network and do so securely over an unsecure internet connectivity. This has, of course, its own database to store information that you may use to create your baselines to be able to know what the norms are so you can detect and determine with your rules as to whether or not you're out of the normals or the normal settings. So I haven't, of course, hit every single key point that there is with the operations manager, but hopefully I've given you kind of like I was wanting an overview of what this does for us. And it's important that we have that overview because at the end of this, when I talk about each of these products, I'll try to give you kind of a focus about how the different components within this suite can interact with each other. When it comes to configuration manager, as it says its job is to help you with imaging, updating, updating programs, updating settings, upgrading the capabilities, system patch management. It really is, I guess you could say, that it starts by laying down an image of an operating system. And we can do that on a bare metal machine and we can adjust those images as we send them out there. It can work with servers or clients. So as we think about how well configuration manager can manage things that we need to do and to put automation in there, then it makes sense to use its technologies for that purpose, just that automation. So as I said, I can throw down an image and suddenly have servers getting up and ready to run. Those images can be customized. Customized meaning that after I put the image on there, I can then add other programs if I wanted to. Over time, I can be used as a server to maintain my updates, my hot fixes, my service packs. It's a great tool that helps us in being able to get consistency. The goal here is to, as I said, to add that automation so that these things are done, either scheduled or on a manual basis. But one of the great things is, when it comes to doing updates, as an example, who says that it can only do one of these at a time? Its goal is to do whichever systems, whatever updates, whatever upgrades you want and to be able to hit more than one. If a system is asleep and its network card is capable of a wake on LAN, I should say the configuration manager will reach out there, wake that machine up, do the updates that it needs, let it go back down into its hibernation or completely turned off state. Now, we do that through the way in which we configure the rules. As I said, it will continually patch and update systems, gives you the ability to push out new software, you can make some of your rules based on specific templates and guidelines. The other thing that it does for us is it keeps track of our inventory, keeping track of what we have out there as far as hardware, keeping track of what operating systems we have, keeping track to see that you have the proper licenses for the software that are out there so you don't find yourself in any type of the civil or criminal violations through piracy of software. As I said, it has remote control capabilities, it gives you the ability to make sure that everything is being maintained and again, it does so usually with a series of agents that are involved so that we can have that ongoing communications with the configuration manager. It is important to know that again you can have many configuration manager servers that are out there working for a larger enterprise. Some may be remotely connected so it's easier to have staging computers where maybe your updates, your images and everything else are put closer to where they're needed. But again, the configuration manager is a way of making, I guess we could say, an easier task of being able to do the work that we would normally have to do on a day by day basis. It'll take care of those schedules for us, it will keep our centers up to date and it will, of course, hopefully add consistency and reduce the potential of having errors in the way in which we install software or updates. Well, so far we've talked a lot about tools that are going out there and doing updates or gathering information and so here's one with service manager. That's about management. Management of the processes and change control. Now, we can make an argument that service management can actually make changes for you but not on its own and we're gonna talk a little bit about how it all relates together but that's, its goal is to help us when it comes down to the actual management of whatever it is that we may see like an incident. An incident that could be reported by a person could be entered in manually, could have been discovered automatically of problems and there's a little bit of difference between an incident and a problem and we'll talk about that as we get into this portion of what we're doing and of course, as I said, change to be able to help us with the planning of changes. So when we think of this service manager as I've been doing, just put it here in the middle of my network, the goal of service manager is to basically allow users at one point if we want to to be able to connect and report an incident or a problem that they can talk about on outage or something that's poorly performing. Maybe they've been trying to log on to this server and they're not getting anywhere. And that can then lead to the notification of our admin staff or the IT department to let them know about what the issues are and to be able to start a process of being able to go through and actually figure out what's wrong. Now this is the one probably of all of these that I'm gonna talk the least of at the moment but you're gonna find out that this service manager is really kind of in the middle of all of the things that systems we can do. Of course, there's always gonna be a related database that we use to be able to store the information of the jobs that we're doing. But the big thing about service management is that as we go through an incident or a problem, besides it being reported, let's say, or even change, then it can be worked on to plan. By planning on it, you can associate a variety of knowledge-based articles. You can upload other files, maybe a diagram, maybe a white paper that discusses potential problems or potential issues. It goes through an approval process. The approval process is to finally basically sign off on the plan and then, of course, it can give us the action plan that we need to take care of this, whatever the item is, the work item, I guess is the right term. It'll help us with that action plan that we can develop, we can follow it and then, of course, when we're done, we can then report what's been accomplished. And so it takes us through that in actually many more steps. But it is important that we understand that it is just that change control, that process management to add actual management capabilities into our system, into managing and maintaining our cloud.  It gives us either a text-based or graphical-based overview of, let's just say, steps of work to be done. And what that means is, basically, that as it sounds, as an Orchestrator, we are going to use this to help get things done that none of the other system center products might be able to do just right out of the box. We can create specific steps, specific workflows that might not be normal if maybe you have some specialized process or you need to launch a script. And so what you're gonna be finding here is a runbook designer.  And on this runbook designer, you'll have a list of items here that you can click and drag onto the screen. And you could say, all right, let's start here by waiting for an alert. Ah, I see, now I'm gonna give it away. Where's that alert gonna come from? Well, it could come from Operations Manager. It could come from the Service Manager. It could be something that we initiated on ourselves. And after that alert is done, it can then say, all right, there's my start. That's what I do. Let's say that the alert is, like I said before, some process or service has stopped on a system. Then we can have another step that could ask the question, is that service actually running or not? If it's a no, then we might say, all right, then let's start that service. If it's a yes, then maybe we'd say stop it. Maybe there's a problem with it. And as the next step, come back over here and start it up again. And so what you can do is you are orchestrating a series of steps, step by step by instructions that will actually go out and proactively do these actions that we're requesting it to do. So, you know, it's not just as easy as, as I said, starting a process or a service. Like I said, it could launch a script. It could process a report. For that matter, we could have it move data from one system to another. Orchestrator is designed to help us come up with a way of taking care of our tasks through the automation process. That we set these up and we can run them whenever it is called for. Whether it's gonna do this all on its own automatically, as I just talked about with this service starting or having a problem, or whether or not it's based on any number of things that could start this entire process. They used to call it Apollos, but now, of course, it's called Orchestra. And it is a big part of this, of the entire system center suite. They like to tell us that it is an end-to-end solution because it can work with multiple different platforms. As I said, if I created a process to move data from one machine to another, then that means Orchestra is reaching out to the first machine, telling it to issue some command to transfer data to another machine. And of course, again, I'm making a very simple workflow. In fact, they actually encourage your workflows to be somewhat short, so that doesn't get so complicated that it's a little harder to fathom. They have looping capabilities. They have weighting capabilities for the logic of the steps that you need to go through. And that's what it's designed to do. It's, again, it's something that does have to really work with the other system center products. And I hope to be able to diagram that for you and talk about how they can kind of all interrelate, at least to some extent, because the goal, again, is to give you this preview so you kind of understand what this tool is doing when we begin to have our discussions about how it works within the cloud. Well, I'm gonna draw a big hard drive. Data Protection Manager is just that. It's a tool with a specialized backup and recovery capability. And what Data Protection Manager does, and which is really kind of cool about this, is it's a central location of being able to set up backups. So I can have many databases, many servers out here that I'm going to be doing a backup of, exchange servers, file servers, and it was designed to work with these different types of servers specifically. So F for file server. And it does work like so many other things, is that we install an agent on these devices. And that agent's job is to be able to interact with the Data Protection Manager. And what it can do for me is it can issue orders to, let's say, backup a file. And when we back up that file, that file you're gonna learn could, or the files could go to another disk somewhere, which you could then transfer to tape. Don't know if I can draw one of those old fashioned cassette tapes. You could go from one disk to another disk and then send it off into a cloud service that handles the backup. These backups you'll find out can be automated to every 15 minutes if you wanted to. Or as infrequently as you want it to be able to do the backups. And the backups are efficient. You're gonna find out that maybe I have this one really big file inside of this database. And so the first time it's slow because I'm backing up this entire file. And once that file's been backed up and somebody comes and makes a couple changes, I only need to go and take those little changes and merge them onto the original file so that I have them up to date with what's occurring. And that's, again, another one of those great things that can help us. Now we know that the goal here in backing up the data is to fit with some sort of business continuity plan or disaster recovery plan. Or just to protect you from the loss of information whether accidental or malicious. And that's why we call it data protection. It acts as a backup to clients, to server file systems as I said, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL, Hyper-V, the actual guest sessions on Hyper-V if I want to. And it does it on a continuous basis. And I may have so many machines that I may have many of these DPM servers out there. But as I said again, it's central management. I can manage them all from one point and have them all being responsible for the communications and performing the backups. It's also something that will do restores quite well. So if I did back up the information as you saw my arrow going this direction, I can restore. I can restore to a certain point in time if I want to. I can also do just a file type of restore if that's all I want. I can even allow a user who is just sitting on their workstation who knows that they're working with files that they had backed up and they can make a self-service request for the permission to restore a file and DPM would help them if you get granted that permission to be able to do that simple restore. So that's where it is in the world of protection and of course of being able to restore. And it's more than just a restore of a file or of a folder but you can in order to a point in time but we can restore all the way to a completely dead system if we wanted to. It was designed to do all of it right together. The system state if you need to gather the files and folders or whatever it is that your goal is as far as managing these backups. So it's a really kind of cool tool. I can't wait to talk to you a little bit more about it as we get into it so you have a better understanding about how it goes through the backup process and how efficient it is in the backup process but it is really I think one of my favorite tools out of all of the system center. It's always operations manager as well but just for the I think the big changes that we had in the technology that this is just a fantastic part of the suite. Well the virtual machine manager it says it's a Hyper-V host management. So you know I've drawn already a little Hyper-V host. I just call it a host. And on that host maybe several virtual machines that are running that we need to manage. Maybe there are some slots open so for room for memory and the rest of it. And of course there are the understanding that we may have many different hosts out there that we need to work with. And so the goal of VMM is from a central location to be able to administratively work with all of these different hosts. It'll also work with the storage area network in the background that a lot of these images may be running on or virtual machines may be stored on or at least their virtual hard drives. It has its own database for its own configuration commands so that we can move the VMM server anywhere that we want it to. And what this virtual machine manager can do is just really help facilitate all aspects of the virtual environment. We have a library that we'll talk about that we can store virtual machines in. And with very few commands we can go to the library, pull out a virtual machine and have it automatically install on another host. Or if one of the hosts fails I can then take that virtual machine that may have its virtual hard drive in the storage area network and repoint it to another host so I can bring that machine back online. So I have a faster recovery. Or if I know I want to take a host down for maintenance I can make a virtual machine move from one location to another we call a live migration. One of the coolest things though but I think now with 2012 is that we can gather the components that we want to put together and tell the VMM that we want to make this a private cloud. And the virtual machine manager's gonna go out there and take all of those components that we listed and make it become a cloud service that we can manage as that one service. Like I said, it just goes on and on with the capabilities of some of the stuff that is available to us. And its job is to take over from you having to go to each individual host or to remote management of each host and having to manually take care of a lot of the issues that I've just talked about. I almost don't know where to begin in talking about putting it all together but I'll start with the server. And this server is, let's say, crucial to us and it's hosting an application. And in fact, let's say it's hosting a web page. And that web page, and you'll see this diagram so many times as we go through here, they have some servers that are operating some business logic for us. Maybe some of them are connecting to banks for credit cards. And others may be something specific for, I don't know, shipping products to people. And then in the background, I have a database that is keeping track of all of my transactions. All of the customer orders, maybe it's, I've just suddenly developed a distributed application. And all of these pieces need to be able to work for us and if they don't, then we have some problems. So one of the first things we talked about was the operations manager. Operations manager working with the agents installed on each of these components and reporting to operation manager will keep track of the performance, the counters on these devices. But it can also test applications for me as well. And it can test it as the server itself that it's on or can test it as a user. And we'll talk about some of those things. And of course, we're waiting for the potential of hearing about some sort of an alert or an event that's gonna trigger an action. Okay, well operations manager, let's say got an alert. One of the things I could do with that operations manager is send the alert off to my service manager. The service manager can then send my email off to people. And maybe my service manager will go out and register that alert over here with orchestra. An orchestra may have a run book that talks about what we need to do to be able to fix this particular problem. And so it can start going and doing whatever configuration commands are required to try to bring a service or a system back up online. And so right there, what I wanted to show you is a little bit of the interaction between these tools that we have. We could also, I said, have users. So send in an email to start a service plan, which may start something with the orchestra to handle whatever the issues are. Maybe orchestra realizes at some point it needs to work with a virtual machine manager to move a virtual machine from one location to the next so that with that virtual machine manager can then reach out and go to all the hosts into the virtual images or go to its library and start that process. If VMM suddenly encounters an error, it too can send an alert off to operations manager, which may, again, trigger something as a new service that's going out there. We could start a change request process here on the service manager. And that change request, again, may trigger something in orchestra to try to automatically implement the change. Or it may just start us in the process of being able to do real change management, which is to go through the steps of gathering information, of getting the supporting papers, of documentations, results of lab tests and the sign off process.  VMM may also rely on something like the data protection manager to tell all of the hosts on its hyper or to tell the hosts to maybe start doing backups of all of their virtual machines. And again, if there's a problem with that, we can see this, again, report errors. And nothing said that if there was an error that I couldn't report it directly to the service manager because I certainly can. And so again, I hope what you're seeing here is that there is an interaction and I haven't even gotten into all of the interactions between these product lines that are within the suite. But they all can bring a benefit. They can all help keep this network at its peak performance for us and to help us in recovering from so many different things that may have potentially been a slowdown or even an outage. But they do communicate. They work side by side with each other. Not installed on the same server, certainly. Oh, and the best part is, they're almost all of them are gonna report their information off to a data warehouse. And as I said, that data warehouse can then publish a widget that you can put on your dashboard or it may publish something to a SharePoint server so that people who are in the same SharePoint site could look at that information and have a good idea of how, you know, their particular interests are being served by the software or the hardware that's being monitored. And that's kind of what I mean by putting it all together. There certainly is a lot more to it. But the goal here is just to make sure that you understand that they truly do coexist and interact with each other. And they can through the, as complex of a situation as you want, you can add automation to try to recover from any potential damages that could occur in the network.