ISG News has posted a new item, 'How to keep your Windows XP Installations living on after End-of-Life'

As announced in an earlier post last year, Microsoft is going to end the support for Windows XP in April 2014.

After this date the central network security group of the ETH will frequently scan our public networks to identify any existing Windows XP machines. Every Windows XP detected by such a scan will be disabled on the network level since it is strictly prohibited to keep this operating system up and running on the public network of ETH.

Since we are aware that there may be Windows XP machines living on after the end-of-life date, we worked out a solution to support these situations and to help you not to get in conflict with the network usage regulations.

We founded a project called eXile which provides very locked down network environments that are monitored by advanced security techniques and provide excessive firewall setups. Furthermore eXile provides easy interfaces for you to manage your computers and overview the security state and network access to your machines in eXile.

You can send your machines to the eXile when they match one of the following scenarios:

Lab computers (controlling, collecting measure data, or monitoring other systems) Industrial computers Embedded systems

The following applications are not suitable for eXile and need to be migrated to a supported operating system:

Office Computers Computers on which internet access needs to be available Computers on which emails are received and sent Computers that provide any services to public computers in the internet

Please note that eXile should not be seen as an excuse not to migrate your Windows XP to a supported operating system as soon as possible. The purpose of eXile is really only to address those few machines that are somehow locked to their operating system.

Nevertheless we invented eXile to address the Windows XP end-of-live problem, it is capable to take up any other computer for which you want to have an extra level of security or on which you run any other outdated or insecure operating system.

If you think your remaining Windows XP computers are candidates to send to eXile, we would be happy if you could send a message to isg@phys.ethz.ch  and inform us about the number of computers and what application you are using these computers for. Later this month a web interface will be made available on https://exile.phys.ethz.ch/ where you can directly register every machine you want to send to eXile.

After eXile is fully online, another post will be submitted here.

You may view the latest post at https://nic.phys.ethz.ch/news/2014/02/07/how-to-keep-your-windows-xp-install...

You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Thomas Berchtold thomber@phys.ethz.ch