tech.sweetnam.eu

Recently I have upgraded all bar one of my Windows servers to server 2008. This included upgrading a Windows 2003 Active Directory controller. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that everything went perfectly well with absolutely no initial issues. However after a couple of days one very odd issue began rearing its head.

My Windows 2008 DNS server (PDC upgraded from 2003) occasionally decided that it can no longer resolve .uk domains. It doesn’t matter if it is .co.uk, ac.uk or whatever .uk it just flat out refuses to resolve them unless I restart the service.

A second Windows 2008 server that I installed DNS on as a secondary server has the exact same issue. After a couple of days it will just stop resolving .uk domains!

After plenty of head scratching and searching I finally discovered this article on technet.

It requires a bit of registry editing but what puzzles me is that if the problem has been fairly well known for almost a year (that technet article is dates 29th January 2009) why is the fix still a registry hack?

Microsoft have played a bit of a blinder. I’ve always found it a nightmare to set up ASP.net applications on IIS. Even getting PHP up and running and playing nice on IIS can be an absolute nightmare at times. No more however. If you are running IIS 6 or 7 then it is well worth your while installing Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer.

At the moment I’m using version 2 which is in beta but it is fine for production use albeit with one very unusual and weird quirk. If you try to install a package it will throw a wobbly if you are not in the Pacific, US and Canada time zone. So change the time zone before installing a web app and don’t forget to change it back once you are finished.

Rather than wax on about it myself I will just rehash Microsoft’s blurb:

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes it simple to download, install and keep up-to-date with the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer. In addition, install popular open source ASP.NET and PHP web apps with the Web PI.

If you have to administer or are setting up an IIS server then it’s an essential install!

Having being obsessed with computers and networks for many years I am always interested to find out the infrastructure behind some of the more popular sites out there. Quite often it is possible to glean bits of information here and there and occasionally an error may occur that offers a glimpse as to what is happening in the back end.

Today it is the turn of the Irish Independent. I got the error pictured here while browsing through their site. What is interesting about it is the domain name; externalcontent.independent.ie. As we can see it is an served by an Apache web server running on a Red Hat machine. However if you look at the error more closely it is a bit more telling.

The server in question (externalcontent.independent.ie) attempted to serve up an ad or content related to  loadzajobs.ie but was unable to contact the back end server. So this tells me that externalcontent.independent.ie is configured as a reverse proxy server and according to Netcraft is located in Ireland.

The primary domain; www.independent.ie, is hosted in the Netherlands and runs Apache Coyote, again according to Netcraft. Apache Coyote is a connector for Apache Tomcat. I find it curious that the main www site is located in the Netherlands but I suspect that it might have something to do with being connected to the Amsterdam Internet Exchange which is largest Internet Exchange in the world.

It does make me wonder why they chose AMS-IX given that here in Ireland we have INEX.

So what about the other national daily online newspapers?

The Irish Times is hosted on Linux and Apache and hosted in Dublin and The Irish Examiner is hosted on Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft IIS/6.

Although there are Irish editions of the Sun, The Star, The Daily Mail and The Mirror, none of them have specific Irish orientated sites but I will include them here nonetheless.

The Sun claims to be hosted on Linux and Apache however they use Akamai for content delivery so this could be inaccurate.

The Daily Star claims to be hosted on an unknown Unix and Apache and the Daily Mirror is hosted on RedHat Linux and Apache.

Finally the Daily Mail, like the Sun also uses Akamai for content delivery and claims to be running Linux and Apache.

It’s clear that Apache and Linux are the front runners.

Most people will buy a PC or a laptop based on a budget. At this present moment in time given the economy crashing down around us that is more true than ever. Typically the version of operating system pre-installed on a new machine rarely if ever figures in the purchasing decision. The end result is that most people will end up buying a laptop of the shelf of their local Tesco that is running Windows Vista Home Basic which as you may or may not know is a castrated version of Vista.

However with the upcoming Windows 7 Microsoft have listened to the criticism from customers that Vista was a stinking pile of excrement but they didn’t listen to the complaints about the many confusing versions available because they have just announced that Windows 7 will be shipping in six different editions.

As with Vista, the Ultimate edition will be the one everyone will want but few will get. You see after someone pays €500+ for a laptop they aren’t likely to shell out the same amount again to update their operating system to something vaguely functional.

If you include 32bit and 64bit versions then there becomes a total of 22 versions including those “Euro Specials” that don’t have Media Player installed.

Why do they insist on thinking that they know what is best for us? Just make a Home and Professional edition a la XP and everyone should be happy. The irony is that at the moment the Windows 7 beta is getting fantastic reviews but that is because everyone using the beta is using the Ultimate edition.

They are going to get some shock when the beta expires!

When I originally decided to host from home a few years back I had to do more than just decide to fire up a webserver and NAT from my router to it. Choosing an operating system and web server software and application server was another consideration. Did I want to run Linux? Solaris? Microsoft IIS? and did I want to go with PHP or ASP? What was I going to use as a CMS for my primary site and what blog software would suit my requirements?

Ultimately I decided on OpenBSD with Apache and PHP and Windows + IIS. Of course I knew that over time I would be constantly changing this and I needed a way to effictively manage the domains themselves and the sites and database dumps. Obviously I needed a control panel of some sorts and after a bit of investigation I settled on Virtualmin.

Virtualmin is created by the same people who created the excellent and utterly essential Webmin control panel and as such the Virtualmin module integrates nicely into Webmin. Oh, and it’s free!

Originally this site was hosted on Windows Server and IIS and powered by BlogEngine.NET but I found it a bit of a pain to handle two different types of blogging software so I migrated this blog over to WordPress and host it with my other sites. Over time my other server changed several times from OpenBSD to Ubuntu, then Solaris 10 running on a Sun Workstation, back to Ubuntu and currently onto the Debian machine where they currently reside. With Virtualmin moving platforms was a simple matter of restoring from the backups that I took from the machine that was to be replaced.

Of course with it now being relatively trivial to change servers I find myself experimenting a bit more and I’m currently fighting the urge to move everything over to a FreeBSD server but for the moment I’m successfully resisting that urge!

I had a hard drive failure on my main workstation recently and after installing the new one I decided to partition it with Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.04. That was about six weeks ago and I have only booted into Windows once.

I would consider myself a pretty advanced Linux/Unix user. My first encounter with Linux was in 1995 with LinuxFT and not long after that with an early Slackware release. As the years have rolled by since then I have setup literally hundreds of Linux servers and scores of Solaris and HP-UX servers but Linux has never impressed me on the desktop.

Through one job I had eight years ago I had to use RedHat 6.1 as a desktop OS and I absolutely hated it. The look and feel was terrible. The early GTK widgets were hideous. Gnome was at version 1.4 and it was almost completely unusable. Around the same time I installed SuSE 6.0 on a spare PC at home and while it used KDE by default, it wasn’t much better. Installing fonts was a nightmare and the only decent browser available then was Netscape Navigator which used the Motif Widget set and was a nightmarisly ugly looking beast with which to browse the web.

How things have changed in eight years! A quick roll call of my computer room here at home comes up with the following:

1 HP 9000 running HP-UX
1 Reverse Proxy server running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
1 Web Server running Debian Lenny 64bit
2 Sun Blade 2000 workstations running Solaris 10
1 Apple MacBook running OS X 10.5 Leopard
1 Dell Poweredge running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS
1 Main workstation running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Dual booting with Windows XP)
1 Firewall running Smoothwall Linux

And finally:

1 File server running Windows Server 2003.

I’m now down running just one single Windows machine from a maximum of about 8 over the years. And unlike before I don’t think I will be turning back. Most of the applications that I used on Windows were open source to begin with and naturally they have Linux versions. Firefox and Thunderbird being the most obvious two. WINE has matured to such an extent that when I’m no longer comfortable using The Gimp for certain tasks, Photoshop CS2 works under WINE like a charm.

However if there is a problem with Linux it is that there is probably too much choice. Particularly when it comes to your default desktop. I’ve finally decided on Gnome mainly because I couldn’t get Compiz working properly with XFCE. I had a look at KDE4 and I will probably have to wrte a seperate post about it. Suffice to say for the moment I don’t like the look of it one little bit.

So after six weeks I finally have my desktop looking the way I want it to. Gone is the Ubuntu Brown default theme replaced instead with one I liked from art.gnome.org . I’m still trying to find window decorations that I like but for the moment the default Ubuntu one is tolerable.

I still do think however that Linux is still no where even near ready for use as a mainstram desktop OS for the average user. But for the moment I’m finally impressed enough that I can eschew Windows at long last.

According to a leaked memo from Intel, it seems that Intel have no intention of ever migrating their desktops to Vista. What makes this interesting is that as mentioned in the article, Intel have full source code access to Vista and actually wrote parts of the operating system itself.

I wonder what the will move to instead, if anything. Mac? Regardless it doesn’t bode well that the primary supplier of CPU’s that will power a majority of Vista machines won’t even use the operating system itself.

The article on the Inquirer is here.

Apparently Windows Server 2008 can be configured to be used as a desktop operating system. You can even enable the Aero desktop effects and by all accounts the performance is only blazing when compared to Vista. Now it is being dubbed “Windows Workstation 2008″.

Information week have a brief article on it here which in turn links to an actual Microsoft employees blog and another site which tells you all you need to know about how to convert Server 2008 into a workstation.

Given that Vista gives me nightmares just thinking about it I figure this might be worth a whirl. All I need now is a copy of Server 2008

A lot of you may already be familiar with KDE and use it on a daily basis. Maybe you prefer the Gnome desktop? Either way it is interesting to learn that KDE and it's components like KOffice are going to be ported over to Windows and OS X.

Apparently it is down to the ease at which apps built on the QT4 toolkit can easily be ported across operating systems. From the article comes this wonderful quote:

The KDE development community's adoption of CMake is another major factor that has contributed to the increased portability of the desktop environment. KDE's build system was previously based on Autotools, an intractably arcane and grotesquely anachronistic cesspool of ineffable complexity that makes even seasoned programmers nauseous.

And here is the article itself.

I have a disk that is about to fail on my Active Directory domain controller. The system event viewer is rapidly being filled with bad block errors and it does indeed look like that I will have to replace the offending disk. That is no major problem, however I only have one domain controller so I’ve just finished configuring another Windows 2003 server here as a secondary controller for when I take the other one off line. As soon as replication is complete I will promote it to become the primary and take the other off-line.

There are a few annoyances though. My PDC is also my DNS server and primary file and print server too. It is configured with two disks, one 160GB and the other 40GB. It is the 40GB disk that is on its way out and that is also the system disk. Luckily it only has one share which I’m currently moving the data off of as I type. The DNS is going to throw me slightly I think so it looks like I might have to replicate that over as well. Ah well, rarely a dull moment.

Update – Using Norton Ghost, I have successfully cloned the dying disk to a new 160GB one. Only took an hour