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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.