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!
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
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 
Microsoft is getting a lot of flak lately for the speed of their website. It seems to have reduced itself to a crawl. What have they done that could have caused this? They migrated their web servers over to Windows Server 2008 is what.
It is a fairly big assumption to make if you think Server 2008 is solely responsible but it seems to be a case of coincidental timing too as this started around the same time as they started trying to foist their Silverlight technology on us.
Information Week had an article recently that delved into the nitty gritty behind their site where they seem to think the problems with Microsoft’s site lies squarely with the developers. However what about those of us who actually have to administer servers sometimes numbering into the hundreds? I came across an open letter to Microsoft that deals with exactly this.
Since Vista was released into the market exactly a year ago, I made an attempt to use it as my day to day OS which lasted approximately two days. Whatever its shortcomings at least I could fall back to XP. However with server 2008 almost upon us I’m starting to feel the same dread all over again that I had with Vista.
The thought of having to work with both Vista and Server 2008 on a daily basis is actually enough to make me reconsider working in IT. So far the only exposure I have had to Server 2008 has been by way of a 90 minute demo on a virtual machine on Microsoft’s rather excellent Virtual Labs site. From the 90 minutes playing around, it doesn’t look good.
In it’s original incarnation this site was runnning on a virtual Windows 2000 server. However since the hardware it was hosted on has been nothing but unreliable, I have moved it over to a Windows 2003 Server. Reliability should be much improved and hopefully I will manage to update this on a more regular basis.
I’m still playing around with themes too so it may take a while to settle on one that I like 
