Category: Technology

Server: Good

After trying many things including getting the product team involved in diagnosing the problem, I decided to rebuild the server from scratch. That seemed to correct the problem of Hyper-V not working correctly. No one is sure why, but my guess is that the install got corrupted for some odd reason.

I have to say, though, that getting the product group involved was kind of cool even though they couldn’t help – which wasn’t their fault, but the fact that I didn’t have the equipment to do the kernel level debugging that they needed to do.

Now, however, the web site is back up and running on the new Hyper-V box!

New Server

The new server case has arrived and I have put all the parts into it and it starts up nice. It’s good to have everything fit where it’s supposed to…

One problem, though: it’s LOUD! I think OSHA would have to classify this machine as hazardous to your hearing. I think I’m going to have to put this box in the closet with the other rack servers. At least it works, though.

Once it’s built on a single hard drive, I will shut down the main server and move the large array to the new server and turn it on… I’ll then shut down the old for good. It should be rock solid, then.

Well, it had better be…

Temporary Insanity?

2012-01-08 23:30:26

Many of you might have noticed that there was an outage today… Yes, it was my fault. I was too anxious and didn’t wait the proper amount of time.

Let me ‘splain.

For the last year or so, I’ve been using GoDaddy.com as my registrar. Before that, I used a service called easyDNS.com. EasyDNS.com not only was my registrar, but they provided some additional services, the critical one of which was a backup MX service. What this does is that if your main email server is down, they will hold the emails until it comes back up. But, last year I decided to move to GoDaddy.com due to cost. They are much cheaper, but they don’t offer the backup MX service. That means that every time my server reboots or is offline due to a power outage or whatever reason, email doesn’t get delivered. In fact, it gets rejected. When I had easyDNS, this was not a problem.

I have been doing work on the network lately and have been noticing that people were sending us email and we’d never get it. So, today, I re-enabled my old account. I didn’t transfer my registrations, but just signed up for the DNS service. I then immediately turned my DNS server records to point to easyDNS from GoDaddy. This broke everything since I didn’t wait the prescribed six hours. I turned them back and waited after I finished reading to the bottom of the email…

It’s back now and everything is working just fine.

Sorry!

Virtually Configured

You may have noticed a short (3 hour) outage tonight… or not. The web server, as you know, was virtualized a couple of weeks ago. However, it was taking up space on my file server – over 250GB of space. So, I took the old hard drive out of the physical web server and installed it in the Virtual Server machine and moved the virtual hard drive files to that disk, making it dedicated for the web server only.

Voila! It’s a little faster now as well.

Wireless Workplace

Don’t you love technology? I mean, until recently, we were all relegated to working at our work locations – offices, customers sites, etc. in order to do our jobs. Now, I can either work from home or work from a place like Panera with free WiFi. I mean, when you can get great coffee and bagels and just sit and work on whatever you want, things are just good.

[GEEK SPEEK BEGINS]
Recently, I have obtained better access to a server we bought to assist in development for a project. I took it and have rebuilt it as a new Windows Server 2008 box, complete with the new Hyper-V beta software [don’t worry if you don’t know what that is… it’s the newest version of Virtual Server] to run some test boxes. My final aim will be to make the server a TS Gateway box so that all machines can be accessed via the same internet connection across port 443. But, I think I need a new IP address for that.

How does this tie in with the subject? Well, TS Gateway will allow for access to the server lab from anywhere regardless of network firewall restrictions as long as the Internet is available. So, it’s very handy for working at places like Panera, or even customer sites.

So, back to the old “grind” [heh – nice pun, eh? Grind? Coffee… get it… ? … nevermind…]

A Breather To Work

After working all day Saturday and long hours during the week, I’m finally able to sit down at home and see to some system updates on my own network. I downloaded and installed Exchange 2007 SP1 Beta 2 and have to say that it is a very nice improvement over the RTM version. The full month calendar and public folder access in OWA alone make it worth while. Not only that, you can now use the GUI to manage many things that before had to be done with a command line.

So – the server is up and running and I’m hoping that it’s pretty stable as we all have to wait some months for the official version of SP1 to come out.

New Wireless Network

In the course of my security training at work, I learned many things about security – especially securing wireless networks. In a previous posting many years ago [quite litterally – Sept. 2004], I talked about securing a Wireless network. I was wrong on one topic though: DON’T disable the broadcasting of the SSID. I read a good article on the microsoft web site that basically says it’s more secure to NOT disable the broadcast. In other words, don’t hide the SSID – there are holes in the way XP processes hidden wireless networks which actually causes them to be exposed by the client anyway. Since then, I have made changes and un-hidden the network, while keeping it WPA and now WPA2.

This week, though, my manager allowed me to expense a new wireless router which supports an additional level of security: WPA-Enterprise using RADIUS. I got this to learn more about how ISA & IAG (MSFT’s version of RADIUS) work in concert with a PKI infrastructure and wireless network security. With the new device [which is also stronger for better signal coverage] I will set up an 802.1X certificate-based RADIUS authenticated wireless LAN that should be the most secure home wireless network ever. Corporations do it, but I’ve never seen one in a home before.

But then, not many people have the fun toys at home that I do…

Windows Mobile 6

Since I didn’t want to wait for AT&T to come out with a flash update for my phone [the 8500 – or “Hermes” model], I decided to grab an unsupported early release off the Internet. It is supposedly the version released by HTC [the manufacturer] to AT&T for testing. Knowing AT&T, it won’t be released until the end of the year and I didn’t want to wait. So I loaded it. It works just fine! I’m loving the nicely-formatted HTML email now.