xmas early: hardware
Posted by Matt Brotherson in asides on December 6, 2006
Ahh…the joys of setting up a data center environment. We’ve got a new Watchguard Firebox x750e sitting here waiting on our cabinet, servers, UPS and managed switches to get here. I can’t wait to get my hands dirty and start setting everything up. It will be quite the steep learning curve for me and my associate that are handling this initiative as we both have about the same knowledge of networking and it is limited to basic tcp/ip, subnetting, etc. We’re going to be setting up some sweet VLAN’s and that is definitely an area we lack expertise in. Long hours and lots of beer should ensue shortly!
when the IDE hoses you
Posted by Matt Brotherson in asides on November 29, 2006
Great advances have been made in Integrated Development Environments over the past three years. These IDE’s aim to simplify every day development tasks – everything from compiling code to handling check in procedures with a version control provider to providing drag and drop design interfaces. I am constantly amazed at the advances made in Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET 2003 and they bested themselves once again with the 2005 version. Eclipse for java based development has come a long way since the first time I looked at it.
I’m lazy. Any advantage an IDE has to offer me, I’ll try and oblige them the opportunity. At my last company I did an experiment with our service oriented architecture to utilize the IDE to do most of the wiring for me from the data access to the visual representation by working with typed datasets returned from web services and presenting them via data grids. This was excellent as the IDE was able to save me many lines of code. Based on that success, I’ve tried to let IDE’s do things for me that I could normally do on my own. The attractive part of this type of functionality is that it saves you time and handles the plumbing portion for you.
exchange 2003 and rpc over http(s)
Posted by Matt Brotherson in asides on November 20, 2006
Whew. Finally after some trials and tribulations I have managed to get rpc over http(s) working with my home exchange server. I followed many of the guides online and there are even some tools to help aid the process of the configuration. Exchange 2003 with service pack 2 and the aforementioned guide/tools makes the setup a breeze.
I still couldn’t get outlook to connect to exchange outside my LAN. What good does that do me? Not much which is the whole reason I wanted to get exchange running over http. Outlook would fire up and eventually prompt me for a login (good.) However it would never fully connect. The problem: SSL certificates. I haven’t paid for an SSL cert yet so I use my own certificate authority to grant the certificate. Ok, all set. Nope. I had to make sure the certificate had the FQDN of the exchange server in it and also import that certificate into my trusted authorities in IE. Presto! Now we have connectivity.
Daniel Petri advises that most if not all of the connectivity issues are related to certificate issues. Make sure you check your certs and if possible, buy one from an online vendor so you don’t have to import anything.
hosting websites
Posted by Matt Brotherson in asides on November 7, 2006
As the free three year trial of 1and1′s professional hosting package has expired I needed to make a choice about what to do with the couple of sites I hosted with them. I’ve been running brotherson.com from my home server for about four years now. I pay for the highest residential service from my cable provider to have the best upload speed without breaking my wallet. It seems only logical to move all of my sites in house…so I am now hosting all of my external websites from home.
Additionally, I am able to help out a friend that faced the same dilemma I did and am now hosting his sites. I’m not able to offer the same SLA’s as a hosting provider, but it is something I was willing to do to help him out and am happy he obliged my offer. Here’s to hoping my cable connection is as steady as it has been in the past. Cheers!
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