I'm reviewing the logs of a Windows Server 2008 R2 server which is running inside a VM. The server hosts an Azure web role. The logs contain this record:
The Plug and Play service entered the running state
This is completely unattended server hosted inside a VM.
Why would it need this service in the first place?
Recently Windows Azure Storage SSL certificate expired and that causes a lot of problems. Now the certificate can be retrieved by any user and so everyone could have noticed that it was going to expire.
Now what's the typical timeframe of replacing a soon to expire certificate? Is is a month before expiration or a week before expiration or any other time?
In other words, suppose I'm validating a third party service certificate and see that it expires in N days. If I notice it one day in advance it may be too late - I'll need time to contact the service owner and they will need time for reissuing the certificate and replacing it. If I notice it one month in advance - it may be too early to raise alarm - maybe the service owner is about to replace the certificate a bit later.
What's the value of N such that if the SSL certificate is about to expire in N days it's likely that the service owner has forgot about its expiration? What's the common practice of when to update a soon to expire SSL certificate?
By default IIS has "Recycling" app pool settings set to "Regular Time Interval (minutes) == 1740" which makes the application pool restart every 29 hours no matter what happens and what load the server responds to.
How do I know if I need this "automatic recycle every N hours" policy enabled?
My Azure service depends on a huge filetree and I try to deal with that filetree using VHDs. What I currently plan to do is create a VHD file, mount it, format it to NTFS and enable NTFS transparent compression, then copy the filetree there. Then I'll upload the VHD file to Windows Azure Blob Storage. When an Azure instance starts it will download the VHD file, mount it and use it transparently as if it was in a local folder.
Everything sounds great, but the filetree is something like 800 megabytes. With NTFS compression enabled it fits into a 600 megabytes VHD file. Yet if I ZIP the filetree it occupies around 400 megabytes.
I want to have a file as small as possible and without a need to unpack it - so that it can be "mounted" and used transparently. That's like VHD, but with better compression.
Can I have a VHD with better compression?
What's the use of Server, X-Powered-By and other similar headers? Looks like the consensus is they should be removed so that automatic vulnerability scanners doen't immediately know which version of which software they're dealing with and so automatic vulnerability discovery gets harder.
Are there scenarios where it is indeed useful to let all the world know that the site is running on IIS 7 and is X-Powered-By ASP.NET version 4?
I have a dedicated domain mydomain.com and I have a Windows Azure service that has to send email from addresses @mydomain.com. I found a mail service that agrees to send email "on behalf" of my domain.
That mail service requires me to add an MX-record for my domain and looks like MX-record implies a static IP address. Windows Azure doesn't guarantee static IPs at the moment and the industry-wide solution is to use CNAME records to map my domain name onto the third-level domain name in Azure (mydomain.cloudapp.net).
So ideally I'd want both an A-record and a CNAME for my domain. Is that possible? What are other options for my situation?
In my Windows Azure web role I need to send emails. Looks like one of the options is to use my company SMTP server. I asked our admins - they say I have to join the Azure role into our corporate VPN for that.
How do I do that joining? Do I use Azure Connect?
Suppose I have a rack with several servers and other stuff. One of servers overheats severely and either starts smoking or catches fire while there's a serviceman nearby.
If anything similar happens in an apartment and there's a fire extinguisher nearby using the latter promptly often lets extinguish the fire very fast but in case of server rack improper extinguishing may lead to unneeded extra damage to surrounding equipment.
To clarify, I'm talking about a really small fire that one can try to extinguish without risking their life - like grab a nearby extinguisher, discharge it and get the fire extinguished in say ten fifteen seconds.
What's the strategy to extinguish a small local fire in a server rack? What type of extinguisher is to be used? How to minimize damage to surrounding equipment?
I need to host a web service that would accept requests over https. Therefore I need an SSL certificate issues by some Serious Certificate Company. I asked our admins - they say I have to generate some request and give it to them before they can proceed.
I'm on Windows if that matters.
What are they talking about? Where do I start?
Recently we had a rather funny incident: suddenly about a liter of water ran from above the drop ceiling right in the middle of the office. Turned out it was some pipe in the air conditioning that detached and released condensed water.
Obviously that's not what anyone wants to happen above a server equipment rack. What is the easiest (I mean that materials should be easily accessible and the consrtcution should be easy to manufacture) reliable way to shield a rack from above to protect it against minor water leaks?
Every now and then I read that a severe fire has happened in some datacenter, lots of equipment has been damaged and customers have gone offline. Now I wonder what is there to support and spread fire?
I mean walls in a server room usually have little or no finish. Racks are made of metal. Almost all units have metal cases. Cables have (or at least should have) insulation of materials that don't spread fire.
What is spreading fire in a server room or datacenter?
I'm asking this here because this is primarily a huge office scenario and administrators will more likely have the answer I'm looking for.
Employees' desktop computers can be either left turned on for the whole night or switched off in the evening and turned back on in the morning. The latter will surely save energy. In the same time turning on and off is very harmful for the equipment - hardware often breaks specifically when turned on.
Both energy and hardware replacements cost money. With energy it's quite obvious - you pay every month according to what your power meter shows. With hardware replacements it's worse - you need qualified stuff to quickly diagnose the problems and once something breaks the affected employee will have to wait for some time while his computer is fixed/replaced and the data is recovered.
So the company has to choose between saving money on energy and saving money on computer maintaince and lost hours. Such decisions must be well though.
Is there any detailed study of how turning computers off each evening affects their lifetime and what losses are induced by it?
We use Apache 2.2 to host SVN repository on a Windows 2003 machine.
Works fine except that over a couple of weeks the httpd process inflates and starts consuming something like 1.5 gigabytes of virtual memory. All operations with the repository become very slow.
What to tweak to prevent httpd from cosuming so many resources?
In order to give my COM+ application enough credentials I want its components to be instantiated under "Local Service" account.
When I create a server application with a wizard on Win2k3 it offers to choose under whom to instantiate components - "Local Service" is one of choices. But on WinXP "Local Service" is not offered at all in the wizard.
When I open the "Identity" tab of the COM+ application under Win2k3 there'a a handful of choises, "Local Service" included, and I can select any of them. But on WinXP the same "Identity" tab only offers "Interactive user".
What does this difference depend on? Does it depend on the system or on something else?
Suppose I have a hard disk with data I don't want to expose to a third party. The warranty period for that disk still lasts. Now the disk starts malfunctioning.
I can't use a disk wiping program on a malfunctioning disk - it just wouldn't work. If I run any destructive action on the disk - burn it, open and scratch it, smash it, whatever similar - the retailer will refuse to exchange the disk saying that the destructive actions void warranty.
How can I destroy sensitive data on a failed disk without voiding warranty?
Our company has moved recenty. Although each computer was packaged into bubble wrap and hopefully handled carefully we now see a burst in hard disk failures. Some computers failed to boot immediately upon relocation, some experience disk problems weeks after.
Are there some best practices on how to prepare computers for relocation? Maybe something like disconnect all drives and put into boxes with shock absorbing material? This would "put all eggs into one bin" - should one box get lost or severely damaged many computers would be left without disks. It is also very resource consuming - we would need to remove and label all the disks and then put them back upon relocation.
What are best practices for handling hard drives when relocating a huge (100+ employees) company?
I encounter very short power outages quite often. Typically they last for just couple of seconds - perhaps the power grid maintenance staff just flips the switch to "Off" and then immediately to "On". However this is enough for all kinds of IT equipment to lose power and reboot.
A UPS would help, but it looks like a quite expensive thing - the batteries wear out quickly and the retail price of the unit is considerable.
Are there any other solutions against very short outages?
I've never had an uninterruptible power supply and think of buying one. What not-so-obvious things should I not do to the UPS so that it lives longer?
I don't mean some obvious abuse like dropping/exposing to direct heat/exposing to wrong voltage. I mean less obvious things like its not acceptable to leave an acid battery UPS unplugged for long time after it has been used because some chemical processes start in half-discharged batteries and render the batteries unusable. What other misuses should I know about?
When using a uninterruptible power supply how long does it preserve the original capacity? Say I buy a UPS that holds the necessary load for 10 minutes - I don't want it to unexpectedly come into state when it dies 30 seconds after a blackout starts.
Hw many years does it usually take to exhaust the battery without its misuse and abuse? Are there any known examples?
When leaving the computer for a long time it seems convenient to hibernate it instead of shutting down - all the programs remain in the same state when resumed. Are there any drawbacks in doing so?