EJB's questions

Under normal circumstances, is the windows server 2008r2 firewall, running on an amazon ec2 instance even necessary? Can it safely be turned off? It appears that thru the security groups, amazon is providing a firewall for the machine, or am I missing something?

Is there any way to test the 'cleanliness' of the power your are getting at your PC from the UPS and also from the wall?

I have a powerful workstation (Dell T7400) that is now on its 3rd PSU in 30 months (all under warranty thankfully), but 3PSU's seems like a lot to go thru in 2.5 years, especially given that I have owned over 20+ machines in the last 15 years and never had a PSU fail on any other machine.

I have a 10 year old APC SmartUPS 2200NET, (now on its 2nd set of batteries), but I wonder if over time they start to give off 'dirty' power that maybe contributing to the premature failure of my PSU's? I don't know enough about elextricity to quantify what I mean by 'dirty' power, but the dell tech that swapped out my PSU's suggested I may want to look into it.

I just bought a newer, (expensive) workstation I to be honest I am afraid to plug it into the UPS, but at the same time don't want to drop another $500-$1000 on a UPS without a need.

I have been asked to help setup a remote desktop solution for a small business that has about 10 workstations. All 10 workstations are sharing a single verizon dsl line with (presumably) a low-end westell DSL modem. They do not currently have a static IP.

Each person would like the ability to remote desktop into their office machine from home, though in all likelihood there will not usually be 1-2 people doing this at any time.

What are the basic obstacles I will have to deal with? I presume not having a static ip is one problem that needs to be solved, but even with a single static IP, how will the remote connection finds it way to the proper machine? Is there some routing software that can be employed here, or another method?

Links or suggestions much appreciated. I assume this problem has likely been faced by many folks before...

I need to create a rewrite rule as follows:

OldPage.aspx?UserId=12345 should redirect to NewPage.aspx?Id=12345

the '12345' can be any numeric value.)

I have the page redirect working, but not sure how to change the 'UserId' to 'Id' (I can do it in my code, but would rather do it in the web.config).

This is what I have:

    <rewrite>
        <rules>
            <rule name="Old Site to New" patternSyntax="Wildcard" stopProcessing="true">
                <match url="*OldPage.aspx*" />
                <action type="Rewrite" url="NewPage.aspx" appendQueryString="true" logRewrittenUrl="true" />
            </rule>
        </rules>
    </rewrite>

I am using wildcards, but a suggestion with either regex or wildcards would be OK by me.

A question with regards to DNS for my 20 or so websites I support...

I own/manage about 20 domains, each domain has 1-8 subdomains. about 1/2 of the domains are on one dedicated server, the rest on another.

I am trying to plan for the possibility that someday a server will go down, and I need to quickly redirect my DNS to a backup server. To do that now, I would need to manually go into my dns control panel and change the IP in about 30-40 places.

Is it possible (and is it a good idea if it is possible), to define a single DNS record as "MyMainServer" and give it the actual IP address, and then for every other DNS record, instead of keying in the IP address, I give it a domain name? Will this resolve properly, and if so, is there any performance impact that matters? (my sites are relatively low traffic).

My thought is that then if a server goes down, I only have to point one "main" dns record, and everthing else will flow from that.

Thanks in advance.

Greetings, I have an SQL server standard license, and it is being used on a dedicated server from one of the large hosting providers. If I want to move my dedciated server to another company, how does one go about transferring the license to another box? Is there any limits to how many times I can do this? (I only need one active at a time).

My dell T7400 has two 300G 15k SAS drives in a raid 1 configuration. I'd like to instead have a 300G 'C" drive and a 300G 'D' drive.

Is there anyway to remove one of the drives from the raid configuration without having to reinstall the OS? and then reformat and use the second hard drive as a new disk?

Thanks.

Thinking about getting a new dedicated server, having played with a shared solution and not very happy with it I am going to go back to dedicated

For the same amount of money I can get either a windows 2003 32bit server that comes with the helm control panel, versus windows 2008R2 64bit without the helm control panel (not supported)...

Question 1: Which OS is better for running asp.net web applications and some using small SQL Server database (yes, on the same machine). I assume the 64Bit will perform better...will I notice any problems with 64Bit, R2?

Question 2: How much will I miss having helm? I assume I can do manually everything helm does for me, correct? Any big drawbacks of this way? Last time I used helm, I vaguely remember not really using or needing many of the features anyway...

I have a smart UPS 2200 that is giving me problems, I suspect that the batteries need to be replaced, but I am not sure. There are no visible problems, ie. no error codes, no error lights etc, but every once in a while, usually if there is a power "event", i.e. not a full blackout, but a spike or a low, the unit will begin to click, lights flash etc, and it will go one for a long time, usually ending with the power going out and everything getting turned off - even though, in fact, the power never actually went out - and none of the non-protected devices even shut down.

Of course my first guess is that the batteries need replacing, but at $350 for a new set, I don't want to get new batteries, only to find out that it is the unit itself...

Question is, what are the usual symptoms for bad batteries? and/or how do I know for sure if that will solve the problem.

I have a client that has a php website hosted at network solutions, along with years worth of email and lots of email accounts which he doesn't want to move. I am working on a new website for them that uses asp.net, and sql server, and I would like to host them on my rackspace servers, but don't want to deal with moving the email.

Is it possible from within the network solutions control panel to set up the dns to leave all the email and email accounts where they are, but host the website elsewhere? Any downside to this?

I have Verizon DSL in my office, I put DSL in about a year ago for $29.95 month...I added a new phone line recently and it was cheaper to actually get it bundled with DSL so now I have two DSL lines...my plan was to shut the first one off when my 1 year contract comes up (in September).

A couple of times DSL has gone out on one line so I just used the other, which is a nice redundancy to have - but it doesn't happen often. (I unplugged one line and plugged in the other)

Question is, is there any way to use both DSL lines together so that

1. Increase bandwidth and effective speed might increase (is that possible?)
2. have them both on and connected someway so that traffic on my network would just use either one, and if one went down the traffic would route automatically?

If I can either increase speed by having two, or at a minimum get some automatic redundancy, I see no reason to keep both on....

I need to setup a users forum/discussion board (maybe 200 users max) for supporting a custom piece of software.

I prefer asp.net (vb) against SQL Server, customization ability would be nice, but I would like for it to be usable right out of the box with little effort on my part.

Recommendations/links?

Anyone know if there is a separate download for MS SQL 2008 mgmt studio, that includes just the client tools?

EDIT: Sorry, not the express version, the full-blown one. and if there is a 64bit one, even better.

I am thinking of adding a mac, (latop or mac-mini), to my arsenal of development machines for iPhone development.

Is it possible to use the equivalent of remote desktop so I can stay on my regular(pc based) keyboard and monitor, but open a window into the mac when I want to use it?

I do this now with multiple PC's running various flavors of windows, but being a mac novice was not sure if this was even possible.

EDIT: Maybe I wasn't clear: I want to remotely control my Mac from a Vista PC, not from another Mac.

I've often wondered, I have an MSDN universal license, and a technet license, so I have all the licenses I need to do what I need, which is software development.

If I was a dishonest person, and simply gave a license key for say an enterprise version of SQL server, to someone (or worse charged them for it), and they used it in a production environment, how does Microsoft catch people?

In the old days, when most software that was installed on a desktop, it was always pretty obvious when a company bought one copy of a piece of software and installed it on the desktops of 500-1000 or more people (I worked at a company like that. Ultimately, someone ratted them out and the software police came and handed down a big fine...)

If a dishonest company installs a illegal copy of server software and 1000 or more people use it, there would be no way anyone except the sysadmin would know...I have to believe MS has a way of dealing with this...but how?

I have Verizon DSL service that came with a westell 7500 wireless router, but the wireless does not cover a big enough area.

I also own a linksys wireless router which I would like to place about 75 feet away, up one floor, in order to have complete coverage for the building.

It seems it is not as simple to simply plug the second wireless router into the network, it shows up as a wireless router, but if I connect to it from a laptop I can't get to the internet...

What is the basic steps I need to take in order to inexpensively add a second wireless access point to my network? I don't mind if I need t omanually pick one wireless point versus another, but it would be better if it was possible to just log onto either one and have the laptops talk to whichever router is available.

Thanks.

Is there any easy way to find out what license(s) are associated with a running copy of SQl Server, or Windows Server 2008?

I have technet subscriptions, and an MSDN subscription, but sometimes I also use a trial software if I need to quickly get a test environment up for a short amount of time. I have plenty of legal licenes for all the software (they are all just for test/development), but I don't accidentally want one of my 'trial licenses' to expire unexpectedly....how can I tell if I am running a trial version or not?

There is something I don't get, one of my web apps has a small form that allows you to enter you name and email address to "subscribe" to a user list for a site I maintain. The site is very low traffic, and only useful to a very small number of people that live in a very small town..it would be of no interest to anyone else.

Yet, every day, sometimes many times per day, someone (or a bot) is entering fictitious names and probably bogus email addresses into the form.

This form is not even active on my site anymore, it just happens to still exist as an orphaned page on my IIS directory (which tells me that someone is searching for these types of forms via Google, because there is no path to this form if you come in thru the default page.

This is not a big hassle for me, I can solve the problem with captcha, but what I don't understand is for what purpose would someone setup a bot to repeatedly fill in forms? I figure there must be a reason, but for the life of me don't know why?

What am I missing?