Brian Webster's questions

I have been obtaining errors like below because I did not specify enough ports for the active FTP connections.

 Response: 150 Opening data channel for directory list.
 Response: 425 Can't open data connection.Error: Failed to retrieve directory listing

Things seem to work nicely with limited ports, but when I perform actions that cause very rapid short-lived connections, something like 20-30% of the connections drop with the error above.

I started with ports 50000-50100.

When I opened up to 50000-52000, the errors disappeared.

Why did this fix my problem? I would like to understand why adding ports fixed it.

I have a suspicion that ports become "locked down" for a few moments surrounding when they are used in a connection. If connections are happening so rapidly, there may be no ports available, thus the above error.

Can anybody confirm?

I'd like to setup an ASP.NET page that performs some maintenance for a web application.

What is a simple method for making a web request to the URL for this maintenance page?

I typically use Windows Tasks for these things, but I don't know how to make a web request within Windows. (wget would work on Linux)

I could build an executable that performs the task, but I'd rather not have that dependency.

I would like to:

1. Create an IAM user
2. Restrict that user to be able to have full management over a single EC2 Instance only.

Example: While the AWS EC2 account has 10 instances, the new user, UserA, can start or stop InstanceA but can do nothing else on the account (No launching of instances, no messing with volumes, etc).

Is there a simple method for giving a single user full access to a single resource like this, but no access to anything else?

I'm lost in Linux, can somebody help me with an iptables command to allow only the IP Address 5.5.5.5 to access port 22?

I've got that port restricted to the same IP in the EC2 security group, but I need to block it on the instance itself as well.

I need to point two IIS sites at the same folder on the server.

I need to do this because I need different IP-restrictions for the domain name bound to IIS-Site-B vs. IIS-Site-A (which is completely open to the public).

When I add the second site pointed to the same folder, there seems to be some sort of conflict. When I visit the site, there's a runtime error (but error messages beyond that are turned off)

How is this usually accomplished?

This question/answer suggests that it is the proper method for restricting bindings as I need to: iis 7 - IP-restrictions on one part of a website's bindings?

I'm working with a hosting company. I need them to setup a 301 redirect for one of my pages. I really care about the ranking on the search engines for this particular page.

They claim that in order to do a 301 redirect, they will delete the page on their server which will trigger a 404 and they will respond with a 301 to the new address.

It is my understanding that you cannot do a 404 and a 301, but I'm just a programmer.

I'm not sure if they're using IIS. All I know is they specialize in ColdFusion hosting.

Thanks

I have a system volume in Windows Server 2008 R2 that I have shrunk to well under the size of a 40 GB SSD.

What steps should I perform to move the image to the SSD and boot from it instead?

The only complication is that the source HDD has three volumes, one that is a few MB reserved by windows, one that is about 35 GB, and one that is about 500 GB (Data volume). Clearly I only want the first two volumes on the SSD, thus, I suspect I may need to use some built in windows 2008 functionality to get them operating correctly on the new drive.

Moving the data volume to another drive to simplify matters is a possibility...

Thanks

I need to remove the letters and numbers from the keys on a number of keyboards. This needs to be done in a non-hazardous fashion without introduction extra physical textures on the keys.

The keys are standard plastic keys on Microsoft keyboards.

In a scenario where an application is hosted by multiple instances in Amazon EC2 (with load balancing), are multiple requests from the same user guaranteed to go to the same instance?

I need to move a section of my website to another server because it is taxing our current web server.

However, I cannot afford to lose page rank on any pages within the section of the site that must be moved.

Furthermore, the URL of the pages must not be changed... visitors must still see the same URL, even though it would be served up by different hardware from a different data center.

How can this be accomplished?

Thanks

Edit:

IIS 6

It's a sub-directory that needs to be moved

Is there a utility to TRIM my Intel SSD (Gen 2 160GB)? Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008

I'm using Windows Server Backup in Windows Server 2008 to do a scheduled daily backup to a dedicated hard-drive on the server.

I noticed that under "All backups" it says I have 45 copies.

Does this mean that I can restore to any revision of my data upon system failure?

If the answer is yes, then I don't have to worry about taking monthly or weekly snapshots of my data. I'm concerned about a data corruption event occurring that working its way into my backups... then not having a clean snapshot to go back to.

Thanks!

I would like to create a script that emails me when a scheduled daily backup runs. I'd prefer the email to indicate success or failure. I understand that this is not an easy thing to do with Windows Server 2008.

Is it possible? If so, how?

Thanks

I'm trying to setup an IP address range. It's asking for:

A) IP Address Range (but it will only accept a normal IP address)

B) Mask or Prefix

I need to allow 192.168.100.100 - 192.168.100.120

How can I make that happen?

I am calling the following from a .cmd file:

 ftp -d -s:D:\backup\web-daily.txt

The web-daily.txt file is an ftp input file with similar contents to this:

open <server>
<login>
<password>
put d:\backup\web-daily.7z web-daily.7z
quit

I need to be able to pass the current date to the ftp input file. Is this doable without having to execute a program that actually modifies web-daily.txt? This is because web-daily.7z is actually web-daily_%date:~10,4%%date:~4,2%%date:~7,2%.7z (or web-daily_yyyy_MM_dd.7z).

I'd like to pass this date in as a parameter if possible.

It seems that my asp.net sites on my web server are very slow to load if they have not been accessed in a while.

Does the ASP.NET processor go into suspend or sleep mode if it has gone unused for a period of time?

Is it better for me to fix this by configuring ASP.NET or writing some program to visit my sites every so often to keep it awake?

Short Version: How do I get 2 computers to shutdown when a UPS battery gets low?

Long Version:

I have an APC UPS, the RS 1500. It has a USB cord that goes into my main dev computer. My dev computer will shutdown when the battery gets low.

However, in addition, I have now hooked up a database server to the same UPS.

How can I have that database server also know that it needs to shut down when the battery gets low?

In Windows XP or later, How do I make a Desktop Shortcut to Logoff User?

I'm running Filezilla server on my dedicated windows 2003 server.

It uses its own user-access control system.

The Filezilla server service itself is running under the System user.

When I setup users within the FTP Server Administrator Interface, I do not need to setup equivalent users, or adjust permissions on folders to allow users to login.

Example:

1. I setup TestFTP user with password 'p'
2. I set the home directoy of TestFTP user to be e:/website
3. I verify that e:/website only has permission for the System and Admin accounts (right click -> security in windows explorer)

TestFTP is able to login to the server just fine.

I'm OK with this (perhaps due to ignorance?).

Is it generally frounded upon to utilize a FTP Server such as FileZilla Server that bypasses the built-in UAC in this method?

If I wasn't clear enough, please let me know.

I'd like to setup MySQL on a Windows 2003 server. However, the server is already running SQL Server 2005 and I'd like to reserve most of the 4 GB of memory for that purpose. Is there some way to cap my MySQL at a certain Memory Usage?

Thanks in advance for your time.