Cruachan's questions

I have a Windows 2008 R2 (virtual) server running a number of websites. My client has uploaded several PDFs by FTP to a download directory from where they can be retrieved via a web page.

This works fine in IE and Safari, but when attempting to download with Firefox or Chrome both browsers hang and Firefox posts 'stopped' in the status bar at the bottom of the page. We've tried this on several PCs at different locations so I think this might be a server problem - although conceivably the software used to generate the PDFs may have produced something incompatible with streaming to Firefox/Chrome.

Why reasons could there be to produce this behaviour? Is there some configuration setting I need to change?

EDIT: Checked headers with Firebug - a GET sticks with a 206 Partial Content

Content-Type    application/pdf
Last-Modified   Sun, 21 Mar 2010 19:50:49 GMT
Accept-Ranges   bytes
Etag    "42da4bce2fc9ca1:0"
Server  Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-Powered-By    ASP.NET
Date    Thu, 27 May 2010 15:39:34 GMT
Content-Length  329532
Content-Range   bytes 27484-357015/357016
Request Headersview source
Host    www.caepost.co.uk
User-Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3
Accept  text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language en-gb,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive  115
Connection  keep-alive
Range   bytes=27484-357015,27484-27485

I'm considering replacing a dedicated windows web server server I run for several clients - the server is hosted at an ISP, and I currently I have a Windows 2003 standard server with SQL Server 2000 standard edition installed. There is a very limited amount of other software, including

• A third party SMTP server
• PHP
• ScriptFTP (automatic ftp for backups)

The server is accessed by remote desktop. It's getting a little long in the tooth now - just 1Gb ram - but there's been no significant performance issues. The server runs one moderate use/visibility public webservers, a couple of server based application sites (using PHP/SQLServer) and a dozen or more very low traffic sites.

The ISP, who I'm pretty happy with, is now offering a higher spec machine for about 30% less than I'm paying, with the exception that the OS would be Windows Web Server 2008 x64. I've no experience with this edition but from Microsoft's spec it would seem ok. Can anyone tell me -

1. Are there any significant restrictions with the web edition I should be aware of?
2. Would there be any issue installing SQL Server 2005 standard x32 on the server?
3. Any problems with PHP - or other software?

The temptation to reduce costs and increase spec is significant, but the web edition restriction is an unknown.

I've a Ubuntu 9.04 server installation which is hosting a small number of websites (currently two, and will remain in single figures). The email requirements for the server are very limited - to send outgoing emails and forward all incoming emails to a mailbox on another server - most likely Google.

I've installed postfix and the outgoing mail is working fine. How do I configure Postfix to forward all incoming mail? If I send it to a googlemail address are there any special considerations? Finally how difficult is it to incorporate basic spam filtering into the forwarding mechanism?

I'm looking at deploying a new commercial web service I've developed, but I'm unsure as to the market potential as yet so I don't wish to purchase a heavyweight server immediately. An ISP who i've dealt with before and I'm pretty happy with are offering economy servers with the following spec for a good price (around $65 pm)

Ubuntu 8.1
1.8GHz 2Mb Core 2 Duo
512Mb RAM
80Gb HD

If all I'm running on this server is Apache, PHP and MySQL with a well designed, initially small, database for a single domain only will this level of hardware be sufficient to give me reasonable headroom?

ADDED: Bandwidth is 'unlimited' and I've a couple of other dedicated servers for clients there who've I've not had an issue with under this formula so I don't think that's a concern. I also have shared backup space on the ISP I can use so that's at a reasonable level too for the moment.

I have a PHP script that uses Curl to call another server via SSL. Is it possible to see the contents of the POST action in any log on the server where the script is running? The server is a Apache2 running on (I think) Centros.

I have a windows 2003 PC set up as a standalone server on a Workgroup network - everything is working fine.

The server has a second network card is it which I wish to connect to another Workgroup network. Is it possible for the server to be configured so it is also visible from this network?

Both networks are small and only used for development - i.e. not a production environment - so we can cut a few corners if necessary.

I'm primarily a developer, but as part of this I'm running an Ubuntu server for a client where he has several small to medium sized websites. Although my main development environment has generally been Windows I'm reasonably familiar with Linux (I run Ubuntu on one of my two main workstations) and command line unix (admin'ing Oracle on HP-UX in the late 90's)

So although I do feel fairly competent on the command line, I'm still a little rusty and generally prefer a GUI. I know I could install a desktop on Ubuntu server, but I'm uncertain if I should, so my questions are

1. Is there any particular risk or reason why I should not install a desktop on Ubuntu server? In particular any security or performance issues? Or should I just grit my teeth and get completely back up to speed on the command line?

2. If installing a desktop is a reasonable option which one should I choose? I really don't need the bloat of Gnome or KDE - just an environment where I have access to the basic GUI facilities and maybe a browser to make downloading scripts and the like more straightforward. Would XFCE be suitable?

This is very much an ease-of-use centred question - I'm not after a complete command line replacement, just something to make moving around the system and performing basic tasks run a little more smoothly for someone who is not going to be a dedicated Linux admin.

We are looking at developing a small, simple, Access system for a client using SQL Server Express (2005 or 2008) as database. The only complicating factor is they have two offices and they will need to synchronise some (but not all) data between them.

What are my options with the Express edition for doing this? Is there any advantage to using 2008 over 2005?

I upgraded an existing 8.10 Ubuntu installation to 9.04 last week, and everything appeared to run fine initially. However now on boot I get a dialog box which says 'Not all updates can be installed'. Hitting the 'Partial Upgrade' button the list includes

Install libd4.6-java
Install libd4.6-java-gcj
Install liblrdf0
Upgrade acpid
Upgrade libfreetype6
Upgrade liblucene2-java
Upgrade update-manager
Upgrade update-manager-core

If I then go with install the upgrade the dialog box disappears (after the permission to proceed password prompt) and nothing further happens until the next reboot, when I'm back to the partial upgrade prompt again.

Where should I look to find out what's going wrong and fix this?