Greg B's questions

I'm working with a domain registered with GoDaddy. The client has a WiX website so in GoDaddy they've set custom nameservers to point to ns4.wixdns.net etc. We're deploying a new website on a different server so I want to lower the TTL so I can point the DNS quickly when we get to go-live.

My question is this, if I change the nameservers in GoDaddy back to "Default" (presumably GoDaddy's own nameservers) will all the DNS records be maintained?

i.e. the current website won't become inaccessible due to the A record disappearing when I change the nameservers back to GoDaddy, right?

Is ObjectSID a feature of Active Directory or is it a standard feature of all directories? Is there an Object Class that provides ObjectSID which can be used in other directory services such as OpenLDAP or ApacheDS?

I've just installed Windows Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 and I'd like to put some OS ISOs on the data store. How do I do this?

I've configured remote administration so I can connect to the server using Hyper-V Manager, Remote Desktop and Computer Management.

In an attempt to minimize the disk space used by a bunch of Windows VMs I'm about to work with, I've tried to create a base image in the hope of using differencing disks. I'm nearly there but OOBE keeps running every time I boot a VM and I have to configure the language and admin password. How can I stop OOBE running on boot?

Here's what I've done so far:

1. Create a VirtualBox VM with a 60GB expanding disk. 2GB RAM, 1CPU.
2. Install Windows Server 2008 R2 and patch the OS using Windows Update.
3. Run sysprep ticking the generalize option and shutting down the OS.
4. Remove the VM from VirtualBox Manager but keep the files.
5. Attach the virtual disk (a .vdi file) from the VM created in #1.
6. Modify the disk in Virtual Media Manager setting it as Immutable.
7. Create a new VM selecting the disk from #6 as the main hard disk.
8. Boot the new VM from #7.
9. OOBE runs. Set the language, password and other prefs.
10. Shutdown the VM.
11. Start the VM from VirtualBox Manager.
12. OOBE runs again.

Each VM that uses the Immutable disk get's a .vid file in it's snapshots directory, and changes made to the VM are persisted between sessions, that is, programs I install are still installed after a reboot, but OOBE runs every time. How can I stop it?

I have a Windows server running Windows Server 2008 R2. I've set up an FTP site and a user account and I can connect to it and successfully download files using the Windows command-line FTP client from my machine at home.

I have a NAS running embedded Linux (BusyBox with FFP) and I've set up a cron job to run a script to mirror this FTP site down to the NAS. This script worked a few times but then I noticed that the data on disk wasn't getting updated, so I tried running the script from an SSH session. The output from the mirror command updates the console a couple of times saying "Getting directory contents" and then it errors with:

Unknown command `;'.

The script is as follows

#! /ffp/bin/bash
HOST='xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx'
USER='UserName'
PASS='Password'
TARGETFOLDER='/path/to/local/directory'
SOURCEFOLDER='.'
LOGNAME="$(date +%F-%H-%M-%S).log"
lftp -f "
open $HOST
user $USER $PASS
mirror -P 2 -n --log=$LOGNAME --verbose $SOURCEFOLDER $TARGETFOLDER
bye
"

LFTP is version 4.0.7.

I've just deployed an update to an existing ASP.NET MVC3 site (it was already configured) and I'm getting the IIS blue screen of death stating

HTTP Error 500.0 - Internal Server Error
The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.

However; there is nothing showing up in the Application Event Log where I would expect to see a (more) detailed description of the entry.

How can I go about diagnosing this issue?

I have two servers on the same subnet. I have an application installed which uses multicast UDP to propagate events between the two servers and keep them in sync.

This does not seem to be happening, so I want to make sure that the multicast UDP messages are getting through as my first step.

The servers are running Windows 2008 R2.

How can I test Multicast UDP connectivity between two servers?

AppFabric is only available on Windows 2008 (and higher). Are there any similar packages that provide similar functionality on Windows 2003?

I've just read an old RFP and one of the questions was along the lines of "List the top 3 KPIs of DNS management".

As a web developer, I have a working knowledge of DNS but no idea what would be considered a KPI of managing a collection of domain names.

I'm currently developing an application which uses SqlDependency which relies on the Service Broker.

I'm running into an issue every time I move the database from development to staging in that I'm getting a YSOD stating that

The SQL Server Service Broker for the current database is not enabled, and as a result query notifications are not supported. Please enable the Service Broker for this database if you wish to use notifications.

I'm not a SQL Server expert and so I don't understand why this is happening. I've tried a bunch of things such as running

ALTER DATABASE [DbName] SET ENABLE_BROKER

on the newly restored database. This doesn't fix the issue. Also calling

ALTER DATABASE [DbName] SET NEW_BROKER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE

doesn't help.

I've also run DISABLE_BROKER on my development database, then performed the backup. Restored to the staging server and then run both ENABLE_BROKER and SET NEW_BROKER hoping that something will give.

Both servers are running SQL 2005 on Windows 2003.

My application is using SqlDependency.Start(connectionString) so I believe I am using the default Service Broker Endpoint rather than a named one(?)

The databases are named different on the development and staging server but some configuration ensures the application is using the correct connection string.

What am I missing? What am I doing wrong?

What is the correct way to move (backup/restore) a database that uses Service Broker / SqlDependency?

Is there a cheat sheet for the different versions of IIS which details various steps to perfom for each new website deployment including compression, caching, AppPool settings. etc.

Edit:
I'm not looking for a list of things you must do, more of a list of the most common things you could do (like compression and caching etc).

For what reasons and in what situations would you use the "Take Offline" / ALTER DATABASE dbName SET OFFLINE feature.

What tasks can you perform with an offline database? What tasks can you only perform with an offline database?

Is there a resource kit for IIS 7 (like the IIS 6 res kit)? If so, where can I get it from, I can't find it anywhere.

Specifically, I'm after the SelfSSL tool...

I've got a server running Windows Web Server 2008 SP1 (Version 6, Build 60001, SP 1).

Looking in task manager I've got an instance of WmiPrvSE.exe running under the SYSTEM account using more than 400MB of RAM in its Working Set.

How can I find out what this is and why its using so much RAM?

I have a pair of web servers running Windows Server 2003 Web Edition SP2 (build 3790). There servers are a on a Gigabit LAN and are on the same subnet.

I created a new link on the 1st server and added the second box as a target to the link. I configured replication as ring.

The 2nd server gets some of the files on the scheduled replication but this varies wildly which makes me think it's not running fully. The folder on server 1 is 1.3GB.

Is there some way I can force repication (from a console?) and monitor the progress and see if/when/why it fails.

I've deployed an ASP.NET 3.5 app to a 64bit Windows 2003 R2 server.

In the web.config I have the following

<customErrors mode="RemoteOnly"
              defaultRedirect="/404/">
  <error statusCode="404"
         redirect="/404/"/>

  <error statusCode="500"
         redirect="/500/"/>
</customErrors>

In the website properties in IIS Manager I have set the 404 and 500 errors to Type = "URL" and the same URLs as in the web.config.

I have a wildcard application map to the .NET 2.0 aspnet_isapi.dll with "Verify file exists" turned off.

If I try to hit a fake .aspx file I successfully get sent to the 404 page. I belive this is because there is an explicit mapping for .aspx to the .NET DLL.

If I try to access a fake directory I simply recieve a plain text response saying:

The system cannot find the file specified.

It would appear that these requests for directories are not being routed through the .NET pipeline, which is what I would expect (and need) to happen becuase of the wildcard application mapping.

Any ideas?

I have two websites, one of which is a slight fork of the originals source code. A basic feature (the use of sessions) appears to be working differently on the forked site to the original site.

I have diff'ed the source and can see no differences in the key areas, and so I am wondering if there is some way I can diff the IIS site configurations?

Is it possible to export ALL the site settings to a text file which could be diffed or is there some other way of highlighting any differences?

UPDATE

I Asked this over on StackOverflow as I hadn't got any answers on here at the time. Here's the link to the answers for completeness' sake. I'll like that page back over here once I've tried Dan C's solution below.

ORIGINAL

A while ago a large client of ours moved to a single hosting provider who spec'd out a software environment which would be consistent accross all the live servers.

Amongs other things this includes Apache 2.2.8 and PHP 5.1.6.

We had an ubuntu 8.04 server for development and these versions of Apache and PHP are not the default installed. So I had to compile them from source. These versions have happily been running for over a year now.

We're starting a new site build and we want to use ZendFrameword which requires PDO_MySQL.

I've tried recompiling with the following...

./configure --with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs \
--with-config-file-path=/user/local/apache2/conf/php.ini \
--with-curl=/usr/lib/ --with-mysql=shared --with-mysqli=shared \
--with-zlib --with-gd --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local/lib/ \
--with-freetype-dir=/usr/lib/ --enable-soap --enable-pdo=shared \
--with-pdo-mysql=shared --with-sqlite=shared
...
make
...
make install
...
libtool --finish /sources/php-5.1.6/libs

Which all works fine, and when I bring apache back up, it shows me the new ./configure in the phpinfo().

After doing this MySQL stops working, the MYSQL section disappears and msyql stops working.

The make, make install, libtool... puts the *.so files in

/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20050922

The configure I have used previously which enabled MySQL but not PDO is

./configure --with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs \
--with-config-file-path=/user/local/apache2/conf/php.ini \
--with-curl=/usr/lib/ --with-mysql --with-mysqli \
--with-zlib --with-gd --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local/lib/ \
--with-freetype-dir=/usr/lib/ --enable-soap

I'm not a massive *nix person, can anyone tell me where I'm going wrong.

Thanks

I'm attempting to SSH to GlobalSCAPE Secure FTP Server. The server is running Windows 2003 and GloablSCAPE Secure FTP Server 3.3.1.

My client is running Vista SP2 and putty 0.60.0.0.

I recieve the following message after correctly entering my username and password.

login as: greg
GlobalSCAPE Secure FTP [email protected]'s password:
Server refused to allocate pty

Any suggestions?

Cheers

I've created a virtual PC and installed Server 2003 R2 on it. I have added the application server role. I can get to the default site using http://localhost on the VPC. The VPC can access the internet.

I can't however ping the VPC from my physical desktop (host machine). I've tried adding a second network adaptor in the VPC console and giving this a static IP but to no avail.