Mee's questions

From the system requirements for Windows Server 2008 (on wikipedia.org):

• Minimum: 512 MB RAM (may limit performance and some features)
• Recommended: 2 GB RAM or higher

I'm going to have my website hosted on a Windows 2008 VPS and I was initially planning to use a hosting plan that gives 512 MB RAM (to save some money), but now I'm worried, do the same system requirements apply to Windows 2008 running in a VPS or are there differences? My website has very little memory requirements but I'll be using MySQL which should use some of this memory, should I get at least 1 GB of memory?

For security reasons, I want to be able to connect to a Windows 2008 dedicated web server using Remote Desktop only from one DNS alias. The reason I want to use a DNS alias and not an IP address is that I don't have a static IP address from my ISP, I have a dynamic IP that changes every time I restart the DSL modem.

Your help is much appreciated ...

In my app, I use MySQL for the database backend (the app uses multiple MySQL databases, all use MyISAM tables). For performance reasons, I want to move one of the databases to a solid state drive (DRAM based), but only that database, the other databases should stay on the SATA drive I use. As you know, in MySQL you can only specify the data directory in MySQL settings and you don't have control over where every database is saved. Is there any workaround for this? I'm hoping that there might some trick I'm not aware of that can get the job done.

Any suggestions would be really appreciated, thanks

I'm using a dedicated server for my app. Now I got a webmail app that I also want to work on the same server. I want the webmail app to work using a subdomain from the site, for example if my site uses the domain mysite.com, then I want the webmail app to use webmail.mysite.com.

I basically want to add a new website in IIS and map the domain webmail.mysite.com to it so that any requests with the host name webmail.mysite.com go the that website, how can I do that?

I'm testing sending emails from mailenable webmail. I have no problems sending mail to gmail or hotmail, both work fine, but yahoo mail sends my messages to the spam folder and shows the attachment icon for the message even though the message doesn't contain any attachments, it's just plain text. It only includes a reply to a previous message, like this:

message text

----- Original Message -----

original message text

I copied the message content and sent it from gmail to yahoo and the attachment icon didn't show which makes me believe it's something with mailenable. What could possibly be wrong?

Also, is there a white list for yahoo mail that I can join? And also for other popular webmail? I'm going to use this on a production website (site visitors use the contact us form to send messages to the site - the mail enable server running on the same machine as the web server - then I check the messages using the mailenable webmail and reply them).

This is really important to me, your help would be really appreciated ...

Is there a way to list all the permissions a user has for all the files and directories in Windows?

I have a problem getting SMTP to work with an ASP.NET app I have (the error I get is "Cannot get IIS pickup directory"). The app delivers the mail to SMTP using the pickup directory.

I already know what causes the error, it's a permissions problem accessing the SMTP settings (see this link http://www.laptev.com/?p=3). I use a custom windows user for that app which seemingly doesn't have the permissions to access the SMTP settings, when I use the NetworkService account, everything works fine but when I use my custom user, I get the error. Now I'm trying to figure out where the SMTP settings are saved in Windows2008/IIS7 to give the needed permissions to my custom user.

Possible Duplicate:
yslow says etags are misconfigured. how to configure etags properly on IIS7 ?

For performance reasons, I'm using expire headers for static files (adding long expiration periods like 50 years or so).

Now I'm trying to get rid of etag headers which are automatically added by IIS7. I've done some searching but it seems harder than what I thought (there doesn't seem to be a straight forward way). I found some workarounds but they all use httpmodules (which I'm keeping as a last resort). I strongly prefer to not get the etag header added in the first place. Did anyone manage to do this?

Thanks

I'm totally new to this site monitoring thing, so please bear with me.

I'm looking for a good monitoring service for my website. What I'm trying do is make sure the site is running and working not just running (ie. responsive and working, not just responsive). For example, the database could be down, so the site is responsive but not working, this means with every request you will get an error page instead of the page you want. How do you normally handle this?

In my app, I have something like a fatal error mode, if something goes wrong that the app can't recover from (like when the database is down for example), then the app is set to fatal error mode and will always transfer to a page that says something like 'We're having some technical problem and will be back online soon' (this is done to avoid returning errors with every request, which is not pleasant for the user experience, and also to avoid logging tons of errors which are all basically the same).

I'm thinking about writing a webservice that the monitoring service should call. The webservice should return a boolean value, so, if it returns true then the site is working but if it returns false, then this means that something is wrong. Is it possible to find a monitoring service that can check the value returned from the webservice and notify me if it's not the expected value?

Sorry for the long question and thanks for any suggestions

This should be really simple but I can't just figure it out. I want to get the cluster size for a partition, e.g. 512, 1024, 2048 .. etc. How can I get this?

On my Windows XP I use a small utility called TreeSize to get the cluster size along with many other details, I believe it should work with Windows 2008 too but I can't believe it's not possible without a utility.

Your help is really appreciated

I got a dedicated server (running Windows 2008 Standard Edtion) with two hard drives. I have a web app (written in ASP.NET) that should be running on this server, the web app uses MySQL which should also be running on the same server. Also there will be the user photos which reside in the same folder as the app folder. Most access will be to MySQL and the user photos.

So, is it better to use the second drive for both the app and MySQL data files so that I leave the first drive for the OS

OR

Use the first drive (which also has the OS files) for the web app and the second drive for MySQL so that I lower the access time.

Which approach should yield better performance?

Many Thanks

I just got a dedicated server with Windows 2008 Standard Edition and am trying to do the necessary configuration to run my web app on it.

Was wondering, is it a good idea to install an antivirus on the web server? In the app, users can't upload any files except images (and they checked for being images in the app code before being saved on the the server). I'm encouraged to not install an antivirus in order not to affect performance or cause any troubles with the app, will I miss anything by doing this?

Thanks

I'm using Windows XP on my development machine (IIS 5.1). I installed hmailserver on my machine and now want to configure IIS to relay all outgoing messages to hmailserver, what should I do in IIS to do this?

Many thanks

I have a computer with Windows XP SP2 with a weird problem. The hosts file doesn't work. No matter what I do, adding or removing entries in the file doesn't make any difference, pinging the added names times out. I tried flushing the DNS cache (using ipconfig /flushdns) but that didn't work, I even tried to restart the DNS client service but that made no difference too.

Removing entries also has no effect, I ping the names and I get a reply.

Help!!!

Edit: Thanks for your answer guys, but the problem is more complicated than this. It seems I'll have to reinstall Windows.

I'm going to get a Windows 2008 dedicated server sometime soon. I'm going to have my website hosted on it, so, I also want to run a mail server on the same machine to receive any mail sent to the website (I use the SMTP Server in IIS for sending mail, but this about receiving not sending)

Does Windows 2008 have a built-in POP3 OR IMAP server? If so, can it be accessed through a webmail interface? I mean does it also have a webmail interface similar to OWA for example? If not, do you have suggestions for a good mail server with a webmail interface, preferably free or open source? MS Exchange is above my budget and my needs are so simple anyway. I heard good things about hMailServer but I checked and it doesn't have a webmail interface.

I know I can outsource this to a third party for a little monthly fee, but I prefer to host my own server.

Thanks for any suggestions