Rob White's questions

In our production environment the SSL is offloaded to the load balancer. This was done to reduce the CPU load on the servers.

For the most part this is perfectly fine, however, we now need the servers to be aware whether they are serving pages over SSL or not.

What is a good way of doing this, but keeping the SSL offload in place?

I've noticed that when I deploy my application via msdeploy all of the url re-writes (IIS 7.5) are removed. How can I prevent this from happending or how can I build the url re-write into part of the msdeploy script?

I've got a number of users who are complaining that IE8 gives the error Not enough storage is available to process this command when printing very large documents (100's of pages). I found a number of articles that talk about the IRPStackSize being too small, but even with that turned up to 50 (the highest it will go), I still see this error happening.

Are there any other possible work around's? Or is it simply that IE is not capable of printing very large documents?

UPDATE

For anyone else looking at this kind of problem:

We have abandoned printing documents directly from the browser, there was a whole litany of problems. We had everything from out of memory errors, images not being displayed and browsers just plain locking up.

Printing large documents from the browser is a plain bad idea. We are currently looking at alternatives.

I'm trying to get the first (any) 10 files from a deeply nested filestructure. I can use XCOPY source dest /T /E to build the folder structure, but what I'd like to do is get 10 files from each folder and sub folder and copy those as well.

Is there a tool that will do this for me?

I have been given an image that I'm told was created in VMWare 4.0 that I am trying to run. When I open it in virtual box I'm told that it cant run the image as it's not a supported version.

I tried digging around the VMWare site and all I could find were tools that required me to boot from a CD, which I can't really do on this remote server. Are there any tools to run a VMWare 4.0 image inside windows 2003?

Ideally a free option would be good.

I have been given an x64 windows 2003 server, on which I have installed M$ Virtual server 2005 R2. I then created an image that is running Server 2008 R2. It was running very slowly so i did a bit of digging through the event logs and ended up finding this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925477.

I have been into the BIOS of the host server and changed the Memory Operating Mode to Optimizer Mode and the Node Interleaving to Enabled. Happily the guest operating system now runs a good lump faster (in my perception, no real concrete testing).

So that's the setup, my question is simple. What did I just do? The more I read into the memory management docs, the less I understand. Could someone please explain what the Memory Operating Mode is and what the different settings really mean.

I have a 2008 reporting services server installed on windows 2003 server. I am trying to allow anonymous access to the report builder folder so that my users do not have to select the remember password option when they login, if they are wanting to use the report builder.

All I have found so far is that I should be able to do this with the IIS manager, but that only seems to work for reporting services 2005. Reporting services 2008 does not show up in the IIS manager, enabling anonymous access seems to be hidden somewhere else.

How do I enable anonymous access to report builder in reporting services 2008?

Disclaimer: I am a developer, not a system admin, please be gentle.

Where I work we are having a lot of intermittent network problems. Sometimes the DNS will fail, but access to servers can be done via IP, sometimes access via IP fails. So far as we can tell nothing has been changed on the servers, firewalls, managed switches etc. Also, frustratingly the faults don't cause issues with all users all of the time, but so far as we can tell, all the users have had problems at some point.

1. The servers are not reporting any faults.
2. The physical network seems fine (it's a small site).
3. The firewalls aren't reporting anything out of the ordinary.
4. The managed switches have passwords that are only stored in the sys admin's head (an issue we know!)

Our in house sysadmin is unavailable at the moment, so it's left to the developers to try and figure something out.

So, given that I have almost no clue, where do I start?

Update

I've tried the tracrt/ping combo and it looks like it's an internal issue. The external stuff seems to be fairly consistent, but the internal bits are proving to be flaky.

I have a D-link DAP-1353 n2, I can connect to it fine, but I am not given an IP address. If I assign myself a static IP I can browse the network without any problems. Some other laptops are able to connect and get an IP without any problems.

It seems to be about 50/50 of users that can and can't connect and there is no obvious connection between them. What can I check that might help?

I have a remote server that has just run through a windows update. The server has rebooted and seems to be fine.

However, I can no longer connect via remote desktop. Someone in my office tells me they had a similar problem with a server here and it was a "genuine advantage" tool wanting to be completed.

Is there a way to get the tool to complete its install without visiting the physical server?

I have an event view that I need to filter and pivot the data from.

I tried exporting the file as a CSV file, but that is missing the description.

I tried exporting the file as XML, but there was no schema, so excel opened it as a table and it was of little to no use.

Is there a way that I can open an event log in excel and be able to pivot / filter on the data, but still retain the description part of the log entries.

I have a folder that was created by unzipping a folder from my c:\users\<username>\downloads directory. The folder that was created is now not trusted, is there a way that I can trust this folder.

It is a local folder, not a mapped folder.

I've got an IIS6 server with a boat load of log files.

What good tools are there that I can't use to get a decent amount of detail from the logs?

I'd like to prevent / restrict the amount of times an applications flashes in my task bar.

For example, messenger chat windows. If I ignore them, they keep flashing. Ideally, what I'd like to do is only allow any given application to flash in the task bar 3 times and then stop.

How might I do this?

Edit

To clarify I do need a Vista solution.

ForegroundFlashCount is already set to 3, so is this setting is ignored in Vista?