Adam Butler's questions

I have an application on a VPS and I want to run it with RemoteApp instead of having to remote desktop into the server. Our VPS provider can sell us a pack of five RDS licenses to use which will be plenty.

I plan on following this guide that says it is not recommended for security reasons: https://ryanmangansitblog.com/2015/02/22/deploying-rds-2012-r2-on-a-domain-controller-the-walk-through-guide/

Another guide on how to set up a single server for remoteApp actually uses two servers: https://msfreaks.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/windows-2012-r2-remote-desktop-services-part-1/

Finally Microsoft have a guide on installing RDS on a DC that essentially just says no: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc742817(v=ws.11).aspx They say it is insecure and bad performance. We have a decent sized VPS though and trust the users.

My question is what is the security risk? The users running the remoteApp apps are trusted employees.

I have two virtual machines for database and app server and I want the app server and only the app server to connect to the database server.

These are in the same vnet. I am trying to do this by securing the endpoint.

With Azure I can see that if I shutdown the VMs they will get new IP addresses so I cant hardcode the public IP address of the app server in the ACL list of the database server. If I put a vnet range like 10.2.0.0/16 in the acl then I need my app server database connection string to use a local address but again the local address of the database will change when it shuts down.

The only option I can see is to set up a dns server. Is there another way?

Potentially I could add the dns role to my app server. This seems like it would be a common scenario, what is the usual way people handle this?

Edit: I found how to get the FQDN using nslookup. This resolves to the 10.x.x.x address so I can use this in the connection string.

We have had a consultant set up a sharepoint 2010 server for us to use for document management. I believe it is just on the basic (free) sharepoint that comes with windows server.

From what I understand this uses sql server express 2008r2 which has a 10GB size limit. I am under the impression that full sharepoint can store file content outside of the database but that with our version they are stored in the database and am worried we will run out of space and suddenly our staff will not be able to work any more.

Is this a reality - will it just stop working when we run out of space?

Are they any ways we can stretch the sql server express database, perhaps by using multiple databases?

How can we monitor the size of the database so we can predict when we might need to upgrade to full sql-server?

I recently moved a tomcat app from tomcat 5 on windows server 2003 to tomcat 6 under windows server 2008. Now there is a delay writing to the log files. This is for both stdout and acceess logs. For example you can go to some page then open the access log but there wont be any record of that access for a few minutes. This is a pain because if there is a problem reported we don't want to have to wait until the log files are written out. I guess tomcat or windows server must be buffering the logs. Is there some way to disable this.

We have not modified the logging.properties file and it does not contain any bufferSize entries.