David Budiac's questions

What are the pro's and con's of consumer SSDs vs. fast 10-15k spinning drives in a server environment? We cannot use enterprise SSDs in our case as they are prohibitively expensive. Here's some notes about our particular use case:

• Hypervisor with 5-10 VM's max. No individual VM will be crazy i/o intensive.
• Internal RAID 10, no SAN/NAS...

I know that enterprise SSDs:

1. are rated for longer lifespans
2. and perform more consistently over long periods

than consumer SSDs... but does that mean consumer SSDs are completely unsuitable for a server environment, or will they still perform better than fast spinning drives?

Since we're protected via RAID/backup, I'm more concerned about performance over lifespan (as long as lifespan isn't expected to be crazy low).

Since about two weeks (around when Google updated stable to version 26), our internal users began receiving periodical timeouts upon requesting pages within our locally hosted app (from Google Chrome). Specifically:

This webpage is not available. Error 7 (net::ERR_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out.

Our ASP.NET app never receives the HTTP request... In fact the issue seems nearly identical to "Our app giving some Google Chrome users trouble :(", except the error only appears sporadically throughout the day (~10 times per business day per user) and only for a few minutes at a time.

Here's the steps I've tried to troubleshoot with no luck:

1. Cleared cookies/cache
2. Removed all extensions
3. Re-installed chrome
4. Ran chrome with --disable-ssl-false-start (even though "SSL False Start" has been disabled since version 20)
5. Verified "Automatically detect settings" is NOT selected in "Settings > Advanced > Change Proxy Settings > LAN Settings"
6. Repro'd on Chrome Canary (version 27)

Here's the verbose log entry:

[2552:1908:0306/154246:VERBOSE1:web_contents_impl.cc(2049)] Failed Provisional Load: http://grid.local/, error_code: -7, error_description: The operation timed out., is_main_frame: 1, showing_repost_interstitial: 0, frame_id: 1

Anybody have any other ideas to try?

I recently transitioned our VPN server from a Windows Server '03 box to '08 R2, both using built-in Routing and Remote Access for PPTP connections. Our firewall has a rule that forwards traffic from a public IP address (which the clients connect to) to the VPN server which is on a private subnet.

Is there an option in RRAS to force the clients to use the VPN connection for both our private and public (on which the firewall is routing traffic) subnets? VPN connections currently only have access to the private subnet unless "Use default gateway on remote network" or "Send all traffic over VPN connection" is checked on the client.

Ideally clients would route only their traffic for our private and public subnets though their VPN connection, and everything else as normal. I could have sworn we had a option set to allow this when our VPN server was on a Server '03 box.

We have a 3 mbps by 3 mbps dedicated, unshared pipe that hosts a web server, mail server, and VoIP/web browsing traffic for 8 employees. The web server hosts a few different sites that average about 250,000 page views total per month, with something less than a 40kb average page load size I'd estimate. I'm not sure how much of that is cached. (Side question: Is there some place in Google Analytics/Webmaster Tools that calculates actual page load size w/ taking into account cached values?)

Our #1 priority is to ensure fast load times from our web server. How should we know when we need to expand our connection beyond 3x3? Should I worry about employee web browsing traffic clogging up our download bandwidth? Will that affect page load time?

Our outbound data circuit traffic logs appear to hover around 500 kbit/second most of the time, sometimes bumps up to 1 mbps, and on occasion appears to hit our 3 mbps cap.

I have a development copy of an ASP.NET intranet site checked out and running on my local machine. We're using digest authentication to allow users to log in using their active directory accounts.

On my development copy only, Digest sometimes will repeatedly prompt for login information usually ~9 times per page request. After repeatedly logging in (or it also works to cancel out of 8 out of the 9 prompts), I can use the site as normal.

I cannot pinpoint what is triggering the issue. Sometimes this problem triggers upon the next page request, sometimes after I edited/saved/refreshed a page, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all.

Each prompt triggers several logon (Event ID 4624 & 4672) security events in the Events Viewer. Shortly after each burst of logon events, I'll see a burst of logoff events (Event ID 4634)

A co-worker who has a nearly an identical setup (Windows 7, IIS 7) is not experiencing the issue. Our production copy (that is running on a different server) also does not experience the issue. We've tried to compare our settings in IIS, not really finding any differences.

I'm using chrome but I've experienced the issue in other browsers.