I'm trying to do something that should be relatively straight-forward - I want to setup a few domains and subdomains to redirect to the core domain for our site, but I want to put the redirects out on Cloudfront. Everything works except redirecting the root path - that gets me an XML file partly-describing the S3 bucket.

Background

S3

S3 allows you to setup an all-redirect bucket, like:

Testing this, the web endpoint (brass9-com.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com) does what it should - it redirects to brass9.com. Good.

Cloudfront

Cloudfront lets you point at an S3 bucket, but the way it suggests you do so is wrong - instead of pointing at the bucket by its name, like brass9-com.s3.amazonaws.com, you need to use the Web Endpoint above. Other than that you can leave everything at its defaults and get good redirect behavior. So, a path like www.brass9.com/portfolio properly redirects to where it should. Also good.

The problem - the root domain redirect

The one thing that then fails to work is redirecting from plain www.brass9.com. Instead of getting you a redirect it gets you this odd result:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ListBucketResult xmlns="http://s3.amazonaws.com/doc/2006-03-01/">
<Name>brass9-com</Name><Prefix></Prefix>
<Marker></Marker><MaxKeys>1000</MaxKeys><IsTruncated>false</IsTruncated>
</ListBucketResult>

OK... . So this is not completely unexpected - because there's no Default Root Object. But what Default Root Object would I possibly specify to prevent this behavior? What is the name of the S3 redirect object, if any, that I need to point to? Or is there some other proper config, or is this just a bug in how Cloudfront and S3 interact that Amazon needs to fix?

Known Not-Working Solution: Default Root Object

It is possible to specify a Default Root Object of index.html, but it doesn't help any - it just changes the problem. The Cloudfront url instead redirects to /index.html on the main site, which is a 404 (we don't use an index.html file, it's a server-side framework driven site). I could put an index.html on the server, but that defeats the small speed gain of using Cloudfront in the first place.

Similar questions

One question asks something similar but gets back a blank, 0-byte response for some reason instead of what I'm seeing, an XML response. It doesn't include a question about that problem or a resolution.

Related articles

One article proposes you just serve the entire site out on both the bare and www domain. This screws with any user's bookmarks, your search ranking, etc, etc. You should not do this.

Several discuss hosting a static website on S3 and Cloudfront rather than a redirect scheme, and so are unrelated.

So, how do I do this properly?

Screenshot of Cloudfront Configuration - no Default Root Object, pointing at S3 origin. Ignore the InProgress - I had just toggled Default Root Object on and off to test.

And the Origin config for that Distribution:

We've configured SPF for our Google Apps For Your Domain domain some time ago, and resources like mail-tester.com validate it as setup correctly (we also have DKIM, etc). For the past year however, we've been getting a lot of "Mail not delivered" messages and replies to strange emails from our domain we've never sent. Sometimes they include the headers from the original email and they look like this:

Received-SPF: unknown(brass9.com: domain of _netblocks2.google.com uses a mechanism not recognized by this client)

In this case the spam service appears to be "Spam Arrest," based on other headers.

So my question is, what can I do to stop this flow of invalid email from our domain? And what can I do to get services like the above to understand our SPF record? Is the default Gmail SPF record not fully compatible with some common spam services?

There's much debate over whether the tilde belongs in a Gmail SPF record, so we've tried changing our SPF record to be more strict:

v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com include:aspmx.googlemail.com -all

But we still see emails like the above. Is there anything we can do to be better netizens?

Note that this question is somewhat similar to this one, except this is for sending from Gmail - theirs was about getting their SPF record to be accepted by Gmail.

When I restore a db in Sql Server 2008 R2 from data on another server, it makes a mess of the users. I have a Windows User and MsSql Login named Web_SqlA on both machines. Before the Restore, Web_SqlA is properly mapped to the right Windows user in the database. After the Restore, Web_SqlA is still listed as a user for the db, but it's no longer tied to the Windows user, causing Trusted Connections to it to fail.

How can I Restore the db without breaking this user each time?

I see that this:
Sql Server Database Restore

Addresses fixing these orphaned users after the fact; I'm looking to prevent overwriting the users during the Restore in the first place - everything else should be restored, but leave my users be. How can I go about that?

Each time I start my ASP.Net MVC 3 app from Visual Studio 2010, IIS Express launches and IE spins waiting. The request fails with HTTP 503 Service Unavailable. I hit Refresh in IE, and the request succeeds. All subsequent requests succeed until I stop debugging. The next time I go to start debugging, the first request fails again.

Has anyone else experienced this?

In IISExpress\applicationhost.config I have:

<site name="ProjectName" id="6">
    <application path="/" applicationPool="Clr4IntegratedAppPool">
            <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="c:\users\chris\dropbox\code\2010\SolutionName\ProjectName" />
    </application>
    <bindings>
            <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:80:laptop" />
    </bindings>
</site>

I have this in my hosts file:

127.0.0.1    laptop

And my Project is set to start with IIS Express, with Project Url set to:

http://laptop

It's very strange that only the first request fails, perhaps as though Visual Studio isn't waiting long enough for IIS Express to start? Is there some way to make it wait?

Stopping debugging, making a change, and then starting again is one of the most common tasks I do so adding another step to get there is pretty annoying.

I regularly see this error in the Windows Error Log on one of my EC2 instances:

Certificate for local system with Thumbprint aa aa aa aa aa aa aa aa aa aa aa aa aa aa aa aa aa aa aa aa is about to expire or already expired.

It appears EC2 uses a self-signed certificate to communicate with an Active Directory service somewhere on the EC2 network. It uses the certificate above to communicate with this, and tries to auto-renew periodically. It appears this mechanism has failed.

1. What problems can arise from this?

2. How do I fix this?

I attempted to follow the instructions here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc774595(WS.10).aspx

But the certificate is not found - the Thumbprint is either an MD5 or more typically SHA1 hash. I searched for both criteria in mmc/Certificates and none were found.

How do I resolve this, and how problematic is it?

I'm looking for a way to flush all pending writes to disk in Windows, then buffer all future writes until a command gives the go-ahead.

I'd like to flush SQL Server writes and Windows system writes, then buffer both.

To be clear about what I'm doing:

I use Windows 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2 on EC2. I run an hourly snapshot on the drive these reside on. When nothing critical is changing, these snapshots come out just fine - but every now and again I get a bad snapshot. Worst-case scenario, in the event of drive failure (EBS failure technically), if I have 3 bad hourly snapshots I've lost 4 hours of data.

The snapshots already solve the fast, differential backup, and fast, easy restore - so all I'm looking for is a way to flush everything so it's in a consistent state on disk, then suspend all writes until the snapshot is complete. I'm happy to write some code for a service I call into to make this happen, but I need to know what APIs/commands I need to write against in order to get the task done.

I'm aware that I could create a separate volume which I continually run Windows Backup to and then snapshot that, but that significantly lengthens the backup process and feels like a hack. I know Windows and SQL Server are both very good at buffering writes, so this seems like something I should be able to accomplish in-place.

Ideas?