Duncan's questions

I have a particularly "hacky" question/solution and looking for some honest feedback.

In an enterprise system there are a number of requests that are destined for www.sometargeturl.com. These need to be diverted to www.newdestination.com.

Edit: We're not in charge of www.sometargeturl.com so can't put in 301 re-directs using .htaccess or anything here.

Rather than change all the code on the enterprise systems, I was wondering if a firewall/packet sniffer solution would work?

All traffic is routed through a Windows proxy server before it goes out onto the internet.

One solution I can think of would be to install a firewall or packet sniffer on the proxy server. The firewall would be programmed to look for packets addressed to www.sometargeturl.com and forward them instead to www.newdestination.com.

It's important that the full HTTP request is forwarded, and that it doesn't reach its original destination.

All thoughts appreciated, this isn't a great solution by any means!

Duncan

I have a conflict between Apache and IIS on Windows Server 2008. They both want control over port 80; we don't use IIS for anything so I wanted to disable the service.

However I can't find it anywhere! Is this something that can be disabled? I'd rather disable than remove the feature, in case anything IS using IIS after all.

Thanks in advance Duncan

What are the main drawbacks if we choose to use Node-Affinity (sticky MAC) with a load-balanced IIS solution?

We are thinking about using in-memory Session State, so need to evaluate the options.

Cheers Duncan

Besides the advantages of 64-bit memory allocation (> 4 GB - see this question on StackOverflow for why 32-bit +4 GB solutions won't work for me), what other reasons do I have for recommending that we should host an ASP.NET website on 64-bit Windows Server 2008, as opposed to the 32-bit version?

If it's only the larger addressable memory (>4 GB) issue, we have a load-balanced solution anyway so we could scale by adding a new (virtual) box.

The CPUs won't be running hot either, so any marginal speed gains couldn't be justified.

My own gut feeling is that we should host on 64-bit if we can, purely because it's easier to scale (by plugging in more RAM when we need to). But is that it?!

All comments and ideas are welcome!

The info I've found on the web so far indicate that SQL Server 2008 does not support true load-balancing.

Is this true? I'm not able to find decent documentation on MS' site, so any links would be appreciated.

Also, the differences between Active/Active and Active/Passive.

I presume that you can't have more than one SQL Server instance connect to the same database, right? Cos that would indicate true load-balancing.

So Active/Active is just when you have two separate SQL Server instances accessing two COMPLETELY SEPARATE databases? If one fails, then it just shares the load onto the one remaining instance? This configuration is only actually any use if we have indeed two COMPLETELY SEPARATE databases then?

So in my case, where I have only one db, I have to go for Active/Passive as the High Availability option?

These are fairly basic questions, but I've not been able to find fairly basic answers!

Thanks Duncan

This is news to me. I was always under the impression that 32-bit OS could only address 2^32 i.e. 4GB of RAM. Period.

But what's this - http://www.crucial.com/uk/kb/answer.aspx?qid=3743&click=true ?

How is this possible? And does this still mean > 4GB per process? i.e. if I have IIS, can ASP.NET be allocated more than 4GB?

Edit: Thanks for the responses. To put this in context, this is for web development. So it looks like w3wp.exe (ASP.NET Worker Process) will still be limited to 4GB? Is this true?

Thanks Duncan