Microsoft

We have a Bonded ADSL solution for our servers to provide the necessary upstream transfer speeds for the applications we host. We have bonded ADSL because our exchange still doesn’t support SDSL, and a leased line is overkill. Theoretically, we should have 28.1 Mbps download and 3.2Mbps upload - what I am actually seeing is about 1.7Mbps down and 1.9Mbps up. I have tested this on various servers, over various times and file sizes, there is no doubt that the performance is POOR.

Outlook Web access is a fantastic tool for our company, providing on-the-go access to people’s mailboxes - which is of course secured by SSL and uses Forms Based Authentication. Internally, we have an intranet portal that allows us to access the various systems - one of which is OWA. One of the stipulations for this internal portal is that it is all Single Sign On using NTLM authentication integrated authentication. This is where the problem lies because enabling OWA with Forms Based Authentication over SSL disables Integrated Authentication.

We were integrating a 3rd party product’s web parts with MOSS the other day and came accross an interesting problem. In site editing mode, all the drop down menus would appear for a flash and then go blank. The actual admin pages we were trying to get to would work if you entered them into the browser directly, but that isn’t an easy way to manage the site! The problem turned out to be that in the process of getting the 3rd party web parts to work, the support team had added a MIME type to the IIS installation.

I was adding a shiny new domain controller to my server farm earlier today, we have just two Windows 2000 SP4 domain controllers on old kit and they are due to retire. With the hardware selected, purchased and a fresh copy of Windows Server 2003 R2 installed, I set to installing Active Directory. DCPromo.exe fires up and I go through the configuration steps until… "The Active Directory Installation Wizard cannot continue because the forest is not prepared for installing Windows Server 2003.

If you’ve logged onto the properties for your IIS install and found that the ASP.NET tab has mysteriously disappered, you can try a couple of things. Firstly, try re-registering ASP.NET with IIS using the ASPNET_REGIIS.exe located in the .NET installation folder: c:\WINDOWS\MICROSOFT.NET\framework\\aspnet_regiis -i   Chances are though, that it won't work, and that you can try and number of command using aspnet_regiis.exe or even uninstalling and reinstalling .NET and you won't actually fix the problem.

When the Dell engineer said “they’ve asked if you can reinstall the OS” my heart sank. Not because I felt like he was weasling out of work - unusually they were very helpful. Not because installing XP is a hard task, I’ve done it over 100 times on all sorts of hardware. No, the reason I let out a sigh was because this particular laptop, the Latitude X1, has no internal CD/DVD drive.

Recently I found the need to retrieve the key from an existing Exchange Server for a reinstall - the software is legally licensed but the key was somehow lost. A trawl through my registry revealed that the key is stored in an obscure place: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft Integration\{GUID}\PID3.0 This was the case on a Windows Server 2000 install with Exchange Server 2003 installed, when I get the chance I will test this on Server 2003.

I’ve just removed a domain controller (DC) from my root domain, the very first server not only in the domain, but the forest. The roles were migrating to a newer server, far more up to the job, but it isn’t a job to be taken lightly. If you mess up the root domain, you’ve potentially got problems all the way down your domain hierarchy.   Let me explain; the primary domain controller in a domain (normally the first domain controller) hosts all the FSMO roles.

Just a quick post today about trust levels for .NET assemblies that are hosted remotely. My current set up at work means that I am maintaining one version of our web site while working on developing a new one - not uncommon. I have 2 virtual servers running Server 2003, IIS and SQL Server, each an identical copy of our production server. Each solution and it’s projects are stored on each virtual server, with the project folders shared and mapped as drives on my laptop.

Originally published Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 Wahey! I got published this week in IT Week, ok it was only a readers letter, but I got in! Here’s what I wrote: “New software always excites me, so I was enthusiastic as I installed Office 2007 on my laptop. The machine offers more than enough grunt for my media applications, but sadly not quite enough to install Office in less than 15 minutes, plus one restart.