E-MIEL.NET

I passed the exam “TOGAF 9 Foundation”.

As of today I can again host in IIS (besides the Apache2 server on Debian), hereby a list of some services (the list will hopefully be updated…):

• HelloWorld
• CalculatePI

In my quest for the best home solution I decided to change my Microsoft environment (2008, Exchange 2007) server to a new Atom based system running Debian.

The first problem I ran into, was not being able to do any Linux installation at all…turned out I had to upgrade the bios (latest version can be found at Intel site).

Second problem…as I had to use USB to install the system: how was I to make a working bootable USB drive. Turned out that on the sourceforge site there is something called UNetbootin. Search no further, this tool works perfectly and I’m going to use it a lot !

Now I’m looking at a great D510MO based running system.

The situation:

At home I’m running a Windows 2008 server (Exchange 2007 and mostly file sharing) that is also hosting two virtualized Debian environments: webserver and mail server.

As all HTTP trafic is serviced by the Debian machine, I had to figure out a way to forward all the traffic for www.elconsultancy.nl to this 2K8 machine (running IIS). Why…trying to make my first steps into the SilverLight world.

The solution:

As most stuff also this could be handled really easy by using the reverse proxy. Two steps to handle this:

1) Edit the Virtual Hosts file:

<VirtualHost 192.168.50.80:80>

ServerName www.elconsultancy.nl

ProxyRequests Off

<Proxy *>

Order deny,allow

Allow from all

</Proxy>

ProxyPass / http://192.168.50.1/

ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.50.1/

</VirtualHost>

2) Enable the proxy module:

a2enmod proxy_http

Yeah, it really is that easy !

Check the site:

Change the Rules

Also enjoying Windows Communication Foundation 3.5 (Unleashed, ISBN 978-0672330247) ?
Having trouble to get the example of Chapter 2 up and running ?

Please check this link, it helped me a lot (by using the HttpNamespaceManager).

As I was running out of disk space on my home server, I decided to replace my RAID 1 setup of two Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB disks by two Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB disks. As RAID controller I use the onboard ATI/AMD SB600 controller (on a Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H motherboard), it does it work perfectly…

Before starting the replacement I searched on the Internet for a good how-to for this replacement as I never extended a soft RAID. Here are the steps I took to get to the extended situation (as there was no complete how-to there for me…):

1. Replace one disk with the new disk and have it synchronized (unfortunately, my setup did not show any progress and it took 4.5 hours to complete). This synchronization is done by the OS, in my case Windows 2008. By watching the disk activity light I could tell it was still syncing. After that reboot and make sure the status of the RAID is no longer critical, but functional.
2. Replace the second disk with the new disk and have it synchronized as well (think it must have taken the same time….decided to go to bed at this point). After that reboot and make sure the status of the RAID is no longer critical, but functional.
3. Press Ctrl + F to get into the RAID utility.
4. At this point I had to delete the RAID set and recreate it to get the full size.
5. In disk manager the additional disk space was displayed and I was able to have my D drive extended (standard Windows 2008 functionality).

Took me a lot of time to find out how to mount shares from OSX on my Windows server. When that was solved, getting these shares mounted persistently was even more difficult…

For those running into the same guest:

You can automatically mount your Windows drive every time you login to your Mac by adding it to your Login items. In System Preferences, Accounts, choose the “Login Items” tab and add the Volume to the list of apps that automatically start up.

For running multiple sites on your box, you have to do something with configuration. What I did is (in my opinion) a nice way:

create a file called /etc/apache2/conf.d/virtual.conf

include the following text:

#
# We’re running multiple virtual hosts.
#
NameVirtualHost [your IP]:80

Now you can create a file in your /etc/apache2/sites-available map called (in my case) e-miel.net with the VirtualHost tag pointing to the NameVirtualHost mentioned above:

<VirtualHost [your IP]:80>

With this no errors will be logged after restarting Apache2.

Btw, I ran into this error:

_default_ VirtualHost overlap on port 80

It seems that /etc/apache2/ports.conf also contains a “global” (don’t know for sure if that is the correct word) variable that holds the NameVirtualHost value.

Though being a fulltime Microsoft .NET developer I decided to change my blogging environment from dasBlog to WordPress (on a Debian host).

After configuring the machine it seemed to work smoothly but from time to time Apache2 was not responding to any requests (though the mail server was running perfectly).

It turned out that by using <Virtualhost *> (yes, I definitely am lazy !) the problem was caused by my second not used nic. Disabling this one did the trick, the server is up and running 24/7.