Posted on: February 28th, 2010 by Famous Phil
As of late, I’ve been focusing many of my efforts into Windows more than on Linux. I suppose my only reason is because my Windows administration knowledge is quickly becoming outdated, but it is also because I spend 99.9% of my time developing and administrating Linux based machines. I am usually under the impression that Windows makes stuff so easy with the “next next next finish” principle, but Windows has just as many problems as Linux does, it just does not make them evident until you actually want to do something with Windows technology. The only great thing about Windows is that normally, the fix is 99 times easier than the same type of fix on a Linux based system.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been wanting to put together a Windows based web server for myself. Its purpose was originally to keep my Outlook 2007 application on Exchange open (to update my website calendar / update my webmail RSS feed folder). I’m beginning to run other stuff on the server (e.g. my instant messenger) so that I can have a better online presence (lets face reality, email isn’t as live as some of my friends would like). Since I chose to run Windows Server 2003, I decided that it might be worth my time to enable Internet Information Services and work on developing some ASP based web applications just for the fun of it. Of course, when the time is right, I will open up a few more accounts on the server through Matthouse for others who share my desire to learn ASP for fun. For those of you who are wondering, I’m waiting for a good billing system to come along, I have one, I’m simply waiting on the developer to make a few changes.
Anyways, today I was playing around with the server and I enabled FTP publishing so that I could easily upload a few files to the server through my local computer. Unfortunate for me, going to the windows components page under the control panel’s add/remove programs section to add FTP Publishing wasn’t enough. Sure enough, the server did install FTP and made it available in the Internet Information Services Manager section of the computer management console.
After I deleted the default ftp site and made a new site with isolated user home directories, ftp didn’t work correctly. Note that this server does not connect to nor run Windows Active Directory, so all the accounts are local. Anyways, after some research, I found that under the ftp root, I needed to add a folder called “LocalUser” and then I had to add the username of the account under that directory. To ensure that other users could not read files / data the directory, I changed permissions on the user folder to allow only that user and administrators access. At this point FTP began to sort of work!
I say sort of work because FTP only worked in active mode, meaning the Windows Firewall was getting in the way. After spending a few minutes looking for a solution, I figured that I would try adding the internet information services executable to the exceptions list. Sure enough, this fixed the passive mode problem. The steps I took to fix the problem were: 1. open up the Windows Firewall control panel console under the Windows control panel. I went to the exceptions tab and added a problem. I browsed for additional programs and added “C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\inetinfo.exe” to the exceptions list. After this was added, passive mode worked as expected.
Although Server 2003 is outdated by now, it is still a very stable system to do any experimental work on, which is why I choose to run it over a better and never version of Windows. It is also much cheaper to run than a newer version of Windows like the current Exchange Server which is running Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter.
Tags: Firewall, FTP, IIS, Microsoft
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
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Posted on: October 8th, 2009 by Famous Phil
As of yesterday, Microsoft’s Exchange 2010 team announced the release of the Exchange 2010’s RTM here: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/10/08/452775.aspx#comments. This is exciting news because I can finally request the RTM and begin migrating my systems to the new Exchange. I have been waiting a few months now for this release because it will be the start of many changes to my web hosting services as well that I need to take further steps to secure and improve performance on.
For those of you who don’t know what an RTM is, this is the Release to Manufacturing version that usually becomes the full version within a few months automatically. Unlike Release Candidates, the RTM version of any software packages will become the full version meaning they don’t require any re-installation or pose any security threats to use in production.
Exchange 2010 is important for me because it will introduce the send as function like hotmail and other providers have. I have many email addresses, but my University at Buffalo address is my most important, so I send as my @ Buffalo address. With 2010, this will no longer be the case because I will reply to email as the address it was sent to. I believe this will prevent a lot of confusion to contacts that don’t recognize my university address.
With Exchange 2010, I will also be upgrading the hardware that hosts my email infrastructure. I will be supporting Server 2008 R2 which is the latest operating system for Windows Server. I believe this was only fully released a few days ago and it is very similar to Windows 7. For those of you who don’t keep up with new releases of Windows, Windows 7 will be released to everyone late this month. I am currently using the RTM version of Windows 7 and I find that it is about 10x faster and more stable than Windows XP. Compared to Windows Vista, I’d say its about 50x more stable, faster, and more efficient. Since Server 2008 is Vista’s server operating system, I prefer to stay away from Server 2008 entirely.
For those of you who are thinking about upgrading to Windows 7, I’d strongly recommend it! First, if you are running Windows Vista, you’d be nuts not to goto Windows 7 within a few months of its final release. Windows 7 is practically the same but much more efficient. You will find that everything will be much easier to use on Windows 7 than Windows Vista. For those of you on Windows XP, it might be time to bite the bullet and upgrade (like I did). For the most part, if your system runs Windows XP fine, it will not have any issues running Windows 7 fine. I did find a few minor problems with XP applications (mostly MIDI musical instrument related) not working on Windows 7, but support is fairly good otherwise. Just one word of caution to the developers out there, if you want to run Visual Studio 2005/2008 on Windows 7, don’t install any Microsoft Office 2007 compatibility pack or PDF package. These will make Visual Studio’s Installation fail (on my preliminary tests).
Now to get into some security updates. I plan on migrating all of my systems to a more secure environment shortly after Exchange 2010 is fully implemented. I will have 1 gateway server that serves as a connection point for all services within Matthouse to keep everything tightened down. Within the next few months you can expect performance increases on sites that I host including my own (this one).
I have a lot more to blog about, and I hope to get around to it all as time permits. My next blog will hopefully be something about mail filtering.
Tags: exchange 2010, matthouse, Microsoft, release candidate, rtm, upgrade, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Technology
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Posted on: August 22nd, 2009 by Famous Phil
A week ago, I noticed that Microsoft has released Windows 7 (the release to companies and their developer network users) to my MSDN account. I have been a long user and have sworn by it because at service pack 3, it is very stable, fast and secure. Windows Vista came out and I gave it a quick look and decided that it was too big of a pig for what little it improved on from XP. Now I am doing the same stuff with Windows 7 and the rest of this post will detail why I like it!
My first look at Windows 7 came in the form of a beta last April (2009). I had a spare hard drive on my desktop computer that is meant for testing operating systems like this. I spent a few hours going through an installation process very similar to Vista and I compared all the memory and cpu usage details to that of a similar Windows XP and Vista install. Compared to XP, it was about the same, compared to Vista, it was about 50% less. This alone hinted that I would very much like this version of Windows. I then uninstalled it and prepared for a Windows XP to 7 migration when the release becomes available to me.
We are now at the release version of Windows 7 that will be supported through the end of the Windows 7 frenzy. I decided that I should upgrade my systems from XP now because its the final week of summer and I may not get a chance to perform an upgrade without any risk until next year sometime (and personally, I want the new flashier features that XP doesn’t have and Vista sucks at showing).
The Windows 7 install was very much like that of Windows Vista, its a very flashy interface and very easy to navigate. There wasn’t that much to it, simply do the “next next finish” routine that Windows has implemented so well. After the install, the release version I have looks somewhat like the beta was but is much more refined and clean. I also see that it uses a touch less than Windows XP does on a fresh install to this computer. To me, that is wonderful. On the fresh install, it only requires me to install 3 drivers which is better than Vista and XP combined!
Overall, I would recommend Windows 7 to anyone who can get their hands on a release copy and hates Vista. I would consider it stable enough to use for every day work and it has caused no harm to me. Although I have only been on 7 for a mere 5 days, I already like it a lot more than I ever liked XP and its a massive improvement over the failure called Vista.
Tags: 7, Microsoft, MSDN, windows
Posted in Technology
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Posted on: April 13th, 2009 by Famous Phil
I guess first, I should thank all of my blog readers for coming to my site, since now I’m on track for 500 visitors a month! I thought I’d post the to date statistics screen since I’m really proud of what my new site design has done 
Statistics of FamousPhil.com on 4/13/09
Now onto the main topic of this post, last night I was with a few friends at about 11pm and we got searching through all the domains in the world looking for what domains are taken and what not. Anyways, many of my friends and I always can Windows Vista with the term: shitsta, since I would never consider running Windows Vista on any of my computers, it is far too unstable and slow for my needs. Granted, I am a power user, but I cannot use Vista for a few hours without it getting super slow from all the memory and processor demands I put on it with programs that I write and test thoroughly. Anyways, we found that shitsta.com is available, so I grabbed it.
It did take me a few minutes to think if I really wanted such a domain, but I thought it would be a nice humor site to have since I do like having a side of humor. I don’t dislike Microsoft or anything like that, but Vista is a failure and Microsoft knows that but they keep pushing it. For example, Microsoft recently discontinued support for Windows XP to force the market to move to Vista, which isn’t really meant for anything more than causal use if you ask me. Right now, I am still in the air on what I want to do, but I might add a few cool features to check for Internet Explorer and perhaps find some sort of known hole in IE (since 99% of home users don’t install Windows Updates), and use it to inform users of what can really happen to you when you don’t update. Its only an idea, but I am confident that something cool will come of such a great domain!
I don’t hate Vista, but I hate how slow it runs. I hope that Windows 7 comes out and is much better than Vista is right now. If it isn’t, I may stop at Windows XP and move to Ubuntu as an upgrade! I consider the extra 5 minutes of work for Ubuntu worth not suffering from performance issues that newer versions of Windows seem to suffer from.
We will see what comes out of shitsta.com, however I think its a great domain to have a little informative fun, don’t you? 
Just for your curiousity, I will not have phil@shitsta.com as an email address, that just doesn’t look right 
But I might offer an email service using the domain if there is some demand for it *laughs*.
Tags: famousphil.com, Microsoft, shitsta, shitsta.com, stats, vista
Posted in My Site, Personal, Technology
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Posted on: February 27th, 2009 by Famous Phil
Today’s blog is about Google since Jordan will be writing about Google today as well.
I wouldn’t believe it if anyone told me they’ve never heard of Google. I’d also find it extremely difficult to believe that anyone hasn’t used Google ever or benefited from a google query. Lets face it, Google owns the search industry! Google also is very efficient at indexing the internet for quick searches.
In recent years, Google has released several new features including, but not limited to, gmail, google earth, google calendar, google docs, and google web toolkit.
I have not tried google docs, however have heard that their terms of service say that google can access your documents whenever they want. I’m not sure how true this is, so I will say no more. (http://www.jordandelozier.com/2009/02/does-google-0wnz-your-soul/ verifies this). However with storing private information anywhere on another service, you have to trust other people who have access to your account (administrators). I’m not sure if I’d like to trust a free service with my documents, regardless of how popular they are, but thats just me.
As for the google web toolkit and google search, I use both often. I don’t think I could live without google search! I submit a good 100 queries each day to google. As for the google web tool kit, I love how it simplifies javascript into java. This has helped me on numerous websites that I’ve developed.
As for google earth, I’ve tried that and it is impressive, however I don’t like the fact that it installs a program to my computer that then interfaces to an internet connection, therefore I’ve uninstalled it and haven’t used it since.
Gmail is also impressive, I tried GMail twice. I thought that I could make it interface with imap and sync my email to every device I have. Unfortunately, I found out the hard way that their IMAP sucks. You cannot upload email to their servers via IMAP to a sent mail folder. I also found that when using a text based client called pine, I couldn’t access the server due to unfamiliar directory names. I also hate how they don’t allow unsecure access via IMAP. I do however like their web interface.
Google calendar is also impressive, and I used this on one website that I created. Google calendar however has a small problem with it, its embedded and you can’t customize the calendar all that much. It also uses a format that is different from the normal ICS file format so a calendar parser can’t quite parse the google ics files correctly, however this may have been fixed by now.
With mobile applications and google, gmail syncs to a smartphone correctly, however won’t syncronise tasks, calendar appointments and contacts effectively. I found many bugs with the one software program that does exist to sync the calendar to my mobile phone.
After finding all these problems, I now pay for mailxchange from www.1and1.com. I got my own domain and it syncs to everything perfectly. It also provides me with standard ics files to power http://calendar.famousphil.com! I’m sure that Microsoft Exchange can do this also, however I wasn’t about ready to pay for hosting on Exchange with the very small space allotments most hosts provide.
Because of the sync issues I’ve had and pine issues, I use 1and1’s mailxchange service, and they even provide a storage area like google docs! I have also read their TOS and they will not release my personal email or documents unless a legal case comes up requiring they do it. I trust their staff, probably because I pay for it. Google should allow its customers to pay for services like syncing if you ask me.
Thats enough blabbing about Google I like thier search and will likely always use google for all of my search needs. Their mail on the other hand needs some work before I’d consider using it.
Tags: 1and1.com, calendar, contacts, exchange, Google, ics, mailxchange, Microsoft, sync
Posted in Technology
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Posted on: January 31st, 2009 by Famous Phil
As expected, I completed moving all of the websites hosted on the former mthsweb1 (Matthouse Web Server 1) server over to the new mthsweb4 server. I haven’t heard any complaints so far about the new server so far and don’t expect to hear of any problems. Tonight I will be doing some testing on the old matthouse web 1 server before it expires later in February. I hope to learn some new knowledge from my testing later tonight regarding apache optimization.
Earlier today, I helped a friend in the hosting business move a massive website (http://clevelandleader.com) from his server to a virtual server that will just host that website. This website is ranked ~76,000 on the alexa scale which means that it gets an insane amount of traffic. My best guess would be 300 to 1500 loads per second. The site itself has a huge mysql database that is over 2GB and the sql move alone almost crashed a dedicated server with a quadcore processor (it did have a lot of other websites on it though). Regardless, after the move, my friend didn’t realize that a default whm (cpanel, inc) installation doesn’t optimize the server nearly enough for a large website like this. Heck, I don’t even know if whm was made for such a large website. I did optimize the server and compile apache correctly just to handle the needs of clevelandleader.com. I also did a lot to prevent apache from crashing with the high load.
Traditionally, with such a large website such as cleveland leader, the web server hosting the site would only run a web server, no overhead like cpanel. I feel that cpanel has made the hosting process much easier, but I just don’t think it was made to handle such a large website. Also, the fact that cpanel uses the root password directly means that if there is a security vulnerability and the user obtains that root password through hacking or whatever, the server could be compromised not only from cpanel’s whm but also from the terminal through ssh (or a rare occasion of console access, meaning sitting in front of the server physically). This could present a major problem. Most smart hosting companies use cpanel’s wheel group to give su access to certain cpanel uesrs that can then login to the terminal via ssh and then su root with the root password to gain root. This provides a 2 password layer and adds an additional layer of security to the server.
Another pitfall that large websites face is the need for a dedicated mysql server, that is if mysql can even handle the load. Mysql was made for small to medium sites and it was made for maybe 100 to 200 queries per second, but much more than that and it undergoes a massive strain. Many large websites find themselves moving to more powerful database servers such as Microsoft SQL or Oracle which are much more powerful solutions that were made for high loads.
So why am I even talking about this! I felt that this would be the best way to introduce a new idea that I’m going to begin working on within the next couple of weeks. I have purchased the domain (http://adminreference.com) and will begin a forum where users can share their administration experience and knowledge to the world. I am a seasoned Windows administrator and a somewhat experienced Linux admin. I find myself knowledgable about both server operating systems and I post tutorials on multiple websites that don’t really aim for administration concepts. I also hope that some day this can help me when I am stuck on a massive problem.
I encourage you to stay informed as I begin this new journey. I will likely be ready to release the site sometime in the next couple of weeks. I am not sure how to market such a website, however I’m sure as people begin coming, someone will have knowledge about that as well.
Tags: admin, administration, facebook, help, hosting, Linux, Microsoft, Personal, reference, server, Server Hosting
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
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