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.

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.

At first, using my UB email account as my primary send from address wasn’t difficult because the software I used (I believe it was postfix/horde which I ran on my own system).  I simply could specify the send as address and all emal is sent from my Buffalo account although it really was being sent from my server that handles phil@matthouse.us (my central email account where all email goes before I see it).  This worked great even through my transition to hotmail plus (yes I paid for it) and mailxchange.

Unfortunately, when I began using Microsoft Exchange, I could not send from a certain address so I had to configure the server to accept / send mail from my buffalo account. This technically means if UB forwarded mail to my server with all their other servers, my server would accept email for my account.  This is the only easy way of making my exchange server send from my buffalo account.

Fortunately, setting my exchange server to handle my buffalo.edu mail fixed most of the problems, although the global mail system doesn’t send mail to it (and that’s fine with me).  The problem is, UB runs a cluster of Exchange mailservers for their domain.  With exchange servers comes something called autodiscover which is meant to set up exchange clients to handle mail automatically (most notably outlook 2007).

A month ago, little did I know that autodiscover existed on the buffalo.edu domain.  When I set up outlook 2007 as a local client, this caused a major problem even after I manually configured my email account for exchange.  The problem was, outlook 2007 is configured to get information from auto discover every 5 minutes if it exists meaning it bothered me every 5 minutes.

Today I decided to fix this issue once and for all.  My solution was to change the auto discover address on my local computer to override the configured address on the internet.  I knew that on linux, there is something called /etc/hosts which is the host file.  You can easily add an ip / value to this file and it will override whatever is on the internet lookup system.  I decided to find an alternative that worked in Windows, and sure enough, there is a hosts file in Windows as well!

If you goto Drive:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\ you should see a bunch of files. One will be named “hosts”. Simply edit this file using an elevated notepad and you should be set to go.  I mean elevated as in find notepad in your start menu and run it as administrator (in the right click menu).  For me, I added the entry “127.0.0.2 autodiscover.buffalo.edu” which solved my outlook problem.  127.0.0.2 is an invalid ip address although its close to the loopback address.

This caused outlook to look for an auto discover server and fail thus not prompting me anymore.  This is also useful if for testing sites locally when developing websites. Hopefully this helps you, I know it helped me.

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.

Over the past week, I got a new server to host Microsoft Exchange which is a powerful email server from Microsoft.  Before you go all crazy on Microsoft (I know I typically do), Exchange is one of the few excellent products they make.  I am actually very hard pressed to find anything that compares to it that is open source and can easily run on Linux which 99% of  my hosting business up until now has ran off from.  Man, I never thought that I would say that

So the first logical question is, why move your email to exchange?  As you know, I’ve had 1and1 mailxchange now for quite some time.  I really wanted a solution that would sync my calendar, contacts, tasks, files, and email to every device I use on a daily basis.  Mailxchange was that solution but there are many problems. First the web client is very slow,  sure its flashy, but it takes 5 minutes to load on my connection (that is fairly fast).  I don’t have the time to wait on this client to load.  The next problem is it needs custom software to connect to Outlook and Mobile Devices, I’m not into installing “connectors” to software when it has functionality built in with other products.  Perhaps one of my biggest problems is the level of support I’ve gotten from 1and1.  My mail has gone down on a few occasions and I’ve been unable to easily send a support ticket in asking what is wrong.  I’m not even sure if 1and1 backs up my email and I have no method of backup, so I’m kind of stuck if they go down or don’t back up the server.  Its kind of scary actually since I save all of my email.

So about 2 weeks ago, I started talking to a few friends.  I know that I get a free msdn copy of Microsoft Exchange 2003 and Server 2003 from my University.  I figured if I could find a few friends who were interested in small mailboxes on exchange, I could cover the cost for the hardware to host my copies of this software.  I figured that I could host 4 people and handle a server that costs $25 a month from 3dgwebhosting which I’ve had in the past and they run excellent hosting on Windows server 2003.  They cover the license cost, so I’d only be covering exchange.  The downfall was I would only have 10GB to work with which isn’t a lot for email and backups.  Because of this, I looked for alternate hosting.  I decided that if I could find xen hosting, xen would support Windows.

About this time when I was looking, I knew that http://fsckvps.com who is a child company of vaserv in England hosted xen vps machines.  I went to that site to look up their support email and found out about the horrible hypervm owner hanging and they were down.  Anxious to get this hosting off the ground, I began looking at alternate places for hosting.  Shortly after, I found good reviews on other blogs of a new hosting company called Elite Data Hosting.  I contacted them about a 10mbps plan to host exchange on and they got an account for me on a xen vps using my server key.  I’m basically paying $15 a month for ~325MB of ram and 30GB of hard disk space.  The server is a high end server and I have had no complaints.  They even took the time to install Windows for me from my disk!

Elite Data Hosting is good news for me because I now can have my 2 guaranteed friends and myself have a guaranteed 5GB of space for files / mailboxes a piece.  It will also be very easy to automate backups of these mailboxes.  We all split the $5 a month cost for the server so I’m basically paying what I would be paying 1and1 but I control my backups and have a better piece of mind.

So now I started the daunting task of setting up the Exchange server. Normally with Microsoft products, it takes about 5 seconds and about 10 clicks of the next button to install software and another 3 minutes to say configure this software to do this.  By that point, everything normally works flawlessly (except for the occasional crashes of Microsoft Windows).  On linux, there is always a lot of configuration, but linux always works without the crashes and instability.  Perhaps this is the way to tell what is good and bad???

To get back to Exchange, I must say, this is the hardest piece of software I have ever had to install on both Linux and Windows.  Part of the reason is the way Exchange relies on existing Server 2003 infustructure to improve itself.  I’m not so sure if I’d rely on a Windows Server operating system, but I really have no choice with Exchange.  Exchange requires Active Directory among other server features to run correctly and the prerequisite list is a nightmare to get through in less than 5 hours if you ask me.  I started with a clean server a week from last Tuesday and didn’t get Exchange running until about Monday and I had 8 hours a day into it at the very least.  I will take part of the blame for not knowing what I was doing past Active Directory configuration, but Exchange was no day at the beach to figure out.  I also had a lot of errors that I spent hours reading about to find simple fixes.  Finally after all of the struggle, I got exchange fully working to the point where I wanted it about 2 days ago. During my struggle, I posted a lot about my solutions on Admin Reference which is my site where I post solutions to all of my problems.  I picture it as another *free* experts exchange but more tutorial based than question based.  Maybe some day it will do a little of both   That is my goal anyways!

One side note that I should add is, when I first loaded Outlook Web Access, I got a crappy looking interface.  I found out quickly that Exchange only supports Internet Explorer in its premium interface (the one that looks nice and loads quick).  Sadly, this is the only reason why I have opened Internet Explorer, and I have found that Firefox can open an IE tab, so I’ve began using that.  I will also likely find a solution when I migrate completely to Linux (my next upcoming project).

So now that Exchange works, what was so difficult? Most of my difficulty was from I never managed an exchange server in the past, and I couldn’t find any decent documentation on how to do it. That is why I posted a lot to Admin Reference unlike I normally would.  My biggest issue was the domain errors which were caused by firewalls and figuring out how to get Outlook Web Access and Outlook Mobile Access working with SSL encryption.  I also was not prepared to spend money on an SSL certificate (required by exchange) and provide antivirus / spam scanning to the server.  I was under the impression that spam/virus protection was built in, but it isn’t, and the freeware gfi version is no longer free.  I figured out how to migrate linux spamassassin to the server and that is adequate for spam protection

One last question that I should cover is why didn’t I go with Exchange 2007?  I will admit that Exchange 2007 is very nice software, but there are a few problems:

• My first issue would be, Exchange 2007 is really bloated.  If you compare the 2003 to 2007 installation disks, the 2003 install disk is about 300MB, the 2007 version is closer to 1.7GB.  That is a huge difference, one that I’m not willing to upgrade for.
• My next issue is due to the bloat, I would need a much powerful server.  I could upgrade to the 600MB RAM server plan with a 50GB hard disk or so for 30 dollars a month, but then I would have to start hosting more mailboxes than I’d want to to cover the costs, and I’m not really into that idea.  I might upgrade for 2003 if people are interested and it won’t take too many server resources or hurt my rigged spam fighting solution, but that is a decision that I’d rather not make now since it works perfectly as is!
• My final issue is, newer software normally sucks.  I always wait for at least Service Pack 1 (2 if possible) until I start using a product mainstream.  Exchange 2003 is at SP2 while Exchange 2007 is at SP1.  With other Microsoft software, I’ve found that when I compare a fresh install of Server 2003 to Server 2008: Microsoft Server 2003 with a GUI (Graphical User Interface or your windows desktop) uses 400MB on a new install, while the Microsoft Server 2008 Core Edition (no desktop, strictly command line to reduce bloat) uses 800MB on a new install with nothing configured.  This is a huge jump and I have a feeling that Exchange 2003-2007 will be very similar (the requirements for 2003 is 256MB of ram, 2007: 2GB of ram).  BIG DIFFERENCE, huh!

All in all, I figure I am paying about $200 bucks total for my new email solution, but my friends really do help cut the cost down to where I can happily afford it.  I still have 1 slot open but have a feeling that will be closed before long.  For a private email server, I consider it an excellent learning experience, and a good way to get some good content on Admin Reference! Hopefully you got some helpful tips out of this.

One final note:  I’d like to put a plug out there to any other system admins.  If you are like me, you are always running into new problems that don’t have easy solutions.  Why not take a few minutes when you find the answer and post it to Admin Reference?  Maybe someday you will look back on it (I know I have) and say thats how to fix it!  Someday when it gets a little more material, I plan on integrating the forum into a wiki that is easily searachable for solutions to problems.

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*.

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.

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.