Posted on: November 21st, 2011 by Famous Phil

Most of the Matthouse infrastructure is running on old Celeron processors and limited RAM, you may laugh at me, but that hardware has been very reliable and has lasted Matthouse for the better part of 3 years, and some of it may continue to power Matthouse well into the future!  But there are some applications out there that require a little more juice to run well, and (unfortunately) Exchange falls into this category.  I say it is unfortunate since the Exchange server hosts a handful (< 10) mailboxes, yet it costs quite a bit to maintain compared to other Mail Transfer Agents (MTA).  So anyways, this blog is dedicated to the procedure that I took to migrate Exchange over to brand new, shiny, fast hardware.

First, I had Server 2008 R2 Datacenter as my operating system on both the existing server (denoted double) and the new server (denoted ruby).  The servers could clearly communicate with each other within the same datacenter as well so that file / data transfers could be effective.  The first thing to adding any server is to give the new server a name and know its network configuration details ahead of time.  I’m not going to go into details about how to install Windows, since it’s pretty simple.  Just make sure that you have the correct drivers installed for your server after the installation completes.

Note about installing Windows: just so that you don’t run into any issues with your system, make sure that your primary hard drive is attached to the first port for your motherboard’s interface, in my case, the first hard drive was connected to SATA 0.  If you don’t do this, you’ll run into a lot of problems and waste a lot of time (like I did!).  In addition, make sure that your BIOS has AHCI enabled prior to installing Windows, this also caused problems in my scenario.  Once Windows is installed, make sure that you can disable write caching on your hard disk without the operating system freezing (in computer management, under storage, right click the disk and optimize for quick removal).  If you followed the above, this shouldn’t cause Windows to hang, and will prevent Active Directory from incapacitating your system during the restart phase of the installation.  In addition, this is a good time to name your computer, join it to some default workgroup, add remote administration features, and change the time zone / clock settings.

Before continuing, I’d also recommend disabling Internet Explorer’s advanced security features; this is done by going to the computer management main screen and scrolling down, finding IE ESC and turning it off (acknowledging all of the warnings).  If you keep them on, you’ll find yourself doing way too much work to download necessary applications, etc.  These features are only useful if you plan on doing general web surfing on the server (which I would not recommend for security reasons).  I also activated windows, ran all the necessary windows updates (several reboots and optional updates as well).  After this all has been done, I ended up rebooting the machine a final time.

At this point, I installed several applications (using IE to get Google Chrome initially).

• Google Chrome (http://chrome.google.com) for web surfing / downloading the rest of these
• Adblock plus for chrome (http://adblockplus.org/en/) to block malware / ads
• 7zip (http://www.7-zip.org/download.html) for good archive file support
• Microsoft Security Essentials (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/security-essentials), Windows 7 version works fine, this is a quick, safe, free antivirus solution for all of those who hate Symantec’s ability to slow down the entire system (hey, that’s me!)   This is also good for desktop users!  I would recommend disabling the scheduled Sunday scan since real-time protection is sufficient in my case.
• Magic ISO (http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-overview.htm) to mount ISO images (including the Exchange 2010 ISO if you downloaded it from MSDN like I did).
• Office Filter Packs which are a prerequisite for Exchange 2010 (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17062) Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: active directory, exchange, exchange 2010, migration, owa, Transfer, upgrade, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Technology
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Posted on: August 6th, 2010 by Famous Phil

Often times, I’m asked the question: Should I get Windows hosting or Linux hosting for my new website.  This is a topic that comes up time and time again in my field of expertise and sadly, newbies often choose based on perception, not based on fact.  This blog will cover some of the facts about both hosting platforms and hopefully help you make an informed decision about how you want your website hosted.
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Tags: choice, hosting, Linux, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Programming, Technology
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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: July 10th, 2009 by Famous Phil

As you probably know by now, I have a Microsoft Exchange 2007 server.  With any kind of server, a backup and disaster recovery plan is a vital part of any kind of professional hosting.  Hosting email can be quite tricky as it is, but taking network backups was a new road that I’ve never covered in Windows.

First, I have a fairly simple environment set up for my backup.  I have a Linux backup server running samba sitting in Seattle (mthsweb2).  This server has the Windows IP white listed so that only my Windows server can connect to it to map a network share.  For those of you who don’t know what samba is, samba is a daemon in Linux that will allow Windows to naively connect to a Linux server for file sharing.  Samba is a very simple solution for mapping a network drive to Linux in Windows without needing any specialized software such as sftpdrive (not called something else).

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Tags: backup, batch, Linux, mapped network drive, network, ntbackup, samba, script, server 2003, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
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Posted on: June 20th, 2009 by Famous Phil

First I guess I should apologize for not posting anything in the past week here!  I really hate it when I have to ignore my own blog for more important admin business elsewhere.  The good thing is, I always manage to learn a lot of new stuff that I can easily share

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

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Tags: 1and1, 3dgwebhosting, active directory, Admin Reference, administration, Elite data hosting, email, exchange, exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, fsckvps, mailxchange, Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange, mobile, outlook, outlook web access, owa, server 2003, vaserv, vps, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Mobile Technology, My Site
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Posted on: April 28th, 2009 by Famous Phil

A good place to introduce this topic is by stating that I consider myself a “good” system administrator.  I consider myself above average when it comes to Windows Server administration, and “average” when it comes to Linux server administration.  Normally, regardless of platform (Linux or Windows), I usually know enough not to get myself into trouble, yet rectify the problem that is presented to me.

Prior to last October (2008), I have solved a wide array of problems consisting of Apache malfunctions and complete Server Hard Drive failures requiring data recovery, to simply having to unblock a person’s ip address from the firewall because they tried to login to the server incorrectly too many times.  I never really messed a server up so badly that I couldn’t undo what I attempted to fix in the first place.

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Tags: administration, blunder, delete, disk space, hosting, Linux, mysql, var, var/lib/mysql, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Personal
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