Devils are rolling

Hello there!

It's been a while since my last post. The Devils are rolling, the finance market is crashing, GM is soone no more, an many many other things are happening...

The Devils are playing greate hockey and playoffs are closing in.
Brodeur is back and playing well, Thanks Scotty for the a fantastic season!!!!!!

On the job, It's a lot of work with SQL Server. Analysis of server configurations, permofrmance tuning, cluster configurations and many more things are going on with this product right now.

Hey it's fun to work with this product because all the time you notice something new you can do with it.

Last week we configured a database mirroring setup for a customer, and I have never seen a SQL server that handles that many databases.......

Next week I'm going to install a new SQL cluster to a customer, so they can use it and evaluate how it all works, before the put it in production.

Then I'm off to a vacation for 2 weeks to a very sunny place.

Cheers

Internet Explorer 8 Beta

I downloaded and installed Internet Explorer 8 Beta yesterday.

I found it to be a good browser with a few new features that might be usefull.

It's worth checking out........

Back again

Now I'm back again, took a long break from this when i have studied for some certifications that went really well.

I'm going to star a new project on monday, where I'm going to build a Windows XP Embedded platform for a big company to use in their stores.
They need it to be a long list of requirements, so it's just to start learning Embedded editon and how you bild a image with drivers and all.

Firefox or IE

I have for a very long time used Firefox, because Firefox has had tabs which i like very much instead of having 6 or 7 windows open. I also hate all these adds and have use adblock to get rid of them. I also used an add on called IE tab, where i can run websites that needs IE, like Outlook web access.

I recently found an add on to IE where I can block ads, and as we know, from IE 7 you can also browse in tabs. Check out IE7Pro

So now i don't know what broswer i should use, it's looking though i'm going to use IE at work for all systems that rely on IE, and thats alot of systems.

At home I'm still going to use Firefox. I like the browser and i'm used to it now.

New inventory software

Today I've tested a new inventory system at a customer.
They didn't want to spend any money on this system (thank you open source projects).

So after a a few minutes I installed a software called spiceworks.

I't work fine, and it got what we needed.

Let me know if you have any inventory system that you want to recommend

Create a self signed certificate

During this week I've created a couple of certificates for our webserver.
We have both IIS and apache servers for different systems and their requirements.

If you need a certificate in IIS and don't want to pay a signed certificate from, say Verisign.
All you need to do is to install selfssl from the IIS resource kit on the server where you have IIS.
then you just run the following command to create a simple certificate:
selfssl.exe /N:CN=website.com /K:1024 /V:365 /S:1 /P:443
You should change the CN name to match with your website or URL.
/K is the key size, /V is how long it's valid, /S is the site number /P is the port

If you want more info on this run selfssl.exe /?


If you need to create a certificate with apache, just install openssl and run the following commands.

openssl genrsa -out ca.key 1024
this creates a private key in ca.key

openssl req -new -key ca.key -out ca.csr
This creates a CSR file named ca.csr using the ca.key key file. You can submit this file to certification authorty, like Verisign. They will use this file to create a certificate for you.
You will be asked several questions here, and make sure that Common Name match your website.

Next command will create a self-signed certificate that you can use on your apache webserver.
openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in ca.csr -signkey ca.key -out ca.crt

If you're using apache on windows you should run the following command and use the new key created.
openssl rsa -in ca.key -out ca2.key

Otherwise you get the following message in the apache error log and can't start the apache service: SSLPassPhraseDialog builtin is not supported on Win32.

Good luck

Problems with bugzilla

I got an error on my bugzilla server today:

There was an error sending mail from 'user.name@xxxx.com' to 'anotheruser.name@xxxx.com':Can't send data

The problem was solved when i uppgraded all my email perl-modules.

Uppgrade every module with email in it's name and you should be god to go.

You should also check so you have a working smtp-server first.....

Installing Webdav with IIS and SSL

A couple of weeks ago i got a question, that I had to think about for a few minutes.
We need a more secure way of transfering files between our customers and us?? FIX IT!!

That was a short summary of the conversation.

I know that the ftp protocol sucks and with sftp with ISA Server isn't going so well.

So I thought of webdav with SSL, and then they could also do some other stuff, not only transfer files.

So i started to install IIS on my Windows 2003 computer. Webdav should follow the default installation of IIS.
Enter the IIS and request a new certificate for the website you're going to use.

Then you neew to sign the new certificate, for yourself or send it to a CA.

Here is a guide on how you do it yourself with openSSL. OpenSSL works on both linux and Windows. http://eal.us/blog/_archives/2003/6/2/25109.html
You can also install the IIS resource kit and make one with selfssl.

When you have signed the certificate it time to install it, and you do that the same way you did when you requested a new certificate, almost....

Then its time to create a new virtual directory. Just follow the wizard when doing this.
Be sure that you have access to write to that directory you are using as a webdav folder.

If your users must authenticate, you can choose domain in the authentication method.

Now you have a webdav folder with ssl.

If you have a firewall, you probobly know what to do next, allow ssl traffic to the server

Sorry for the not so detailed description

Hope it works for you....

Back again

I've been awat for a while now. It has happened many things in my life.
My daughter takes a lot of my time, but I think that it's a possitive thing.
I started a new job 2 weeks ago as a consultant and it's really fun.

I will post a few things about different systems and some setups that I've done during this time while I was away

Back to reality

Hello There

Now I'm back to reality and the office.

I had a very nice vacation, were we just relaxed for two weeks (I don't know how much relax there is with 2 children running around).

In january I'm going to start my new job, and I look forward to this since i will be doing what I'm good at.

So I'm going to leave my current company where I've worked for 8 years now.

A few days ago...

It was a few days since i last posted something, but now I'm back.

There have been a lot to think about, since I got a few offers that i need to think thru.

On top of that we have a big migration at work to do, so it's a lot of planning and coordinationg things that have to be done.

And then we're going on vaccation, which some company folks don't like.

Tonight we will visit the Islanders and I hope that we will win this one.......

Sold!!!!!

My company or should I say my office was yesterday sold to another smaller company.
No we're going to be a bit smaller than before.

I think for the office, this is a good thing, because our previous owner was crap!!

So this is the 4:th time I have been sold, so I have every script ready.......:)

I'll be back with more info on this, and maybe put some of them here

Devils play Islanders tonight

Devils will play at Islanders tonight at 7:00 PM.

Let's hope they win this one.



The PHP-script seems to work great....

Sharepoint

I have been testing Windows Sharepoint services for a few days now, and I think you can do pretty much with this system.
It's a system where you can easy share documents, calender, news, contacts, have discussions and much more. You can have this for you're entire company or just use it for different projects.

We're testing this system to see what it can do, and how we can use to better share information between us.

Documentation

Today I'm going to write all day long........

I have a lot of documentation to do so, I'm going to update every server and system docs.

I'm totaly excited......NOT

New job or????

Got a call today that a company is interested in my services, so I'm going to meet them next monday.

WPAD file

Here is how our WPAD look:

function FindProxyForURL(url,host)
{ if(isPlainHostName(host)||
dnsDomainIs(host, ".domain.se"))
return "DIRECT";
else return "PROXY proxy.domain.se:8080; DIRECT";
}

Just publish this textfile on a webserver, http://servername.domain.se/wpad.txt
and configure option 252 in your DHCP to point to this location and everything should work just fine.

browsers must be configured to "automatic detect mode"

Another day at the office

Today was a quiet day at the office.

Nothing major happened.

I configured our external network with a new ISA firewall and proxy.
Now we can publish some of our systems to our customers.

I'm thinking no major configuration, just the required ports should be opened in and out....

tomorrow I'm going to write a WPAD file to publish

Problems at work

During the weekend I worked with upgrading our subversion server to a new version.
The new version is 1.4.5. It seems to work just fine, and our projects haven't reported any problems, so far.

I don't think there should be any problem but you never know, and when there are ca 500 developers, and just about 100 repos, It has to work.

The other thing I planned on doing during the weekend was to implement a new way to authenticate. Subversion has it's own way of authenticate users, but when you have 500 developers it takes alot of time, and they all need to remeber a second password for this.

Thats why I tested this with apache and ldap, and it seemed to work just fine in our testenvironment.
The modules seems to load just fine but, when i'm configuring a repository, the service will not start. There seem to be a problem with libapr.dll.
I can't find som much info on this and when I find it, there are no soloution.....

So right now i have to run some test and see what we will do.

Linux with AD authentication

Hey All!

A while ago I was testing how I could setup my Linux computers and servers to authenticate with Active Directory instead of Linux own account management.

I was able to setup so when you log on our Linux servers you use you're AD login and password and everything seemd to work just fine.

I implemented this in our server environment, so now all our users is using their AD username and password on our Linux systems.

The one thing I didn't do so well was that i didn't document this implementation, so now I have forgott how I did everything!

I'm going to look in to this and read current configuration and possibly do it all over again. THIS TIME I'LL WRITE IT DOWN!!!!
We're using Ubuntu, but it should be similar with other Linux distributions

When I'm done I'll post i here.........