jorkeo - hosting geek : Infrastructure

Down and Dirty with tech•ed backstage

jorkeo — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 02:24:52 GMT

Sign up for the dirt and all view of what happens with the production of tech•ed 09 Australia. Subscribe to http://techedbackstage.net/ – to get the low down on what is going on. Here is the first post…

Welcome to the start of tech•ed Backstage. This blog is designed to give the world the view of what goes on in the background of running the tech•ed Australia 2009 conference from all the people the work in the Technology team and those that we interact with in developing the production.

We’re going to give the warts and all view of what’s involved in doing this focusing around the pragmatic approach of logistic and planning for this event and those related such as:

Products and technology used for the event
How the logistical planning is done
How to you build a network for such and event and all the prep work.
Tons of other information in mind numbing detail!

Plus of course lots of statistics and prediction that all go into delivering this kind of technology for the event.

So first of all some introductions for the core delivery team;

Jorke Odolphi – Microsoft – Infrastructure Architecture Evangelist / tech•ed Technology Guy – responsible for the delivery of the infrastructure technology and ensuring and enabling that Microsoft has the best technology on show.

Other duties include attending long meetings and staying awake, breaking down barriers in delivery, helping the business understand the logistics and food/wine tasting.

(source: flickr.com/photos/heroeshappen)

Codify – International Men of Mystery – These guys actually DO the delivery of all the core infrastructure to tech•ed such as network connectivity, Wireless Networks, building machines for speaker rooms and connecting everyone to the internet. Simply put if you’re going to be putting anything on the network at tech•ed these guys are involved in some form. As a result they’re slaves to the network for the event!

To protect their identity (and they’re camera shy) the picture on the right is an artists rendition.. (source wikipedia.org)

Jomablue – International Men of Mystery – again another group of camera shy individuals. These guys are the core of the logistics for the event. When any piece of technology is placed in a location in the event these are the guys bumping it in, plugging it in and making sure the the power is right and in fact everything is right.

To protect their identity (and they’re camera shy) the picture on the left is an artists rendition.. (source wikipedia.org)

Of course we’re only scraping the surface of what we all do, and we can’t forget all the other people we interact with such as the tech•ed core team, Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre staff and if course all the awesome staging staff. We’ll be hearing from all those people leading up to the event, so sit back take it in and tell us what you’d love to hear from the bluelit parts of tech•ed.

So check it out at http://techedbackstage.net/

- jorke

Tech.Ed 2009 Windows 7 Experience – Netbooks for you!

jorkeo — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:13:20 GMT

So FINALLY we can talk about a project that’s been happening for a while now. I’ve picked up a job for Tech.Ed 2009 as overall infrastructure guy so i’ve been working on ensuring that we have the best technology to deliver and awesome event. Aside from that we had a question earlier in the year which was…”what if we give every paid teched delegate a netbook with windows 7”…. While my head is still spinning from the awesomeness of this idea and all the planning we are doing, Nick Hodge has put the hard yards and pushed it through.

All documented here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/nickhodge/archive/2009/06/30/big-things-in-mini-packages.aspx

http://www.nickhodge.com/blog/archives/3143

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090630/teched-australia-attendees-free-hp-mini-windows-7/

So a BIG shout out to the hard work Nick Hodge has been working so hard on this for the past few months. Now we go into the fun part of getting them on the network and doing some awesome things. We’ve already started planning this, with a wireless survey of the Gold Coast Convention Centre - as you can see, there’s a lot of air to cover!

-jorke

DST changes for Australia in 2008!

jorkeo — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:17:29 GMT

Does that mean Queensland will have daylight savings time? NOOOO - fades the curtains apparently...

Anyway the REST of Australia is making some changes in October - that's 1 month away! - so we all need to update our servers/machines/robots to cope with the time differences.

Key Action: Download the Australia 2008 Daylight Saving Planning Document

Here is the rest of the communication - Make sure you're ready:

Daylight Savings Changes – October 2008

In October this year, we will again be experiencing Daylight Savings changes in Australia. These changes can have a significant impact on business performance if not dealt with proactively. These effects can range from the incorrect time display on the clock, to calendaring problems, to financial and reputation loss if business critical services fail.

Daylight saving now commences on the first Sunday in October and ends on the first Sunday in April in Australia Eastern (New South Wales, Victoria, Australian Capital Territory and Tasmania) and Central (South Australia). This change affects Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office Outlook and other Microsoft, third party and custom applications. Please find below some of the key things you need to know.

What is the impact of Daylight Savings changes?

Effects can range from the incorrect time display on the clock, to calendaring problems, to financial and reputation loss if business critical services fail.

The 5^th of October commences the second window of time zone harmonisation for this year, however, we expect a greater impact in October as the change is 21 days difference, whereas the adjustment earlier in the year was only 7 days.

What is affected?

- All Microsoft Windows PC, server and mobile devices in the affected time zones must be updated to ensure accuracy of internal time zone tables and correct operation of the system clock.

- Microsoft Office Outlook calendars may need to be adjusted. Client and Server-based tools are available to automate this service.

- Microsoft, third party and custom applications which schedule events at future dates should be reviewed to ensure they will operate correctly during the extended daylight saving period. Previously scheduled events may also need to be adjusted.

- Microsoft recommends that all PC and server systems are updated regardless of location to ensure consistency of operation.

What do I need to do?

Thorough planning and testing for these changes is critical to ensure the change results in minimal user impact, so to help customers prepare Microsoft has developed the Australia 2008 Daylight Saving Planning document which details the nature and impact of the DST changes, along with planning guidance to avoid user impact.

What if the systems have been previously patched?

Where servers, workstations and mobile devices have been added to the infrastructure, organisations will need to audit their environment to ensure all systems are patched according to the organisation’s Daylight Savings Plan.

Where the environment does not have a consistent Daylight Savings Time (DST) patch level, appointments may have been created with a mix of correct and incorrect DST transition dates. Furthermore, Microsoft recommends customers update all systems to ensure consistency of operation, even if none of your systems are in the affected time zones.

- jorke

Technorati Tags: DST,Daylight Savings,Australia,Timezone

Installing FTP with IIS7 on 2008 Server Core

jorkeo — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:36:51 GMT

I had a few questions from an old colleague, Virgil, who had just built a 2008 server core machine and was having issues configuring FTP. Without asking I knew Virgil would be chasing an FTP server that would have some method of secure transport such as FTPS and pluggable authentication methods, I know this because he's an interoperable kind of guy :)

He'd already been trying to configure this with the default install of FTP that comes with Server 2008, but I recommended that he use the downloadable version from the iis.net website. Only issue here is that you have to uninstall the old FTP server before that will install, then configure the service all over again... so after about 30 minutes of furious IM conversations this is how we did it..

First we uninstalled the FTP Service that comes with 2008 :

start /w pkgmgr /uu:IIS-FTPPublishingService;IIS-FTPServer

Then downloaded the FTP publishing service for IIS 7, with the friendly name of FTP7;
- x86 - http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1619
- x64 - http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1620

and installed it:

msiexec /i ftp7_x86_rtw.msi

Once that was in we simply had add the appropriate bindings to the site, like so (Make sure you close your quotes properly or it goes NUTS!) :

c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set site /site.name:"Default Web Site" /+bindings.[protocol='ftp',bindingInformation="*:21:"]

then we simply had to set an authorised user to the server:

c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set config "Default Web Site" /sectionystem.ftpserver/security/authorization /+[accessType='Allow',permissions='Read,Write',roles='',users='ftpuser'] /commit:apphost

And we were done! (or so we thought!).... On attempting to connect to the FTP server we ended up with the error :

534-Policy requires SSL.
Win32 error: Access is denied.
Error details: SSL policy requires SSL for control channel.
534 End
Login failed.

ahh that's right - by default the FTP install is set to run as FTPS thus requiring a secure connection... to turn off this feature (it was a lab environment and didn't require secure transfer) resulted in a LOT of head scratching, eventually to save time we popped open the applicationhost.config file and and added theses lines in the <site /> tag..:

Not very elegant but served the purpose - a bit more investigation I eventually fell upon the answer using the IIS7 Administration Pack, which allowed me to generate the correct script:

c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set config -section:system.applicationHost/sites /[name='Default Web Site'].ftpServer.security.ssl.controlChannelPolicy:"SslAllow" /[name='Default Web Site'].ftpServer.security.ssl.dataChannelPolicy:"SslRequire" /commit:apphost

And there we go, FTP7 configured on Windows Server 2008 Core - couldn't be easier to script...

- jorke

Technorati Tags: Windows Server 2008,IIS,FTP,FTP7,Server Core

MSExperts.org - a blog for.. er.. MS Experts

jorkeo — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 03:54:43 GMT

Cam told me about this blog a little ago and I've been following it so see what they're up to. I quite like the slogan - memoirs of a goldfish - make sure you blog it before you forget it forever.. although according to wikipedia - the myth of a goldfish having a 3 second memory is false..

There is really great quality posts there that address problems that a bunch of IT professionals run into every day of the week.

Check out some of the posts by Mark Rhodes - cracking good stuff for SharePoint.

- jorke

Technorati Tags: MSexperts,sharepoint,community

mstsc.exe /console != console where OS = 2008 || ver > 6.0 -- WHAT THE?

jorkeo — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 05:09:16 GMT

(ok, that's pseudo code above and is never intended to run - just illustrate concept :) )

If you're a like me and prefer typing your commands into the run box or start bar, in Windows 2003 to connect to the console of a server using remote administration with Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) you would have typed mstsc.exe /v:servername /console like so:

rather than searching for Remote Desktop Connection from the programs list. (or you could add /console to the end of your server address in the RDC dialog box i.e. idcinabox.microsoft.com /console)

But doing this from Windows 2008 or Vista SP1 this just does nothing and connects to you a normal RDC session. Of course I didn't know this at first but then noticed something was amiss when I ran out of administration session connections... hmmmm.

Luckily Fitzy is the man and pointed out that this behaviour has changed and now you have to use /admin .

Thus mstsc.exe /v:servername /admin hooks you up to the console when using RDC 6.1

More information on this change can be found directly from the source of the change - the Terminal Services Team Blog!

-jorke

P.S. Fitzy - I just parked you in :)

Technorati Tags: Windows server 2008,Vista SP1,Remote Desktop,RDC,Infrastructure Managment

Infrastructure Architecture Design Questions

jorkeo — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 04:44:11 GMT

This is very interesting and fairly comprehensive list of basic operational questions to ask when building the infrastructure on your web facing project - from the Microsoft.com operations team.

I love the breakdown of availability, this is something I've had lots of discussions with people in the past - and I've found it a pretty good measure of priorities in the past:

Availability %	Downtime per year	Downtime per month*		Downtime per week
98%	7.30 days		14.4 hours	3.36 hours
99%	3.65 days		7.20 hours	1.68 hours
99.5%	1.83 days		3.60 hours	50.4 min
99.9%	8.76 hours		43.2 min	10.1 min
99.99%	52.6 min		4.32 min	1.01 min
99.999%	5.26 min		25.9 sec	6.05 sec
99.9999%	31.5 sec		2.59 sec	0.605 sec

The hardest question for anyone starting a new project is answering performance questions - how to test this without over-engineering and blowing out cost?

- jorke

Technorati Tags: Ms.com,architecture,Microsoft,hosting,infrastructure