WordPress upgrade

Tonight I logged in to the admin section of this blog and found that the latest version of wordpress was available so without even checking what had been updated I clicked the upgrade button. I am now working away with the new version and  this will be the first post written with in.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4

In what seems like a life time but in fact was only 6 months I have managed to become Microsoft Certified in installing and maintaining it. Exam code MB2-633.

New training

I am currently on a training course an Compellent UK Office learning how to use the features on the Compellent SAN. So far I must admit that the SAN is a great thing. The enterprise manager is a great tool where it will configure the server to automatically connect to the volume you are creating.

Windows 2008 R2 Upgrade

In the office we are looking at upgrading the current Windows 2008 to the r” edition, this will open up new features within IIS and Hyper-V which we are currently using. I am in charge of planning the upgrade so once I have the upgrade planned I shall write how we are going to perform the upgrade without killing the servers in the process.

Upgrading Thecus SANs

I also have the task of upgrading our Thecus SANs to their latest firmware. We currently have two Thecus SAN which sit on our Data Protection Manager system. I have two Thecus boxes to upgrade on Friday. I shall write about how it goes.

So thats it for the moment I will update this on Friday after the upgrade has happened.

Was it hard ?

In all honesty I should have done it weeks ago when I first thought about it but I waited. I don’t quite know what I was waiting for. Was I in search for the next great game, A friend request I from someone I have thought to already request or just because I didn’t want to let go..?

What am I doing instead?

Spending time with my wife and two children, starting and finishing jobs around the house reducing the amount of time I spend in front of a PC. Although some time has now been added to play on wii fit and bonding on the xbox360 with the eldest.

Am I going back?

I really hope not. Although there are some times where I end up at the front page they have only been for a spilt second usually because it was my most visited page my browser was trying to be helpful. I feel if I go back I have failed at something and this is one thing I don’t want to fail at. If that day came where I am sucked back into the website called facebook would be a very sad day.

First of the version of Window 7 I am using is “Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit”.

My machine has a 2.79 GHz Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU with  4GB of RAM and a PNY Geforce 8400 graphics card with 256MB Memory 64-bit. This machine scores a 3.5 and that is due to the Graphics component.

One of the good things is the ability to view which machines you are recently connectrd to via Remote Desktop. Another good feature I have found is the preview with Internet Explore version 8 where you can see all tabs.

I shall write about some more of the features I have found usual later on.

That has all change now that I have found proxoid for my HTC Magic. http://code.google.com/p/proxoid/wiki/installationLinux. It took me 30 minutes to download everything and setup things up as per the instructions. Everything seemed to go swimming well until it came time to active the forward the my device but my device wasn’t showing in the command “adb devices” so a quick reboot of my laptop and still nothing so I started searching the Internet for any sort of ideas on how to resolve this I couldn’t find anything to help so I rebooted the phone just to see if that would help and bingo. After a very slow but satisfying test I am now happy that when I am on call I am able to go out and not have to be too close to home.

My next article will be added online later this week.

As I work on a support desk having to do technical support and new service provisioning. I spend a lot of time working on helping our users troubleshoot issues they may have.

Recently I have been building a virtual exchange 2007 server server a virtual machine with Icewarps merak mail server. once I have the whole thing configured and built I shall do a write up on provisioning the setup.

Today I have been setting up a MS FTP 7.5 server which allows connections of SSL. The main instructions for the service were obtained from iis.net but I then encountered some problems being able to connect to the service from the Internet.

As my office has a direct VPN connect to the servers it was difficult to test the connection. what we found for the Internet was the passive connection could not be established after the initial FTP connection.

We found after reading Configuring FTP Firewall settings also from iis.net and applying the firewall rule

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="FTP for IIS7" service=ftpsvc action=allow protocol=TCP dir=in

and adding the passive connection ports to the Windows Firewall the issue seems to be resolved.

One thing I must add is that if you are using the ftp server for yourself and just want to encrypt the traffic a self signed certificate is OK but if you are opening up the server the clients, suppliers, partners or any one else I would suggest a certificate from a recognised certificate body like Thawte or Verisign and other certificate authorities are also available.

So what have I been doing?

Ice Skating -

I have still been going fairly regularly and I am not improving at the rate I was but still a nice rate, my personal fitness could do with a lot of work but it isn’t anything to be worried about.

Computing -

1. I have been trying to setup shrewsoft VPN client to allow me to my office systems without using my desktop, this means that when I am on call I can be out and about without having to worry about staying too close to home.
2. I have also been playing the sirens game at hack3r website I am currently on level6 trying to gain access to level7 and I hope to have that done at some point tonight.

Photography -

1. Having played with my samsung trying to get the best pictures I could I decided to upgrade to the sony A200k entry level digital SLR. ( I shall write some more on the camera by the end of the week).
2. I have a photo I have taken with it up at “My Gallery” and there will be some more photos added shortly.

On Sunday I did the usual think of going ice skating and I most say that over the past couple of month I have been improve a lot, I still can’t ice hockey stop but that will come with time.

Over the Weekend I decided to upgrade my laptop to Ubuntu 8.10. I decide to do this at 22:00 on a Saturday night which is never the best idea I could have as I kept falling asleep and the whole process didn’t finish until 5:00 the following morning and then I had to go back through the ubuntu guide to make sure everything was working on my laptop correctly.

All of last week I was learning about Active Directory (AD) at the “Learning Tree” centre in London. I must admit that I did know some of the things that were being discussed the slightly more basic things such as adding machines to the domain, promoting a machine to be a domain controller and creating users, groups, Organisational Units (OUs), but I was unclear about how to actually plan an AD but this course I believe has helped put me in the mind set of what requirements to look at when planning.
Also on Sunday the 26th of October I was invited by Microsoft to watch an American Football game at Wembley Stadium in there corporate box. It was the San Diego Chargers Vs New Orleans Saints. The Saints went on to win the game but is was a close game which went down to the wire.

That is about all I have done over the past week and a bit and I shall update with a bit more technical information shortly.

The only way so I did a search which lead me to this page at codex.wordpress.org. This page give out the basics of permalinks and a quick read of the page showed me that my virtual host coonfiguration for this domain in apache was missing some options.

This is what I was missing

<Directory /path-to-website/>
AllowOverride ALL
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
</Directory>

Once I had added that and done the necessary “httpd -k restart” to pick up the new changes in the config it all came together and started to work.

Which is followed but it wasn’t all the information I needed so I experimented as best I could and found that if I type cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/X/root/anonymoususerpass
with X being the identifier for the website it would give me the password I wanted or at least I thought so. With the credentials now available I tried to log in and change the regional settings but the password wouldn’t let me in.
so what should I do now?

Well I decided to take a jump which isn’t always the best idea but this is what I have done.
within computer manager I located the IUSR I was after and reset the password for the user.
Opened up regional settings as that user by holding down the shift ket and clicking with the left mouse button on regional settings.
changed the regional settings and closed the window.
Within DOS I inputted the following command “cscript adsutil.vbs set w3svc/X/root/anonymoususerpass <password>
I then checked to make sure the password had been accepted by running this command again cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/X/root/anonymoususerpass “although it does print it back when the it has been accepted”.

Then I checked the website to ensure it was still working and it was phew but has the date change I well find out when I reboot the server in the next couple of days and let you know.

caio for now