Stephens’ Blog

Now I know I haven’t been updating this site much as I could so with a deep breathe I am going to write about what has been going on since I last updated.

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.

Well I have been using Windows 7 of the last couple of days so I though I would write a review of on how I am finding it.

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.

Well I know I haven’t written much about the type of computing I have been doing recently,  well that is about to change.

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.