siliconpizza.com

This site uses WP MU, (multiuser) and i have just upgraded to 2.6.3

At a School event recently I was shown a a very powerfull video which puts the challenges that schools and society face today into perspective and is a real eye opener.

One thing in particulare stood out to me
“We are currenlty preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist… in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet”
Think about it. The WEB did not exists when many of todays WEB designer left school …………….

The Video is here http://is.gd/t1T

I went to a school meeting last night where where there was a presentation on “Virtual Learning Environment” Collaboration to you and I

The teacher doing the talk was saying how kids use IT, is very different to adults

20% of his Year9 class has had a online chat with someone in a different countrty this week
20% had posted to youtube this year
80 % had watched a youtube this week
Then he said, i want make a comparision
Everyone to stand up, (Parents and governors, 50 ish total )
He then Said

Sit down if you Don’t use email? No one sat down !
Sit down if you are not carrying a mobile phone, Three sat down
Sit down if you Don’t use MSN? A few more sit down.
Sit down if you Don’t use facebook/myspace? A few more sit down.
Sit down if you Don’t have a blog

Hmmmm, only TWO left standing, Me and a Teacher…..

Recently I have been involved in a few projects where for a long time I was bogged down by huge amounts of what appeared to be useless paper work, High level design, Service Definition, Service Description, Detailed design, Support documnetation, CMDB requirements, bulid documenst, architecture review etc, etc, etc . All of which seemed to be just a painfull, civil service mentality excercise designed to slow things down.

However having now come out of the other side, the penny finaly dropped. No one man can think of everything from every point of view at once. So the during the process of writing up and author review, peer review etc  almost all of the assumptions, mistakes and missing bits get sorted out. In particular reviews by non technical people, seemed to serve the most benefit, as they will make totall different assumptions from a completely different view point.

Don’t get me wrong, I still believe there has to be a better way and I am certainly not looking forward to the next project, but I am sure I won’t complain so much

Over the past five years I have built several Highly available microsoft web hosting farms , hosted web apps, and associated database servers and supporting services, each one slight better than the last.

Web farms
No 1. IIS5, NLB base load balancing, every web site usesing same process identity, many sites is shared pool
No 2. IIS6, Cisco CSM load balanced, 2 Node Physcial, unique ID for every site / application
No 3, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site / application
No 4, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site / application, second site
No 5, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site,  Internet facing with SSL
No 6, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site,  Intranet facing with SSL
No 7, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site,  Intranet facing with SSL
No 8, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site,  Intranet facing with SSL, for UAT use.

FTP, centralise FTP gateway providing a single FTP solution to every windows / Sambe wen server inside the enterprise

WordPress MU, enterprise blog solution

Now Finally I get to build an IIS7 one and FTP7 with FTP over SSL, watch this space

I work for a large multination company, which boast possibly the largest intranet in europe.

The microsoft parts of this intranet are taking, upto 9,000,000 hits per day, using an assumtion of 10 hits per page impressiion (GIFs, CSS etc) that is 900,000 page impressions per day, I can’t speak for the linux hosted parts as I don’t have access to ALL of the data.

Compare to  an avarage joe-doe blog site or even the avarage small business web site (4,000 page impressions per day, this is real data from a small 10 employee ecommerce web site) that is quite impressive.

Then enter the BBC , from the BBC annual report “bbc.co.uk’s reach grew by 16.2 per cent over the year, with page impressions averaging over 3.6 billion per month.” that is 120 Million page impressions per day (or using the same assumption I made above 1.2 billion server hits per day)

one word

WOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Like many, my preferred web platform, (done a few intranet and internet) uses a CIFS based backend content store and unique AD based application pool identities for EACH application. This has several plus points. Add to this a tweaked .NET medium trust and you have a secure and scalable platform.

But that is where the fun starts

Read the rest of this entry »

This Blogging Platform is built on WordPress MU, WordPress MU is slightly different to WordPress in that it has support for multiple independent blogs on top of a single user database, when running in folder per blog mode WordPress MU is totally dependent on the apache MOD-ReWrite feature to rebuild URL in the fly. This is a feature that has been missing from IIS until now, Microsoft have released, albeit CTP1 at the moment, a URL rewrite module for IIS7.

WordPress and WordPress MU can also use url-rewrite to create “friendly” permalinks

Well I did it, installed a copy of WordPress MU on IIS7 in folder per blog mode

• Server 2008 enterprise
• IIS7 URL-ReWrite CTP1
•  WordPress MU 1.5.1
•  mysql-5.1.25-rc-win32
•  ZendCore-2.5.0-Windows-x86

Using the URL-Write Module and some help from IIS.net, it was fairly straight forward; URL-ReWrite is still in CTP1 and has a few known issues. For instance the import wizard correctly identifies the  [L] parameter in .htaccess and create the correct XML, but the ”stopProcessing” attribute does not get copied to the web.config file and the ReWritecondition flag created a NEW rule with no action , rather than apply the condition to the next rule.

So after a bit of fiddling and some help from IIS.NET I got it all working including CSS and themes for folder based blogs.
The Only issue I did not fix was an issue with ONE of the CSS files which controls the layout of the TOP of the admin pages,

SORTED !!!!!!!!!!

Just so i dont lose it the web.config file is here

And dont forget the rewrite server variable fix too

I have been working on a ZERO touch build script for IIS on and off for a few weeks,

One of the last stepping stone for formating the “data” drive prior to setting everything up

“FORMAT H: /FS:NTFS /V:ASG” will prompt for “do you want to erase all yoiu data”, and again if the disk is in use !

 So enter WMI, after only 20 mins of digging around the the internet I found some code to do a defrag, a few tweaks, and I have some VBS code that will format a DRIVE, NO questions, even if the drive is in use, and it is ONLY 7 lines

strComputer = “.”
Set objWMIService = GetObject(“winmgmts:\\” & strComputer & “\root\cimv2″)
Set colVolumes = objWMIService.ExecQuery (“Select * from Win32_Volume Where Name = ‘H:\\’”)
For Each objVolume in colVolumes
     errResult  = objvolume.dismount(1,0)
     errResult = objVolume.format(“NTFS”, 1, 4096, “ASG”, 0)
Next

I am heavily involved in designing, building some large intranet and internet Microsoft based web hosting platforms. Many of these platforms are designed to allow consolidation of existing applications on to a load balanced web farm. As the quality of the source code is unknown , and many employ file upload techniques I extensively use a CIFS backend for web content, once you get past all the smoke and mirrors with IIS connecting to content on the UNC share. You have to consider how this UNC path is managed. To reduce any future implications of file server changes DFS provides an excellent way to alias in the REAL UNC path in a manner which is understood by all of the modern windows operating systems. But then you have to create and possibly destroy DFS links on the fly , as part of your automated site creation processes.
Version 1 of my automation scripts, used a SHELL to  call DFSCMD.exe, while this works it is less than ideal,

After many hour of internet searching,   I came across http://pinvoke.net and  a few articles on calling netapi32.dll from c#
http://jkhines.com/blogs/code/archive/2007/12/15/access-dfs-from-net-posted.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb524805(VS.85).aspx

A FEW hours later I have a working .net 3.5 assembly to add and remove DFS links, Sorted

Download the source here