Posted by Michael Alfaro on December 21, 2009
Yup, that’s the definition according to wikipedia. It was a very interesting find when I went out looking for an online backup tool. As I was scouring the internet for an inexpensive and easy online backup tool for LW, I ran into lifehacker’s article on the subject. They of course mention the big guys such as carbonite, mozy, crashplan (featured here on the LW blog in the past!), but I like to go beyond the article, that’s where the true diamonds in the rough are found. As you read the comments, you quickly realize that there are 2 types of products people mention there, syncing software and online backup software.
For small amounts of data, some people preferred the syncing software as they have access to the data from various entry points and machines. For larger data sets, the online backup tools really came into play. One comment pointed me to Live mesh by microsoft which caught me off guard when the comment mentioned that they had a Mac OS client! One of the products we did like to use in the past for syncing was microsoft’s groove. Problem came into play with the Mac OS machines, so we dumped it after trying it out for about 6 – 12 months.
Check it out here, we will be :)
“Your work computer. Your home laptop. Your Mac. Your mobile phone. Devices live in multiple places. But the files you need—and the programs that open them—often don’t. Live Mesh changes all that.
With Live Mesh, you can synchronize files with all of your devices, so you always have the latest versions handy. Access your files from any device or from the web, easily share them with others, and get notified whenever someone changes a file.
Working on one computer, but need a program from another? No problem. Use Live Mesh to connect to your other computer and access its desktop as if you were sitting right in front of it.”
Topics: business, internet, technology
Posted by Michael Alfaro on December 15, 2009
While trying to install KB967723 through windows update on one of our servers, we ran into an issue with it not installing. After some research it seems that if you run into this issue, you should download and install the fix manually.
You can find it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6e46822e-f79d-492d-ad01-ee680ad324f5&displaylang=en
Topics: internet, technology
Posted by Michael Alfaro on December 9, 2009
Raj and I ran into this one today while trying to load a web app on our new Server 2008 R2 box. The box is new and just had all it’s updates, so we started down the old IIS permissions route, but it lead us nowhere. After some searching, we find an answer that lead us to the real problem. We found the solution on this forum post by Tom Moser where he wrote:
‘I was able to fix this same problem by setting “Load User Profile” to TRUE on the Application Pool serving the MVC app.
Process mon showed me that the worker process was looking for the SID of a user under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\ProfileList\… but that it wasn’t found. On a hunch, I set it to load user profile and now it works. I’m still trying to understand why, though. Maybe I need to look at the developer’s code to understand that.’
Well, once we did that, we ended up with a different issue. Our web app was trying to use .NET framework 3.5 which wasn’t installed on the server. It seems, that by setting ‘Load User Profile’ to True, it allowed the app to try to get to the framework and give us the real problem that it wasn’t installed. It was really a true error message hidden behind an error message pertaining to permissions. Tom found out in his app the same thing happened, he found the true problem afterwards:
‘Turns out, the reason I was getting that exception in the first place was because their database wasn’t configured properly. After enabling “Load User Profile” it showed me a SQL exception informing me that the app pool ID didn’t have rights to the database. After giving rights to the database, I was able to set “Load User Profile” to false and the page loaded. Maybe that’s something to keep in mind while debugging MVC issues.’
After we installed .NET 3.5 on the server, the application worked and we turned the “Load User Profile” back to False and it continued working. At times during application launches you do run into error messages that don’t truly tell you what the final problem is, but at least this one didn’t take too long to figure out! You’d be amazed at the amount of time it takes to launch a simple web app because it works fine on the development box, but when it comes to pushing it to production, it just fails and the error messages don’t help at all. But I guess figuring this stuff out is why they pay Raj and I the medium bucks :)
Topics: development, internet, technology
Posted by Michael Alfaro on December 9, 2009
We ran into this message today while trying to install .NET Framework 3.5 on a Server 2008 R2 box. I know people are going to run into this, so I figured I’d share the answer that we found from Bryan:
“Windows 2008 R2 already ships with the .NET 3.5.1 framework so you just need to enable the feature from Server Manager.”
“So before installing the Visual Studio 2008, we enable the .NET 3.5.1 framework feature from the Add Features Wizard in Server Manager.”
Topics: internet, technology
