Chrome Development Tools

Google Chrome (beta version) now has a brilliant set of plug-ins available to use. The best of the additional features in Chrome is the developer tool-bar. It rivals Firebug and I've found myself using Chrome as my development browser rather than fireFox. The main reason for this is that it's just so much faster to start and do anything in. I'll obviously need to test in all browsers but at the moment I am finding development work in Chrome a lot faster than FireFox... may have just ousted FireFox from everyday use... sorry!

Apache running webs on a network drive...

Ok... here's a tricky one I've just had to work through.

I have apache, Mysql, PHP running on my Windows machine. So that my development files are stored in a backed up location I wanted to move my files to a mapped network drive. This causes some problems which I've just worked through.

When you map a network drive this drive gets mapped under your user account. The apache service runs under the computer system account so has no visibility to the mapped drive and as such using w:\.... in your DocumentRoot directive will not work. Only local drives can be accessed in this manner. As a mapped drive this should have a UNC path associated with it. E.g. \\domain.local\Development\MyWebs. This is the style of path required for Apache.

When entering this path into the httpd.conf file you need to ensure that you use "/" instead of "\". So the above would be "//domain.local/Development/MyWebs".

You will then need to change the user that the Apache service runs as. I've set it to run under my domain account. This account I know has NTFS permissions to the mapped drive/UNC path.

One final step is to give the new account that the service runs as access to the logs directory under the server root (or move your logs to a location that has permission). After all that you should be able to have a local Apache server running webs stored on a network drive.

Split site DNS

Another problem... unfortunately not yet resolved.

The environment:

We have 2 windows servers in two separate sites in Active Directory. Server 1 is a Small business server so is forced to the be Primary Domain Controller. This is fine. Server 2 is a Server 2008 Standard acting as a secondary domain controller in our satellite office. We have two sites set-up in Active Directory for each physical location. This means the local clients connect to their nearest domain controller (based on IP subnets).

Our internal domain is "company-private.local" (for example). Externally we have a web presence using "company-public.com". We have a split DNS set-up for accessing crm and email web access internally (to name but a few).

The Problem:

With the server in the satellite office we are implementing a replicated version of our crm software (utilising MySQL master-master replication). We have an external DNS record pointing to the head office implementation of the CRM software at crm.company-public.com. At the head office we have an internal DNS record pointing to the same server using an internal IP address.

What we want is to be able to set-up a scenario where we have the head office clients pointing to their closest copy of the CRM software, our satellite office pointing to their local copy of CRM and external clients able to connect to the head office all using the address crm.company-public.com.

The head office and external clients is simple. Setup a split DNS so the internal clients point to the internal address and the external clients point to the external address of the same machine.

The problem here is that with a Windows Server domain the dns records are kept in sync accross the sites meaning ALL clients get directed to the same machine.

I think I can set it up so internal clients connect to the correct sites by using crm.company-private.local and external clients connect to crm.company-public.com (Due to company-private.local being our active directory domain), but I'm wanting to set-up all to access the public address.....

Any readers got any ideas??? Please help!!!! lol

Microsoft Hyper-v Server

We're in the process of doing a server upgrade (hence the lack of posts recently!). Things are just coming back to normal here so I've got some time to post some problems we've encountered. I'll probably do them as a series of posts over the next few days.

The main problem we have faced has been the unexpected RAM hungriness of the Hyper-V server. We have one server running Windows Server 2008 SBS (which in it's self demands at least 6 gig of ram) and a Linux email gateway server (with 1 gig assigned). What I didn't realise first off was that when you assign this ram to the virtual machine it takes all of it away from the host OS. This has left our host hyper-v server with 1 GIG of ram.

According to the info we have found on the web people are saying that this is enough but I can state from our experience that this is not the case.

Recently we shutdown the SBS server to do some maintenance on it's virtual Hard Disks and when it came to restarting it again the Hyper-v server stated that it did not have enough memory to complete the request. Basically... as soon as the SBS server shutdown the Hyper-v server grabbed the released RAM to complete it's normal operations.

We're now considering putting yet another 8 gig of ram into the host server just for it's self to play with giving it 9 gig for it's own operations, 6 gig to SBS for it's domain and file server responsibilities and 1 gig to the email gateway server.

Lesson from this... when building a virtualisation server... give it as much RAM as your budget will stretch to... it'll need it.

PRINCE2 Results

I PASSED! I got my results last week after just over 2 weeks of wondering if I had actually passed. I got 77% (pass mark is 55%). I am rather happy with that.

I would say to anyone sitting the exam though that you will have absolutely no idea how you got on after leaving the exam. When doing mock papers I was feeling really shaky on it all. There were several people who were doing a lot better than me. When I did the actual exam however I felt at the time that I was getting on a lot better than the mocks. Speaking to people after the exam however they all said that they thought it was a lot more difficult than the mocks. (I was completely clueless by this point what was going on).

Guess there are two morels to take out of this:

1. Don't talk to other people after the exam about the exam. This just gives you means to worry about the exam.
2. There is nothing you can do about the result of the exam after you have finished so don't worry about it and just wait till the results arrive. Who knows... you may be pleasantly surprised.

What the Hell are Microsoft Doing????????

I just read a news article on the BBC news webiste (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8196242.stm) stating that they are going to keep supporting IE6 until 2014.

Why would they do that. Do they not understand the pains it causes web developers. For god sake there are already 2 versions ahead of that now. IE8 has been here for quite some time. I can't believe they are doing this. I'll begin to list a few things that are the major flaws in IE6.

1. PNG support (Biggest pain for graphical websites)
2. Fixed Positioning
3. inline-block display
4. relative positioning needed on EVERYTHING
5. JS support

These things are just the things I can think right now. When completing web development work I seem to spend 3 days developing things in a decent browser and then the same again getting it working in IE6. It's an expensive browser to support.

WHY WON'T PEOPLE JUST UPGRADE AND MAKE IE6 JUST DIE!!!

It's arrived!!!

In 3 days from ordering form Dell outlet it's arrived! I am impressed!

It's a lovely machine as well. Very slim and a lovely looking machine.

Only problem... they've sent me the wrong power adapter with it so I am waiting for a new power cable. They sent me a 65W power supply rather than a 90W one. I rang them and they were very apologetic for the problem and ordered a new one to be sent to me straight away.

Again... I'm very impressed!