Useless post: just migrated the Phoibos blog hosting collection to the new WP 2.1.2 platform. Seamless upgrade process, nothing to remark. 🙂
Author Archives: Andrea Valsania
Internal WSS migration project has begun
After a long period of deferring, I have finally get the time to start the activities for upgrading my corporate application platform, based on the Windows SharePoint Services, to the latest version from Microsoft.
The first step was to learn about the supported upgrade procedures, on the WSS 3.0 Technical Library. Then I spent some hours to build a SharePoint web farm “cloned” from that which is running on my production systems, to be used for testing all procedures.
As specified on TechNet, I accomplished all the pre-upgrade steps on that development environment, thus operating the simplest approach (in-place upgrade), because my WSS farm has not undergone so many customizations, and I have no strong downtime limits to comply with.
By following a quite simple step-by-step procedure, I was able to see the fist results in a couple of hours: all virtual servers, application pools and site collections were upgraded in a seamless manner by running the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard, after I installed .NET Framework 3.0, SharePoint 3.0 and the new language packs.
A few additional steps were required to finalize the upgrade from the Central Administration web interface.
The only actions I had to do to address some issues:
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to setup the search service and connect each web application to the new indexer;
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to reset some .aspx pages customized far in the past with FrontPage (with WSS 3.0 you must use SharePoint Designer to modify pages).
After that, I was able to uninstall the old language packs and WSS 2.0 from my development systems.
One important thing to remember is the large amount of space needed to maintain WSS diagnostic log files: you may need to dedicate a VHD to it, if you want logging.
By any other point of view, the new SharePoint version is somewhat of exciting! I finally get convinced to convince some professional developers to spend the necessary time in trying to extend all the applications I currently use and to build new solution on this wonderful platform. 😉
ISP connectivity fault
On Friday, 23th February my primary Internet connection link has gone because of the usual incompetence of my provider. Since I noticed the trouble as soon it raised, my customers did not suffer any service break.
The problem was to obtain dynamically what was told to be a static IP in the contract, which did later revealed to be a DHCP reservation. Of course, only if I opened a support service ticket, I’m still waiting for an answer. During the whole day I tried to obtain my IP, by bringing offline and online the dialer and the ATM interfaces on my Cisco router, but only after near 25 hours I was able to come back online.
Thanking one more time my double-connected network infrastructure design, I restored the original RR in my DNS zone, and I went back at work. 🙂
Phoibos blogs migrated to WordPress 2.1
A few days ago I noticed that the latest version of WP had been released with a lot of improvements. The new feature which made me decide to upgrade the whole Phoibos blog hosting environment has been the least important one, of course: the redesigned login screen from the Shuttle project. I was bored by the old login theme so, by following such a stupid reason, last night I upgraded from the quite recent 2.0.6 to the new 2.1 WordPress edition (codename “Ella”).
No technical problems at this time, surely because I ran a full MySQL and WP backup before step into the upgrade procedure. Quite simple upgrade: I think I finally got confidence with it!
I took the time also for redesign the Phoibos blog hosting home page by using the new style! Now it looks like the “Shuttle” login screen. If you want to give a look at the old one, it’s still available here.
Migration to WordPress 2.0.6
On this evening I finally had five minutes to upgrade the blogging engine to the latest version (until now I was using the 2.0.4 release). First of all, I created a temporary blog to test the migration steps by the Codex guide then, after having backed up quickly all the hosted weblogs, I migrated the whole Phoibos blog hosting service.
After the upgrade, I was somewhat disappointed about the login page, since I was expecting to see the new skin, used by the MU edition… hoping to see it the next time. All other stuffs worked just great, nothing to complain about!
Corporate client provisioning
As usual, when holidays come, I have the time to do whatever I missed in the year. Finally our corporate PC full provisioning system has reached the production state! It has taken me some hours to resolve many issues about WMP11 deployment and I had to deal with a time-consuming MSI repackaging, but now I can press F12 after the POST on a PC, write down my domain credentials and wait for the RIS (Remote Installation Service) by Windows Server 2003 and the software distribution feature by Intellimirror doing the work for me. When I come back (about 1 hour later), the client is setup, all corporate policies have been enforced, all programs have been deployed and patches applied: I only have to log on and simply start using my new PC… everyone working with a PC at business should have that at Christmas! 😀
Cisco IOS management over SSH
Until now, all administration of my two Cisco Internet routers was done over vty terminal sessions, using the telnet transport protocol. Since an access list was placed to allow only vty connections from internal networks, it has been not a great security issue, but I was always sensing some “disease” every time I wrote the enable password in my terminal window! :S Obviously I had enabled in the past the SSH server included in that wonderful thing which is the Cisco Internetwork Operating System (IOS), but with my old SSH client (OpenSSH) I had a bad interaction with it. At that time I blamed the IOS for it… only today, by retrying with a different SSH client (PuTTY), I realized my mistake! I hope it has been the last time I have a doubt about the IOS quality… now all my management traffic (and authentication) flows encrypted between hosts of my internal networks, and I can finally go to bed without having nightmares about security concerns. 😉
Single Sign-On
Yesterday morning, instead of starting to do what I had to do, I began fixing a couple of problems which were annoying me from a lot of weeks.
One of the main concerns I solved was the need to enter the same credential each time an external user gains access to a web site published by my array of ISA servers.
In effect, ISA 2006 come with the SSO Web Listener functionality, but when I last worked on it, I had more urgent tasks to accomplish, so I did not find the time for testing and bringing it in the production environment.
My first impression in a test environment was good, so I spent some hours (obviously after midnight) to activate this function on the production servers. Some troubles, mostly due to the Outlook Web Access application configuration, but at the end I reached the goal: now you are requested for credential one time only, and the user experience in accessing the Phoibos online services has been dramatically improved (have a try with it at http://mailhost.valsania.it/)… thanks you one more time, ISA! 😉
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Finally Microsoft released the new WSS package on November, 13. The new system requirements include the .NET Framework 3.0, Windows Server 2003 SP1 and SQL Server 2000 with SP3 (or later).
Yesterday I had the time to have a first try to this new platform, so I started a new testing website at http://wss.valsania.it/. What I have first noticed is the setup process, dramatically simplified to guide the administrator through the creation of the first WSS webfarm, the search server role assignment, and the whole IIS configuration (virtual sites, application pools, etc.). It is now extremely simple to manage that OS components by using the Application Management site, under the redesigned Central Administration website.
From the user perspective, the new look and feel is simply awesome, tanks to the new Recycle Bin feature (great stuff!), the redesigned Quick Launch, the new “Site Hierarchy”, the Breadcrumbs and “Top Link Bar”. All these components greatly improve the user navigation experience, by reducing the time needed to reach the contents you are looking for.
I have not so much time to spend in testing, but I wish to try at less the migration of site contents from my current WSS 2.0 environment. Hoping to have the time to post further comments about that.
Windows Live Writer
After I spent some hours yesterday night to get some information from the Net, I downloaded the latest version of the blogging software from Microsoft. Currently I post in this personal weblog only by using the web interface provided by the WordPress engine, while I use Microsoft Office Word 2003 to write down the articles I publish on my corporate blog.
Whereas I’ve already tested some blogging tools like the Zoundry Blog Writer, I choose to use Microsoft Word because of the need to send all posts to a person who checks the language before publishing. Moreover, I’ve told that the Microsoft tool for blogging, almost in its beta release, was something ugly to use and badly integrated with the most of blogging engines.
Yesterday night I read a good review of the latest revision of Windows Live Writer, so I decided to have a try with it, and I realized it is the best blog writer I’ve ever tested since I began to writing and publishing articles in that way! Despite of its beta revision status, it looks like a fully functional and perfectly integrated tool, both with the WordPress and the Community Server engines. Saving local drafts in the user’s personal documents folder is a great feature for persons like me that have it redirected on a server share, since I can start writing a post on a PC and complete it on another.
The only thing I wish, and I think Microsoft will do so, is to get the blogging feature of Live Writer integrated with other writing tools (maybe in the Office System), to make even more simple to edit, print, save and share blog posts, as we do with any other Office document.