Deven Kampenhout's Tech Blog : Technical Musings

What would you like to do with Windows Server 2008 Core?

devenkamp — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 18:04:00 GMT

Lately there has been a great deal of discussion about WS2008 Core amongst the Web Platform Architect Evangelists and several of the great people in the IIS and Commerce/Hosting product teams. Ever since I first learned of LongHorn Core (now Windows Server 2008 Core), I was very excited about the possibilities that such a concept presented in a web hosting scenario.

For any not familiar with Server Core, it is designed to be minimal environment, or in other words, only running exactly what is needed in order to support a specified server function. One of the most visible manifestations of this concept shows itself in the lack of a Graphical User Interface. If you log into a Server Core box, your session will just look like a command prompt. Beyond the lack of a GUI, the minimalist approach of Server Core limits installed binaries to only the subset of the binaries that are required by the supported server roles. Sound familiar to anyone?

My question is, why do you really need a GUI for a web server? Apart from a manual initial configuration, how often do you really need the GUI elements to manage your web server? And even then, it is so easy to automate a build/install of a server, you shouldn't even need a GUI for that. Most people use some kind of web-based control panel anyway, by which the GUI portions of administrations are accomplished via a web site. In my opinion, that is where the GUI belongs, on the Web. Most administrative tasks that you want to do should be programatic, scripted, and automated. In my years of running and administering Unix and Linux-based web servers, I can honestly tell you that I never once used a console/terminal based GUI to manage anything about that environment. I'm glad that Microsoft has finally created a product that fits this model.

Almost.

You see, the current thinking for Server Core is that it will only support specific, pre-defined, server roles. While there are a variety of roles that can be utilized, there are a number of scenarios that aren't supported in server core. For example, as of today, you can implement Server Core with a Web Server role (IIS). Unfortunately not all of the features of IIS are supported on Server Core. Most prominent among these unsupported features is the .Net CLR. Whoops!

There have been many among the IIS product team and hosting focused folks at Microsoft that have been pushing hard to have this fixed. I can't say for sure that we'll be successful, but I have good hopes here :) As I've had some interesting internal discussions about how something like the .Net CLR could be left out of Server Core, I've certainly made my opinion about the matter known. Now I'm sharing it with you, my readers so that I can garner your comments on this matter. I am one voice, but I hope that I can hear from those of you who feel similarly so that we can really draw attention to the importance of this.

Basically, my opinion is that if Server Core is truly a minimalistic install, it should support ANY role that can be run independently of a GUI. A GUI should depend on the platform, not the other way around. There isn't any reason that something running on a server should require a graphic interface to configure something. As long as there is an API or script-based way to accomplish a task, I should be able to push the administration for such a service to a centralized, off-server approach that wouldn't require any type of GUI-based shell on the server itself.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a pessimist. I believe that we'll get there some day. But we need to broaden the definition of Server Core.

I'm really curious what you think. Here is a list of all of the supported roles for Server Core as of today. Check it here to see updates.

•	Active Directory Domain Services
•	Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS)
•	Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) Server
•	DNS Server
•	File Services
•	Print Server
•	Streaming Media Services
•	Web Server (IIS)

The following optional features are also supported:

•	Microsoft Failover Cluster
•	Network Load Balancing
•	Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications
•	Windows Backup
•	Multipath I/O
•	Removable Storage Management
•	Windows Bitlocker Drive Encryption
•	Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
•	Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS)
•	Telnet client
•	Quality of Service (QoS)

So my question to you all is this. What is missing from this list? Are there any other glaring holes that will affect the hosting industry?

Web Hosting for Designers and Developers at Mix 07

devenkamp — Tue, 08 May 2007 00:06:00 GMT

I had the honor of presenting at this years Mix 07 conference at the Venitian Hotel & Resort in Las Vegas. It was billed as the premier event for Web Developers and Designers for the Microsoft platform. I was able to deliver a session that covered how Microsoft works with partners to deliver world-class hosting solutions built on the Microsoft Web platform. If you weren't able to attend my session at Mix 07, you can view a recording of it online at:

http://int1.fp.sandpiper.net/soma/applications/silverlight/v1/Default.html?title=XBD03 - Web Hosting for Web Designers and Developers&speakers=David Kidd, Derek Curtis, Deven Kampenhout&source=videos/XBD03.wmv

Abstract:

Learn about Windows hosting services and how Service providers meet the needs of the growing designer and developer community by using key products from Microsoft Windows Server. We demonstrate how Windows hosting accounts can scale, be secured, and provide easy access to a broad range of Microsoft tools and technologies. The bottom line is that Windows hosting services allow Developers and Designers to more easily code, deploy, and scale ASP.NET applications.

You can also find other ways of playing the presentation and play all of the other sessions at http://www.visitmix.com/

RPC over HTTP with Outlook 2007 beta and Exchange 12

devenkamp — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 15:16:00 GMT

Yesterday I finally made the plunge and installed both Windows Vista RC1 and Microsoft Office Beta on my primary work laptop. I've been dabbling with Windows Vista for over a year now, and have even played with the Microsoft Office Beta on my home system, but this is the first time I have used both on my primary corporate network machine.

I suppose the reason it took me so long to begin using Office 2007 is because when it comes to critical business applications, I have little tolerance for failures. I know enough about systems and don't mind tinkering around with a system like Windows Vista (I've been using Vista since the Alpha stages). However, if I'm in the middle of editing an email message or writing a word doc, it annoys me to no avail to have the application crash and loose all my work.

I can't say that I've been using the Office 2007 beta long enough to report if it is stable or how much I like its new features and layout, but I have noticed one HUGE feature that made my life much easier, and that is in the realm of setting up your email account and configuring RPC over HTTP.

If you don't know what RPC over HTTP is, it is a way for one to connect to their exchange server without having to be directly connected or VPN connected to your corporate exchange system. This makes getting your exchange-based information/email much more convenient, which is especially important for hosting companies or providers who offer services such as hosted exchange. A hosted exchange provider would incur much greater cost and inconvenience if exhange clients had to VPN to connect to the exchange servers. Thus, RPC over HTTP is a critical enabler for hosted exchange.

With Exchange 2007 in conjunction with Outlook 2007, you can configure email "auto-discovery" so that account and profile settings can be auto-discovered from the exchange server. There is an article here which details how this is done. In practice, when I ran Outlook 2007 for the first time, it automatically determined my email address from my domain login, and automatically configured my outlook client to connect to the exchange 2007 server via RPC over HTTPS with the proper certificate.

With Office 2003 and Exchange 2003, one had to manually configure RPC over HTTP settings. For a hosted exchange provider or corporate exchange environment, one could programmatically script this configuration, but that would take extra development, and wasn't something provided out of the box. With the new exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007 autodiscovery features however, I can see support costs related to new customer setup with Hosted Exchange dropping.

Bass Ackwards search results

devenkamp — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 08:05:00 GMT

This is funny. If you do a search for "search" on Google, MSN will show up higher than google:

Wait, now wipe that smirk off your face! Do the same search on MSN and you find that Google shows up well before MSN search:

Go figure!

Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit (How I learned to freely burn ISO images in Windows)

devenkamp — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 04:38:00 GMT

In my prior life before coming to Microsoft, I didn't use Windows as a server but rarely and as a workstation very little. My main workstation was running on RedHat (or Fedora from time to time), and I managed mostly Unix and Linux servers, only managing Windows servers on an as-needed basis, which was pretty rare since we had other staff to do that. I did run Windows on my laptop however, as it was very usefull to run the Windows Office suite as my company had a fully integrated Exchange environment, and collaboration with co-workers was more efficient using Windows.

One of the reasons I preferred using RedHat as my primary workstation however was due to the availability of tools and resources. If there was a job that needed to be done, and I didn't already have the software, I could almost always find an open-source project that had a solution. If the project was somewhat active I could easily download and install the software without having to pay for it. On Windows, if the OS didn't provide the utility, my perception was that the only other options were typically non-free products, ranging from "trial versions" to "shareware" to full blown pay for license professional software. The problem was that if it wasn't free, then I had to go pester my boss about buying a license for it, and that was an inconvenience at the very least.

One example of such a utility was cd-burning. In Linux/Open Source distributions, it was easy to obtain fully functional cd-burning command-line utilities. On top of those, if you didn't like working in the command-line, there were a bunch of freely available command-line GUI wrappers to make the tools pretty. Most of these utilities are part of the common Linux distributions today. If I wanted to burn a CD, a quick search on the Internet would reveal plenty of how-to docs on the subject.

Conversely, in Windows if I wanted to burn CD's, I had to go find a third party applications to burn them. When I bought my cd-writer, it came with a free "light" version of a CD burning tool, but to get the advanced features such as burning an ISO image, I had to buy an "upgrade". Granted, it wasn't usually more than $20-30, but this is more expensive than "free".

However, it turns out that I should have voiced this opinion to my Microsoft-minded colleagues, as contrary to my ignorant opinion, Microsoft does have free cd-burning tools. Granted, some of these tools came to public distribution relatively recently, so I can't blame myself too badly for my mis-perception. For cd-burning of data and music CD's, Windows Media Player 10 has all of that functionality fully available. But if you want to burn an ISO onto a CD, that isn't supported. However, there is an answer for that too. Microsoft published the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit on 4/28/2003, which contains tools to "help administrators streamline management tasks such as troubleshooting operating system issues, managing Active Directory®, configuring networking and security features, and automating application deployment." This toolkit also includes the cdburn.exe tool, which enables burning ISO images to CD (and dvdburn.exe for burning DVD from ISO images). You can install this resource kit on windows XP or Windows server 2003. One caveat that I discovered (while writing this post nonetheless) is that you can't be running Windows Media Player while using the cdburn or dvdburn command line tools, or you'll get an error message stating "Unable to lock the volume for exclusive locking 5".

Once you install the resource kit, burning a CD is as easy as the following command:

cdburnn d: image.iso -speed max

You can find all of the options for the command by passing the /? flag after the command.

The moral of this story? Before you assume that you have to buy third party software to accomplish your task, check to see if microsoft has a free utility or toolkit.

RedHat Cap at MMS 2005

devenkamp — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 02:36:00 GMT

Even though I didn't get as many comments as I'd hoped, the few that I received convinced me to commence wearing my RedHat cap at the Microsoft Management Summit 2005 in Las Vegas. I wore it on Thursday. It was a good day to wear it, as just the day before, Steve Ballmer had given a keynote address stressing the importance of interoperability within management systems. I wore the RedHat cap to a breakout session which detailed how MOM 2005 can be used to monitor systems and devices independently of their operating system.

The funny thing was that after the session, I bumped into another guy wearing an Apache t-shirt. We smiled at each other and wondered if we were the only two open-source geeks at the conference.

More posts are coming with everything I leaned at MMS. Sorry for the delay, but was travelling all day Friday and didn't have Internet access all weekend. I've got some rought drafts going, so expect some more posts soon.

MOM for Heterogeneous Environments (part 1)

devenkamp — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 02:10:00 GMT

I talked with the CTO of Jalasoft yesterday at MMS 2005. They build connectors and management packs for MOM. The interesting thing about their product is that they also support linux monitoring. They do this via an agent that is installed on the managed systems. When I asked him why he didn't just use SNMP he stated that there were some issues with the default version of SNMP on redhat (NetSNMP) where they weren't getting the most reliable information set and performance. The agent is compiled C code, so in theory should be able to be ported to other OSes if the need is there. Once I get home and have some time to set up my home lab, I'll play around with the Jalasoft software with MOM and tell you what I find.

The feedback I've received from some other Hosters who have looked at using MOM to monitor their complete heterogeneous environment is that while there are a few companies out there providing capabilities to manage linux systems, they're not designed for the scale that web hosting companies are typically looking for. We'll see how these new products stack up and if they can truly create a more heterogeneous management solution.

Expect another blog post on my conversation with Vintela, which is another company making management tools which integrate Linux management into the Microsoft management tools. I'll also report later on what Steve Ballmer had to say about management of a heterogeneous environment.

Blogging from MMS 2005

devenkamp — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 18:55:00 GMT

What do you think? Should I wear the RedHat cap to MMS 2005? Let me know and post comments to my blog. Your voice will determine whether I wear the cap or not....(read more)

The Journey Begins Part 3 - Abuse, Automation, Management, and Aquisition

devenkamp — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 18:55:00 GMT

… Continued from part two (part one):

As we last left my chronicle of my experiences in Web Hosting, I was the sole systems administrator at Virtual Servers. The systems were running high on load average, which isn't surprising given what we were running on the hardware that was available back then. I quickly realized that the only way to begin to address the problems in any meaningful way was to automate fixes and avoid short-term "band-aid" fixes. This is easier said than done however when you're the only sysadmin; To be blunt, time is of the essence and you don't have much time to be proactive when your customers are constantly contacting the support team to complain of slow service due to high server loads. I was able to convince my manager that I needed help, and he allowed me to hire someone to share my workload.

The first person I hired was a guy named Steve, who has since become a great friend. His primary job was to handle all of the abuse complaints. He knew web design very well but was just beginning as a systems administrator. I trained him on how to react to high load issues; The reason this was tied to the Abuse Desk position was that in many cases, high loads on the servers were caused by people hosting things that were against our AUP, such as porn or warez. The other cases were caused by customers whose web sites had outgrown the capacity of their shared hosting plan. Steve would contact these customers and tell them that there site was causing the server to fail and that he'd have to shut down their web site to keep the rest of our customers happy; He also gave them the alternative to upgrade to a plan that had more resources allocated to accommodate the needs of their growing Web site. It was mainly through efforts like this that we built our dedicated hosting business.

Now that I had a little more time, I began to automate everything I could. First, in order to help Steve, I built a number of scripts that he could use to track down users that were causing server performance issues. I also helped to beef up our monitoring and paging system (we called the system Zookeeper) so that it was better capable of paging a team of people rather than just me and my boss. I also integrated some of my data gathering scripts into the web interface of our monitoring solution so that when you saw a server alert come up, you could click a link to get more detailed information to track down the issues.

Through all of this, the Perl scripting language was my greatest friend. When it comes to coding a complex application such as a server, end-user app, or what have you you'd probably want to look at a language like C/C++ (or similar), but there is nothing better than Perl when it comes to system administration, especially on Unix/Linux/GNU systems. It's funny now that I look back at some of my earlier perl scripts - they were hastily written and didn't use the best programming practices. However, over the years I would grow to know Perl like the back of my hand.

By the Fall of 1999, I had hired another system administrator to my team (Phil), and was in the process of looking to hire a full-time Perl scripter to help with tool creation for systems administration automation. In December, It was announced that Virtual Servers (AKA Lightrealm Communications) would be acquired by Micron PC. Micron PC at the time was struggling to compete with the likes of HP, Compaq, and Dell and thought to start an Internet Hosting business in order to take its company in a new direction.

They acquired two other web-focused companies along with Lightrealm with the intent of forming them into a larger player in the web hosting space. Micron Internet Services, acquired from their parent company Micron Electronics, was mainly an Internet Service Provider selling dialup and broadband Internet services in the Boise, ID area. Hostpro (AKA NetLimited) was a hosting company based out of Los Angeles, CA that had an array of hosting products and services ranging from high-end customized dedicated hosting solutions to shared hosting. Our strength at Lightrealm was mainly our shared hosting business. While we had some dedicated hosting and colo customers, the primary focus had always been on the shared hosting business.

The merger brought on a new era. I went from working for a small private startup company with a very personal feel to working for a small part of a much larger publicly traded company. At the time, MicronPC was the large revenue player and we felt completely segmented from them. It was decided that the new brand for the combined companies would be HostPro. It would take a few years for us to begin to truly integrate our cultures and think of ourselves as one company. It is strange to look back now and remember how weird it was going from a company of 100 employees to a company that had well over 1000. In retrospect, this was nothing compared to working for a company like Microsoft, which has almost 60,000 worldwide.

One of the benefits of the acquisition was that we had a much larger budget with which to grow our company. In fact, one of the main reasons for the acquisition was that Lightrealm had grown so much that we'd hit a ceiling of what we could accomplish without some major capital. This capital was what Micron PC brought. Now instead of building our own custom hardware built in custom cases and using PC hardware, we began to deploy our servers onto enterprise class servers (still Intel based, but much higher quality). We were able to build out a new data center and office space, both of which were badly needed. Some of us still laugh with fondness when we remember the old days of working closets for a lack of available floor space in our overcrowded old office space. Having a new employee report to work was always exciting, as it meant trying to figure out if there was a spare cabinet or closet that might possibly be converted into a work area. Now that HostPro was formed with the backing from Micron PC, those problems were behind us.

To Be Continued...

The Little Worm that Couldn't

devenkamp — Sun, 13 Feb 2005 21:02:00 GMT

I read an interesting article posted here about a worm written to affect MySQL installations on Windows servers. In a nutshell, the worm replicates itself by scanning the internet and local networks for MySQL servers and brute-force guessing the root account password. Once it gains entry to a system, it launches connections to a remote IRC server and pushes itself into the background, allowing MySQL to run normally.

The funny thing about this worm is while the IRC bot has the capability of running DDOS attacks, this feature is turned off; The only DDOS that this bot has accomplished is against the very own IRC network it attempts to communicate with:

(quoted from the article)
As with similar types of malware, the bot runs in the background, allowing MySQL to run normally while it contacts a remote Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server for additional instructions. In the report, Ullrich states that the bots' target IRC server was busy and unable to accept new connections when researchers last attempted to contact it. On earlier attempts, the IRC server showed around 8,500 connections, all of them likely due to infected MySQL installations.

Interestingly, the worm only attacks Windows based installations of MySQL. I expect that this is only because the bot was compiled only for the Windows platform, and not because it isn't possible to attack other systems. I wouldn't be surprised to see a variant attempt the same exploit against *nix based MySQL implementations. Any time a brute force security breech is accomplished on this scale, it speeks for a massive lack of proper system configuration. In a nutshell, there are too many people out there who have decided not to disable root level database access to remote users or who use simple (or non-existant) root passwords which are easily guessed. The sad thing is that it is really easy to prevent this type of attack by allowing only local (or users from trusted networks) to connect as root, and at the same time using strong passwords.

I know that 4.1.x versions of MySQL have better authentication methods such as using keys or certificates. But a good feature that isn't understood and implemented by a large number of people makes the software look bad, regardless of its capabilities. For a long time, many in the Open Source community have stood by smugly while Microsoft has suffered attacks on its systems and on its reputation due to security vulnerabilities. But it seems like that attitude may come back to bite.

Several years ago Microsoft decided to step up its efforts with its "Secure Computing" initiative. Because of its position in the lime light, Microsoft receives more attention from hackers. But this attention has served to better prepare Microsoft for secure computing by helping to harden its software and practices. If you compare the number of security vunlerabilities in Windows Server 2003 to its open source competition, Windows Server 2003 has had far less critical vulnerabilies than the major Linux distros. I don't say this to start yet another "religious" conflict about which system is more secure, but as a preface to the following warning: Open source systems have enjoyed a broad, technical user base. As they gain popularity among less technical and security minded folk, prepare for more attacks such as the MySQL worm that is brute forcing passwords to gain access. Unless software is designed to make even the ignorant user to use secure computing practices, your whole platform will suffer as a result. At the end of the day, nobody benefits when any system is compromised, whether that system runs Windows or any other flavor. Secure computing will make or break you. Microsoft understands this, but keeping the growing number of open source users trained in security is going to be a challengeing endeavor.

RPC over HTTP (why this is a great option for Hosted Exchange)

devenkamp — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 08:55:00 GMT

Yesterday I learned about a cool feature that is part of Exchange 2003. RPC over HTTP will allow you to connect to a firewalled exchange server without having to VPN past the firewall. There is a technet guide describing how to set this up at this link.

Due to security concerns with allowing incoming netbios traffic, it is an accepted best practice to keep your exchange server behind a firewall. While using a VPN to access your exchange server is a standard practice and accepted method, it has some drawbacks, specifically in the hosted exchange environment. First, granting VPN access gives the user complete access to the entire internal exchange network. Second, providing and managing VPN clients for your hosting customers is going to be a migrain headache at best. In a hosted exchange offering, the ideal solution is to allow a secure method by which a user can access just the exchange resources he needs without having to grant that user rights to the entire network.

Enter RPC over HTTP. This allows you to connect to the exchange server if you're running outlook 2003 and exchange 2003. On the exchange side, you put the exchange servers behind an ISA server and web proxy. Read the technet guide for more details. I just set this up on my home PC to access the corporate exchange server (without VPN), and it works really well.

If your're a Microsoft employee reading this post and curious how to set this up for the corporate exchange server, there is a link to specific instructions on the front entrypoint to the OWA.

Mysql Triggers Turn on the Heat

devenkamp — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 07:27:00 GMT

Peter Gulutzan wrote an interesting article describing his Mysql Triggers Tryout with the latest Alpha build of MySQL 5. I've been a long-time fan of MySQL. I first started using it in 1998, and have watched with great interest as it has matured. It seems that it is working very hard to match the features of the "enterprise" level SQL databases such as Oracle and MS SQL. For quite some time, many enterprise database (MS SQL, Oracle, etc.) advocates have drawn attention to the lack of features such as triggers and stored procedures in the MySQL database. Soon, the lines between the features of these competing databases will narrow.

One of my favorite things about MySQL in the past has been its speed and its simplicity. Could all of these new features be a pandoras box of instability and performance drains? In trying to compete with the larger databases, I hope that the database that I "grew up" with doesn't loose its identity, its speed, and its stellar performance. The way I see it, not every application needs the power to run join queries on a 3 Terabyte sized database. For small to medium sized database applications (most web apps), speed and simplicity are paramount. In these smaller applications, good database design can almost always compensate for the lack of some of the advanced features offered by the more advanced databases. As MySQL bridges into the enterprise DB space, will these key benefits remain intact?

I wonder what kind of an ultimate impact the "improvement of MySQL" will have on the Database market, as well as on MySQL itself. MySQL is an open source database, but it can be used either under the GPL or under a commercial license. The commercial license is not free, but gives the purchaser assurances and frees them from some of the limitations of GPL (most notably, doesn't require the licensee to distribute their application under the GPL). As the competition from MySQL picks up steam (and it already is), perhaps the other vendors will allow a free license for their databases under specific circumstances similar to MySQL licensing. The challenge is that the database market is a very high revenue generator for both Microsoft and Oracle, so there is a great deal at stake for both companies. At the same time, if MySQL takes over a significant portion of the market will their licenses change to better take advantage of their improved position and give them more cash? Will the approach of MySQL cause the enterprise databases to invent new innovations to differentiate themselves from the growing competition from MySQL?

Needless to say, it is going to be a battle ahead for the database players. There is a great deal at stake, so I'm sure the battles will be hard fought. Unlike Linux, the MySQL community centers around a private "for profit" company funded by venture capitalists. This could give a great deal of stability, legitimacy, and force-of-will to the MySQL movement; Or it is possible that the need for profits will cause a large rift with its Open Source (i.e. "We want everything to be free") champions. Only time will tell.

*Disclaimer* This posting represents the opinion of the author, and not any of the parties mentioned herein or the opinion of my employer. This post is also subject to the default disclaimer of my blog.

Bill Gates Speaks on Software Interoperability

devenkamp — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 02:19:00 GMT

On February 3rd, 2005, Bill Gates sent out an executive email to the public regarding the importance of software interoperability. He stated:

Interoperability is more pragmatic than other approaches, such as attempting to make all systems compatible at the code level, focusing solely on adding new layers of middleware that try to make all systems look and act the same, or seeking to make different systems interchangeable. With a common understanding of basic protocols, different software can interact smoothly with little or no specific knowledge of each other. The Internet is perhaps the most obvious example of this kind of interoperability, where any piece of software can connect and exchange data as long as it adheres to the key protocols.

He then goes on to explain how Microsoft approaches interoperability by working to ensure that its software and operating systems work well with the other software and systems already in existence. He further explains that the next step is to define the next generation of software with a greater degree of "interoperability by design", specifically using XML as a common framework from which different applications can communicate.

This idea isn't new, but the fact that Bill is driving focus towards software interoperability is very encouraging. I remember the first time I heard of XML, thinking how it was a nice idea, but that it was a bit "overbilled" and "overhyped". However, I have to admit that using XML as a common interoperability mechanism is a great idea. It allows you to publicize your communication / interoperability schemas without requiring interfacing programs/programmers to understand all of the details about the inner workings of your software. Furthermore, the self-describing nature of XML eases interoperability by reducing the need for extensive documentation surrounding your interoperability mechanisms. Finally, since it's a common standard, it can be used and accepted broadly.

There are so many "religious wars" out there when it comes to software, platforms, standards, etc. There comes a time however when it benefits all to work together. By establishing interoperability standards, we can all score a big win here. I just hope that common sense will prevail and the bickering software/technology/OSS quarrels won't get in the way of true progress.

MOMA MIA!

devenkamp — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 18:46:00 GMT

I've spent some time checking out Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) over the two weeks. If you don't know what it is, it's a solution designed to manage the operations of servers and data center infrastructure. I'm extremely impressed by MOM 2005. Let me give you more background as to why.

This is of particular interest to me specifically because of my experience with web hosting. In my early days of hosting, we built our own custom operations monitoring software/solution. It was very basic, but it did enough to page me in the middle of the night if a server stopped responding.

Eventually, we built the system to utilize SNMP to get detailed information about what was happening in our environment. Using the Berkley SNMP agent (now NetSNMP), we were able to run scripts, check performance, software availability, hardware failures (i.e. RAID), etc. After my company was acquired by a larger enterprise and had more capital, we started looking at how to grow our business, which included investing in an enterprise level operations management/monitoring solution.

At the end of the day, after looking at many of the solutions out there, we decided that none of the enterprise solutions gave us exactly what we were looking for. They all had some nice features about them, but none of them gave us the flexibility we needed in our growing business. When we added new products and features to our hosting solutions, we needed a way to adapt our monitoring/management solution. In the end, we got more value from engineering our own SNMP-based solution. First, the open-source SNMP agent could be installed on a variety of platforms, while many of the enterprise solutions had agents which didn't support BSD/OS or FreeBSD, which were critical components of our hosting offerings. Secondly, it was easier to tie in our management solution with our trouble-ticketing systems, generate custom reports, and run custom queries against our reporting database.

When I first heard of MOM 2005, I have to admit that I was a little skeptical that it would work well in the Hosting industry. I thought it would be a good solution for enterprise, but there is a gap between the needs of a hoster and your typical enterprise IT shop. MOM 2005 is not your typical enterprise solution, however. In a stroke of genius, the developers realized that their management solution wasn't necessarily the be-all-end-all solution, and created a framework on which MOM2005 can be extended.

There are two key parts of this extensibility. First, the concept of a "Management Pack". A management pack is used to tailor the monitoring, alerting, reporting, and knowledge management to the specific roles/functions you are managing. For example, if you have a SQL cluster you are managing, you apply the SQL management pack, a server with IIS will be monitored/managed via the IIS management pack, etc. The management packs have an SDK, so that they are extensible beyond just the standard Microsoft roles. There are already a ton of management packs available which have been developed by third parties.

The second part of the extensible nature of MOM 2005 is called the MOM Connector Framework, or MCF. This is used to tie MOM to other components of your overall infrastructure. It can be used to connect multiple layers of MOM management groups, or used to tie MOM to third party systems, such as other monitoring systems, a ticketing system, CRM, etc. A list of management packs and connectors available for MOM can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/management/mma/catalog.aspx. There are even a few packs which are designed to support linux.

I'd be remiss if I also didn't mention how slick the operator console is. It mimics the design of Outlook 2003, and the interface is extremely user-friendly. The MOM administrator console is based on MMC, so it can be integrated into any other MMC-based administrative tools you already manage. All things said, I consider this more of a "bonus" than a key requirement.

In short, you get the best of both worlds: An enterprise-level monitoring and management tool, as well as the extensibility you need to manage a highly customized, heterogeneous environment as is typically found in the Hosting industry.

Knoppix to the Rescue!

devenkamp — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 01:46:00 GMT

I found a fun article called "True Stories of Knoppix Rescues". My first experience with Knoppix was when a co-worker of mine pulled a business-card sized CD out of his wallet during a server emergency. It sure does come in handy to carry around one in your wallet, especially if you're running systems on the Internet with data you want to keep. The cool thing is that the bootable utility OS and tools can fit within 100 MB. The filesystem recovery tools have proven invaluable, especially when you wipe out your boot loader. I wonder if there are any similar bootable filesystem tools that can be used on Windows. I know there are the standard install CD's which have some rescue utilities, but it would be cool to have a wallet-sized version. It probably exists somewhere already, but I'll have to keep my eyes out for it.