At 00:51 today, the Windows.NET Server Family RC1 builds were put up on the MSDN download site.   I've just finished downloading Standard and Enterprise, and will be test deploying Enterprise on Achroite within the next 20 minutes (woohoo! for fast turnaround times!).  Sometime early tomorrow morning, if all goes well and I don't get caught up moving my sister into her apartment for the school year, I'll be deploying Standard on Gatekeeper.  That should be all for this little "heads-up" announcement.  If you need further information, I can be contacted up until tomorrow morning.  Oh, and note that all dates/times given in this message, as in all messages unless otherwise spec'd, are UTC.

Yesterday Microsoft announced that the Windows.NET Server Family had entered the Release Candidate stage.  Today Microsoft shipped RC1 to beta testers.  By my estimations, sometime next week I should find myself in possestion of a copy of Windows.NET Standard Server RC1 and Windows.NET Enterprise Server RC1.  So, following in my tradition of being on the bleeding edge, I'll most likely be rebuilding this web server with Windows.NET Standard Server RC1 sometime next week.   I'll have more precise estimates at some point in the future (hopefully before the outage).

In other news, I have purchased a new server.  It is primarily geered towards my personal developmental usage, and will only be pressed into public service after I have had a long time to get acquainted with it.  The delay is due to the radically different architecture of 'Ametrine' (as it has been christened): it's a DEC AlphaServer 4000 5/300.

There's been some more downtime for the site...blasted ISP keeps dropping into these periods of instability that cause me to loose the whole connection.  Speaking of the ISP, it appears that they have begun blocking RDP requests, most likely to "protect" all the "innocent" "NT51" (l)users.  <sigh>  This is what I get for not getting a QOS agreement.  I'll be looking for a solution to this problem, but until I find one the Terminal Services (advocated earlier as a way to access email) will not function.  Perhaps Stunnel is a way out...if I can ever get client mode to work stabily.

I'd like to apoligize to all the users who attempted to access this site yesterday.  Due to circumstances beyond my control (i.e., the ISP), the site was up only sporadicly (at best) yesterday.  Hopefully events such as this will not reoccur in the future, but if they begin to occur more frequently I have a backup plan. Unfortunately it is a tad bit too expensive for me to implement anytime soon.  If anyone would like to make donations to the "Redundant ISP's and Connections" fund, it would be appreciated, as would any other random (large) financial contributions...

The "exciting things to come" stuff I mentioned a while ago is finally coming out!   I'm pleased to announce the introduction of ntldr.NET My Services.  These services will provide actual features for authorized users.  Yeh!  To start off, the services available are Ident and...well, right now the only working one is Ident.   Email is sort-of operational.  I've completed the POP3 library to communicate with the POP3 server, but the ASP.NET implementation is still problematic.  In fact, it doesn't seem to work at all, along with most of my other ASP.NET initiatives.  The core stumbling block right now is that pages just aren't redrawing/updating themselves.  I first encountered this problem back in May, then again in early June, but apparently never got it resolved. <sigh>  One more thing to fix.

For authorized users (this is only Kovach@ntldr.net right now), you "should" be able to "access" the beta terminal support here.

New for Beta Testers!  There is now a beta of a bug reporting tool available.   It's based off an article from msdn Magazine, only adapted a bit to the local situation.  I'm looking into modifying it further to allow non-beta testers to report in about bugs.

A few minor bugs have also been corrected on the site, mostly related to typos I've made that broke functionality under NS/Mozilla.  The /ident storage now has updated icons, the implementation of which helped me find the Mozilla problems.

It's confirmed: my developmental web server has gone insane.  Now, instead of executing server side content and displaying it, it just has you download the raw page!  Oops on someone's part.  But that's what I get for using a beta product...  Because of this event, I'll have to do some development work on this server, so please be patient with some "changes" that may pop up.

Okay, I've tried to be patient with InsightBB, but my patience has run out.   The upgrade ended up taking more like three hours, which I'll freely acknowledge was mostly my fault (well, except for the Kmode STOP errors that kept occuring when the new NIC's driver would try and start...).  However, things went from bad to worse when I actually tried to get an IP address from Insight.

It started out okay.  I had to sit on hold for a while, which was expected.   After waiting 30 minutes or so I finally renewed the adapters on Gatekeeper, expecting to see a shiny new address come up ready for use.  That didn't happen. WAN00 (the primary external adaptor) renewed fine.  After 60 seconds WAN01 timed out.   Bloody "Server not found" or "Fatal server error" messages popped up.  And kept popping up.  Finally, after something like the 10th request, I got an address!  Yippie!  Oh...wait...it wasn't a shiny new IP.  It's a friggin' PRIVATE, INTERNAL USE ONLY address.  One of those "UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES CAN THIS BE USED TO CONNECT TO THE INTERNET" addresses.  InsightBB it turns out DOESN'T SELL ADDITIONAL IP ADDRESSES.  THEY SELL YOU HOOKUPS TO THEIR INTERNAL NAT DEVICE!!!

Insight, if I had wanted to use NAT to connect to the Internet, I would have just used my existing ISA2k solution!  And I used to wonder why @Home went bankrupt...if they were run anything like InsightBB is I now understand completely.  The worst thing about the "additional IP address" is that it costs me (after taxes, retirement, etc. adjustments to get net pay) 1 hour 9 minutes 54 seconds of work a month.   For something that's completely worthless!

Any way, I'm now looking at ADSL.  I'll be able to get a cheap deal through Purdue starting this fall, so I may switch.  The only problem is speed, so more likely is that I'd go to a solution where one adaptor uses Cable and the other uses ADSL.  The idiotic methods that must be used to do some things...

The router for this site will be going down for 30 minutes (hopefully it's only that long) at 2002-06-01T04:00:00.0000000-00:00.  Another server is being brought online and the settings need to be reconfigured.  More news after the upgrade...

After several days of fighting with C# and ASP.NET, I finally got all the details of my custom directory lister worked out.  Well...mostly.  Production testing has found that I need to rewrite it so that the file names are NOT sorted by type (System.IO.FileInfo.Extension) but rather by name (System.IO.FileInfo.Name).   Something to do next weekend...

Oh, I also need some other icons for the listings.  I think I'm going to primarily use ones from KDE, but if they're are any other icons that people like, feel free to contact me about them.  Just remember that whatever icons are recommended must be free of licensing issues.

Finally, I have good news on the uptime front: Gatekeeper.na.internal.ntldr.net (also known as www.ntldr.net, ns1.ntldr.net, mail.ntldr.net, and ntldr.net) currently has 99.87% uptime! Way to go stability improvements!

Let's see, what has happened recently...
· I managed to fix a few typos that were introduced by my overzealous deployment of the last update.
· P3P was messed around with over spring break; it still doesn't seem to work.   However, the site can pass all except for one of the W3C's P3P tests with flying colors (it gets warnings on that one).  One day it shall work, I promise!
· A Jabber server deployment was attempted; issues with NT forced a rollback.   When the project releases 1.6, or rereleases 1.4, I'll look into it again.
· Previous issues with SQL Server have been resolved and numerous problems have kept occurring with my db engine, so I'll be going back to SQL Server (sometime).
· Somewhat related to the above note, Exchange will be looked into to replace EMWAC IMS.  I love IMS, but there are a lot of continueing problems with it that just keep having to be delt with.  Going to Exchange would also mean that I could deploy web based email through Outlook Web Services to users.   Feedback on this plan would be appreciated!
· I had occasion to switch employers in February, and am now working as an IT staffer at SSCI, Inc..  It really beats shelving books.
· Major site changes are planned for this summer, so stay tuned!
If you want some idea of what might be coming, try to browse the Certificate Store and view my document 4 for usHis.

Well, there have certainly been a lot of changes in the last few months.  Er, well, actually, there haven't, but I've been meaning to make some.  Among other things, I need to reverify that the site is XHTML 1.1 complaint, and if it isn't I need to modify it so that it is.  The last few months have taught me a lot about XML, as that is the database format I'm going to use: flat XML files, instead of SQL Server, which doesn't seem to work with my current configuration.  However, the move does mean that I will be getting the services working, as I now have a data backend for them.  All that needs to be done is write my own authorization module to control access to the data.

In related news, Microsoft's .NET Framework has been released.  I highly advise downloading a copy and beginning to program with it if you're a developer.   It's really very easy to use, and I've already begun developing apps using it.  Ximian's MONO project should be finishing in a few months, so those of you that don't use recent Windows releases can still take advantage of the .NET platform.

Lastly, I'd like to apologize to those of you who have been inconvienced by the recent downtime of this site.  As you may have noticed if you have visited the 'Ident' pages, I have changed all the encryption keys.  I do this about every year, on January 20.  This year I sychronized all the X509 certificates to that schedule, including the machine certs.  One of those happened to be the SSL certificate that allows access to this site; upon creation of a new one, the import failed.  It's all due to a bug in the operating system, and should be in a few weeks (I hope).  In the interm, the site is running on the development machine (I know this is a phenomonally bad idea, so don't even think of flaming me about it).   Because of my dissatisfaction with NT's performance during this incident, I'm looking into switching to NetBSD.  Unfortunately, I'm a machine short of being able to do so, so the site may have unpredictable uptime in the future.  Currently, the next scheduled downtime is for 2002-02-09 — 2002-02-18.