I finally completed the ardurous (spelling? bah, I don't have to worry about compAp for another hour...) task of completing a new version of the Directory Lister Web Control.  That's the thing that allows me to create the nice nice directory content listings for the WLHS Docs and CertStore.  The new version primarily adds better exception handling, so if there's some error creating the listing a nice error output will come instead of that nasty default "exception occurred" page that ASP.NET uses by default.  I also made my life easier by having the control set the physical and virtual directory properties to the one where the parent page is in (duh...how long did it take me to make that obvious change?...no snide remarks from the peanut gallery, please).  So on the whole, it's a decent upgrade.

One of these days I would also like to get my new personal page done.   I'm tentatively predicting that it will be sometime in the next week and a half, but, as you've learned by now, don't take my word for it.

It's taken a long time to get here, but some of the site changes are finally manifesting themselves.  This page is obviously no longer a plain old static file, it's a dynamically generated page consisting of the three most recent site comments.  The source data file is /sitenews.xml.

In other news, the site has been down for almost a month.  There was one final "disagreement" with InsightBB (a cease-and-desist type letter...), and I had to switch ISP's immediately.  Well, that took a while.   I'm now using DSL via Verizon and Purdue.  Hopefully everything will be all better now...

As for me, this year is quite busy, and looks like it's only going to get busier.  So don't expect timely site updates; I've already skipped out on writing a late paper to get this page working and the servers up and running!  But it's been fun so far, and I'm looking forward to the big move next year.   If I ever get the college applications done...and next year will involve much more change than merely switching ISP's.

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...