Here you can download the files for fixing mysql issues ( deleting database ) on WSP 1.0.1.0, 1.0.2 , 1.1.0 and 1.1.2

INSTRUCTIONS :

Replace “websitepanel.providers.database.mysql.dll” file in “server\bin” folder with the one you downloaded. These fixes fixed my problem on all servers EXCEPT the one running mysql 5.0.27 version….ones runing 5.1 and 5.0.77 works fine. I Will update if I get this solved too…

Currently I am getting this error on 5.0.27 server: ERROR: ‘MySQL Server 5.0′ DeleteDatabase System.Data.EvaluateException: Cannot perform ‘=’ operation on System.Byte[] and System.String.

FIX for 1.0.1.0 version can be found HERE

FIX for the 1.0.2 version can be found HERE

FIX for the 1.1.0 version can be found HERE

FIX for the 1.1.2 version can be found HERE – UPDATED!!!

Hope it will be helpfull.

If you have any questions, just let me know.

Ofcourse, these fixes are provided AS-IS . I dont guarantee it will work on your machine, and I cannot take responsibility for any damages cause by it.

Fact number one: If you have a streaming server, you must install this extension!

Great, now that we’ve got this fact covered, we can move on.

IIS site says:

Bit Rate Throttling, an IIS Media Services extension, saves money on network costs by metering the download speed of media and data files. For media, Bit Rate Throttling accomplishes this by automatically detecting the encoded bit rates of 11 common media formats, such as Windows Media Video (WMV), Flash Video (FLV), and MPEG 4 (MP4), and then throttling the response to the client. For any other file or MIME type, Bit Rate Throttling allows administrators to configure custom throttling rules.

Now, lets explain the same thing in a bit simpler way.

If you have a server which streams any kind of media files, Im sure you have noticed extremely high bandwidht usage on that machine. In my experience, over 40% of the bandwidth is wasted! WAIT! WHY, HOW?

Answer is simple!

Scenario 1 ( server without Bit Rate Throttling extension ):

Lets say that you have a 100 Mbit link on your machine. A visitor with a 20 Mbit link will come to your site and click “play” on the newest promo movie you have uploaded.  What will happen, the server will send the ENTIRE video to the visitor in couple of seconds ( buffering ) and on the half of the movie, the visitor will see that he doesnt like your movie and go away.

What happened here? Half of the downloaded movie is wasted. The visitor downloaded the entire movie, but only looked at half of it. Efectively, you’ve wasted 50% of that movies bandwidth ( in a 100 Mb file, thats 50 Mb of bandwidth wasted )

This is where Bit Rate Throttling jumps in and saves the day!

Scenario2 ( Server with Bit Rate Throttling Extension installed ) :

Lets say that you have a 100 Mbit link on your machine. A visitor with a 20 Mbit link will come to your site and click “play” on the newest promo movie you have uploaded.  What will happen, the server will see that the movie is encoded at 700 kbps ( example ) and reduce the speed its sending you the movie ( buffering )  to 800 kbps or 850 kbps ( depening on what setting you choose ) so that you still have a smooth playback and some buffer in reserve ).   In this case, amount of bandwidht that could potentially be wasted is a lot smaller than the amount of bandwidth that would be wasted without this extension.

As I said before, improvements in bandwidth costs can be improved up to 40%! Thats not a small amount!

Features of Bit Rate Throttling:

• Seamless integration into IIS 7.x Manager
• Out-of-the box compatibility for the following media types: .asf, .avi, .flv, .m4v, .mov, .mp3, .mp4, .rm, .rmvb, .wma and .wmv
• Dynamic throttling adjustment based on:
  • The file types and their encoded bit rate
  • The available bandwidth of the connection
  • Default and maximum throttling rates
  • Concurrent connection limits
  • Target throughput rate for the site
• Throttling rules configurable at various levels including server, site and virtual directory
• Fast Start experience for optimal user experience
• Extensibility to enable other media formats and file types
• Better-together solution when combined with Web Playlists

Have a nice day! Alesandro

Well…in the very beginning, my answer is pretty much simple : yes AND no!  Why you ask?  Just keep reading…

Compression, regardless if its the compression of static or dynamic content is using CPU – that is a fact we can all agree upon.

Lets say compression is a tradeoff – CPU for bandwidth..use more cpu to “burn” less bandwidth.

The big question here is how to decide if you will benefit from turning on compression or not.

Most of us have “multi-purpose” servers which run various roles at the same time ( database server ( MYSQL , MSSQL, etc…) , mail server, web server, etc.. and all of those services are spending a certain amount of CPU time.

By turning on the compression, you will automatically “lose” some CPU time which could have been used for faster execution of some database queries i.e…

This is the key problem in our case. Is your machine powerfull enough to handle all the services it is already running + compression? Because in the end, you could end up with an even slower server!!!

If you have a small server ( 1 x quad core cpu, 4-8 gb ram ) which is under heavy or moderate load and you want your applications to be “jumpy” ( i.e : fast editing of some articles in your favourite CMS system ),  or you have lots of queries on your database service: DONT use compression, save your CPU time.  If you have some CPU time to spare,  turn on compression of static content which doesn’t change a lot or only needs to be downloaded every once in a while ( browser cache expires )

In case you have a big machine ( 2x quad core nehalems, 24 gb ram, 4x enterprise level hdd’s with hw raid controller, etc…)  and you have CPU time to spare, by all means, turn on the compression of both static and dynamic content. You will notice great improvements on your bandwidth costs

In my experience, the biggest bottleneck on 99% of the server is the disk system. Ofcourse, in my case we are talking about some small RAIDs with 4-8 disks.

Great example of that case are these two pictures:

CPU usage on a 2xQUAD core server with 16 gb of RAM.

As we can see, the server peaks out at 28% of cpu usage, which means it has lots of CPU time to spare for compression.

However, lets have a look at its disk system:

As we can see on the graph, average DISK FREE TIME is 64%, which is a bit low for my personal taste. I would be much more comfortable that this number is around 70 -75% .

This machine would definatelly benefit from turning on compression, since it has lots of CPU time to spare.

But I own a small server…is there any hope for me???

NEVER FEAR IIS 7 IS HERE!!!

One great feature in IIS 7 and IIS 7.5 is that it  offers CPU roll-off function.  When CPU usage goes  above certain level you set,  IIS server will stop compression and when usage drops below the level you have set up, it will start compressing content again.  This function is controlled by the staticCompressionEnableCpuUsage and dynamicCompressionDisableCpuUsage attributes.

For the owners of smaller machines, this function is just AWESOME! It will save you from unpleasant suprises like getting a call at 2-3 AM with a complaint that the SQL server is very sloooow.

In the end; you be the judge. Will you turn on compression on your server or not? Let me know…

Since cloud hosting has become very popular today I have decided to try creating windows cluster for plain old hosting service. Since we are already using WebSitePanel as our main control panel for windows server, the goal is to leave everything running the way it is now, but with the possiblity to add new servers to the server pool without affecting current customers and “fooling” WebSitePanel that it thinks its running on a single machine, so that it isnt aware of the cluster at all.

How did it all start?

Well, to be honest, I was very interested to migrate all of our customers from WebSitePanel to Enkompass when I saw that they are offering cluster based hosting. By going a bit deeper into the scheme of their solution I saw that its basically very simple;  ARR and a big hog of a storage server which even doesnt have to run on windows!!!

Ofcourse, I would LOVE to try Windows Storage Server and give Microsoft money for it, but…since I’m not an OEM manufacturer, I can only dream about it

Since I work at a hosting company which offers linux and windows hosting, we got to an idea to serve all clients from a cluster of storage servers, rather than having 2 separate clusters of storage servers, one for each hosting type ( Windows and Linux ) .

I have the entire thing “visualized” in my head…and some paper, so  I’m hoping that in month-two I will have a WORKING solution of my idea

Im already seeing some blade servers hihihihi…

Hello after a very long pause . Continuing the “Setuping a server for web hosting” series with the new smashing video of how to install PHP on your machine! AWESOME right?

In the very begining of the post, lets learn what PHP is exactly.

So, Wikipedia says ( and I add that I agree with her :

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document. As a general-purpose programming language, PHP code is processed by an interpreter application in command-line mode performing desired operating system operations and producing program output on its standard output channel. It may also function as a graphical application. PHP is available as a processor for most modern web servers and as standalone interpreter on most operating systems and computing platforms.

PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 and has been in continuous development ever since. The main implementation of PHP is now produced by The PHP Group and serves as the de facto standard for PHP as there is no formal specification.PHP is free software released under the PHP License.

So, now when we know what PHP is, lets check the basic PHP syntax:

<?php
    echo "Hello World";
   /* echo("Hello World"); works as well, although echo isn't a
    function (it's a language construct). In some cases, such
    as when multiple parameters are passed to echo, parameters
    cannot be enclosed in parentheses */
?>

You can find out more about the PHP project on www.php.net.

In this case, I will use Windows Web Platform Installer to install PHP on my machine. By going on this link you can use the installer to install PHP on your machine (same link is also used in the video).

Check out the video ( dont forget to put it in full screen mode :

So, now when you’re all full of excitement and thinking “LOL, installing PHP is extra easy, everyone could do it” ….NAH!!! and the host says: You lost

First, lets check it the PHP is working at all on our server. Yes, we could use the above stated syntax, but that just isnt fun . To get some detailed info on our PHP lets use this command:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Lets navigate to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\ and create a file called “phptest.php” . We will do that by clicking with the right mouse click , New – Text Document.  We will call it phptest.php.

Inside the document we will paste the above piece of code, save it and hold your fingers .

Point your browser to your server address, and to the phptest.php file.

If everything went smoothly you should see a page like this:

If you see the page that means that the PHP on our server is working properly.

Now, lets have some fun with security issues in PHP.

First of all, we have to check the php.ini file which is located in C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\php.ini  . Lets open it with Notepad.

Most of the option are explained in the file itself, so we will skip them. Focus will be only on the most important ones.

One of the interesting lines is this :

; – magic_quotes_gpc = Off         [Performance]

As we can see, that option is commented out and DISABLED, and its best to leave it like that since its been deprecated in PHP 5.3.X .

Second option is:

register_globals = Off -

LEAVE THAT TURNED OFF. If you have clients who have ancient applications, tell them to rewrite them .  More about the discussion on using register globals can be found on this link

Third one that should be disabled is :

allow_url_fopen = On

Standard setting in the instllation is “On”, which is bad and wrong for many reasons . This setting should be turned of because of cross site scripting and security holes in lots of CMS/Forum scripts. When fopen is turned on, a potential attacker has an oportunity to use some security hole in your application to include his own file and gain access over your entire account. I really think you dont want that

But, never fear , alternative is here .Tell your customers or yourself to use curl for fetching remote content.

Standard fopen function should be replaced with a curl function :

Fopen function

    <?
    $result = fopen($url,r);
    ?>

Curl function

<?
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
?>

Next very important setting is :

disable_functions =

By standard, its empty…

Here are some of the most common functions to be disabled : system, exec, shell_exec, passthru, set_time_limit, error_log, ini_alter, dl, pfsockopen, openlog, syslog, readlink, symlink, link, leak, fsockopen, popen, escapeshellcmd, apache_child_terminate apache_get_modules, apache_get_version, apache_getenv, apache_note,apache_setenv,virtual

Google a bit to find what these functions do, but for an example, I would disable the “exec” command ( among others) , but you find out why
( hint : net user /add useraccountname mypassword )

When you’re done setting the php.ini file, all you need to do is restart IIS server and thats it.

Next step is to install some PHP based application and admire your work.

Ofcourse, this is a very fast tutorial on installing PHP . Configuration of it is the trickiest part and you should use the official php site and google to help you with it!

Cheers, Alesandro

Back by popular demand part 3 of the “setup my web server” tutorials

In this post we will cover the instalation of MySQL on a Windows 2008 R2 based server. The process is the same if you would have a Windows 2003 machine also.

At the beginning, lets see what MySQL is.

MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS)^. MySQL stands for “My Structured Query Language“. The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases.

The project has made its source code available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements. MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems. As of 2009^[update] Oracle Corporation began the process of acquiring Sun Microsystems; Oracle holds the copyright to most of the MySQL codebase.

MySQL is often used in free software projects which require a full-featured database management system, such as WordPress, phpBB and other software built on the LAMP software stack. It is also used in very high-scale World Wide Web products including Wikipedia, Google and Facebook^.

Many web applications use MySQL as the database component of a LAMP software stack. Its popularity for use with web applications is closely tied to the popularity of PHP, which is often combined with MySQL.

So, what is the process of installing MySQL on a Windows machine? Well, it’s pretty straight forward so there is no need to write step-by-step tuturial..look at the video rather than reading

Dont forget to choose HD and the “full screen” option.

Song in the video is from Thievery Corporation. Song name is : Lebanese Blonde

Hello there…

In order to  install SQL 2008 Express, we have to download it first . Fire up your favorite browser and point it to http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/ . After that, find the box with the SQL 2008 Express, and click download.

On the next step you have the option to register with Microsoft or download the software without registration.  I will choose the “no registration part”.

In the new window, choose the version you would like to install. Personally, I will choose “Runtime with advanced services“. By clicking on install, Microsoft will ask to install the Microsoft Web Platform installer. If you dont have it installed, click on the picture to install it.

Choose “Run”, and after the download, again, choose “Run“. Wait for the installtion to finish and look at the top of the browser, a little bar will pop up and ask us if we want to run Active X control.  Make sure the publisher is “Microsoft Corporation”. Click on “Run“, and then on Allow.

Now, look at the video of the installation I have made for you. The video will show you the process of installing SQL Server 2008 Express.

After that, all you need to do is run the “SQL Server Configuration Manager” under “Configuration Tools” and configure it the way you want it.

BTW, the track used is La Noche by Coca & Villa .IT’s AWESOME!!!

Have fun…bye!

Today, me and my collegaue managed to configure ISCSI on some backup server we had at the office. Iscsi target is based on OpenSolaris and ZFS . ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. ZFS is implemented as open-source software, licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). The ZFS name is a trade mark of Sun.

Requirements for running any OS in HyperV that will be stored on Iscsi server are:

1. Iscsi target, obviously

2.Iscsi initiator software ( bundled in Windows 2008 Server)

3. High speed network, atleast 1Gbit.

4. Drive that you connect to the HyperV machine MUST stay in offline mode.

5. Tons of time to configure it

Will you will be able to read more details about configuring OpenSolaris and ZFS on my collegaues blog : toic.org  – linux geek blog

So, like we already know, the disk on that we want to install the OS has to be offline  ( hint: disk2 ).

Next step is the creation of the virtual machine that will use the disk.  I have recorded that process, so you can see how simple it is .

All that you have to do is to install the OS…I didnt do that to the end in the video.

Tommorow we have planned to create a failover cluster with two Windows 2008 servers and see what will happen when one server suddenly get disconnected..ups

Bye, Alesandro

Hi, last couple of days I have setuped over 10 Windows 2008 servers for hosting services for testing or production, so I am pretty bored with repeating the same stuff all over again , but, here’s a recorded video tutorial of one installation process. Because the video is pretty straightforward, I’ve decided that there is no need to explain every step of the installation.

Click on the HD button and put the video into full screen mode, so you can see all the details.

In the next post, I will show you how to install Microsoft SQL server 2008 Express .

Cheers!

No, I wont explain everything in this post. This post is just a annoucement, so you can know what will you read in a couple of next posts. We will cover the installation of IIS  7( Internet Information Services), MS SQL server, MYSQL server, PHP 5, Perl, Awstats and finally, integrating everything in DotNetPanel, the web hosting control panel for Windows Servers.  I will not explain or show how to install the OS on the server, because its a rudimentary and boring stuff , but being awesome, here’s a link to the video someone made

How To Install a Microsoft Windows 2008 Server – For more amazing video clips, click here