Geek projects, tidbits and things I'm working on at the moment…

I’ve installed WordPress websites several times on various Linux distros w/o issue but today I needed to install WordPress on a Windows 2008 R2 Server for the first time. Thankfully WordPress.org had an entire webpage up on just how to do it. Looks like they’re using a Microsoft publishing site called Web App Gallery or Web Platform Installer to install not only WordPress but also any dependencies and also do the initial configuration. The only problem I had was getting WordPress to update itself via FTP. Not only do you need to install the FTP server under the IIS additional roles but you need to explicitly give that FTP user account modify & write permissions to your wwwroot folder which is housing your WordPress files.

WordPress IIS page:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_on_Microsoft_IIS

Microsoft’s Web App Gallery page:
http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx

So a couple of months ago I had to stand up a DOORS Web Access server for work. It was pretty straight forward except for the creation of a certificate in your Java Keystore and then using it inside of your Tomcat server’s server.xml file.

  To create the Java Keystore file you’ll first need to have downloaded Jetty which will do the command-line magic for you. I downloaded it from the codehaus.org website but you can find it by doing a Google for Jetty keytool. Once downloaded ensure your Java environment is setup correctly by issuing via command-line java -classpath lib/jetty-6.1.1.jar org.mortbay.jetty.security.PKCS12Import . It should return back w/ usage information letting you know your Java environment is setup for command-line Java execution. Next, put your PFX file in the same directory where you are via command-line and then issue java -classpath lib/jetty-6.1.1.jar org.mortbay.jetty.security.PKCS12Import <mycert>.pfx <myjavakeystorefile>.jks. You’ll be prompted for the password that allows you to use the PFX file, then you’ll be asked for a password for your JKS file. Once it’s done, you’ll have your Java Keystore and password.

Now, you need to open up your server.xml file and find the SSL part which needs to be modified to point to your Java Keystore file. When I found my server.xml file the https port was changed to 8443 which from what I hear is pretty common. I simply changed mine back to 443 so I wouldn’t have to do any firewall redirection. Now, I simply had to add SSLEnabled="true" keyAlias="server" keystoreFile="C:\path\to\keystore\file\mykeystorefile.jks" keypass="supersecretpasswordwhichI'mnotstupidenoughtoblogabout" . Once I had those attributes correctly set I simply stopped and restarted the Tomcat server.

All credit really goes to DigiCert & Entrust 🙂

Jetty tool kit explained:
http://www.entrust.net/knowledge-base/technote.cfm?tn=7925

Tomcat SSL certificate installation:
http://www.digicert.com/ssl-certificate-installation-tomcat.htm

Jetty’s website:
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/Jetty+Wiki

So I’ve recently installed Remote Desktop Services at work for testing purposes. I haven’t decided if we’re going to use RDS or something from Citrix. When doing the install I opt’d for the RD web access & gateway pieces so folks can use RDS over port 443. One of the first things I noticed was the generic title page of “Remote Desktop Services Default Connection” which I wasn’t to happy about. Did some quick Googling and found out you can change the text on the webpage by editing the RDWebAccess.config file. Just look for the <WorkspaceSettings Name=””> key and change it to what you want. I found the file at C:\Windows\Web\RDWeb\App_Data folder.

Need to give credit to Matt’s blog over at Bunker Hollow.
http://www.bunkerhollow.com/blogs/matt/archive/2010/02/05/rename-quot-remote-desktop-services-default-connection-quot.aspx

Thanks Matt!

  So way back in the beginning I developed a simple web file manager for our company that allowed us to upload files to a Linux server and share them w/ noncorporate users. Things worked great but I’ve been left maintaining the server even though I’m now playing Network Engineer.

  Well, as time has progressed, the requirement to upload ever bigger files has ballooned and it orginally was built for files around 500MB. So I did a quick php -i | grep php.ini to find where my php.ini file was and started editing the config. I quickly found upload_max_filesize and increased it to over a 1GB for file uploads. Next I found post_max_size and increased that to the same size. Quick restart of the apache server and I was off testing. Started to do some large file uploads and I started getting some errors. I placed some debug code in my php subroutine and low and behold, I was getting an error = 2. This particular error meant I hadn’t increased the HTML form attribute MAX_FILE_SIZE to 1GB either. Once I had all three attributes set to a higher setting I was GTG.

Couple quick links:

Talks about the HTML form input field MAX_FILE_SIZE:
http://www.tizag.com/htmlT/htmlupload.php

PHP move_uploaded_file function call over on php.net/manual. Has LOTS of good demo code below:
http://php.net/manual/en/function.move-uploaded-file.php

Actual PHP file upload errors one can get when using move_uploaded_file:
http://php.net/manual/en/features.file-upload.errors.php

So I’ve got my own Active Directory server at home w/ multiple network segments. On one of these network segments, I’ve got a Win2008R2 server w/ a static IP address that needs to join the domain but isn’t on the same network segment as the AD server. When I attempt to join the domain I get the following error message.

Once I get the error message and do a reboot I’ve joined the domain w/ no perceivable errors except the one shown above. I can log into the server w/o any issues using domain user accounts and everything appears fine. Obviously not satisfied w/ this conclusion I start doing some searches and remove the server from the domain to see if I can repeat the above error message.

Finally after searching for an hour I stumble upon a similar domain joining error on Lumbgaps blog and add a domain suffix to my server via the advanced settings on my network card. Once joined, I remove the domain suffix w/o any issues. Seems the server was having a domain searching issue and wasn’t appending the right FQDN on the end of whatever it was doing. This fixed it.

Link to Lumbgaps blog:
http://lumbgaps.blogspot.com/2010/03/changing-primary-domain-dns-name-of.html