Thursday, June 23, 2011
TFS 2010 Builds
Having now resurrected all my VM's following a RAID issue on my vSphere servers it seemd about time to set up some CI builds on my TFS2010 box.
First build I did, got the following error: -
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" was not found
Had a read of this MS article and realised it was something entirely obvious, I hadn't installed Team Explorer, doh! :(
Dead simple!
First build I did, got the following error: -
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" was not found
Had a read of this MS article and realised it was something entirely obvious, I hadn't installed Team Explorer, doh! :(
Dead simple!
Monday, February 21, 2011
The WCF 4 revision continues...
Another 50 pages waded through by 7.30am this morning (daughter up lots in the night coughing!), Juval's 3rd Edition of his book Programming WCF Services and the Azure App Fabric Service Bus is spot on as ever but after not an awful lot of sleep it was making my head hurt!!! :(
Time for some lunch then I might give some WWF exposed via WCF a quick bash, something a little more funky for an hour or two and then back to the books... :)
Time for some lunch then I might give some WWF exposed via WCF a quick bash, something a little more funky for an hour or two and then back to the books... :)
A very, very, very wet outing at Lydden Hill circuit
Shared my brother's Westfield Megabusa at a track day at Lydden Hill on Saturday, you would be amazed how quickly you can get completely soaked with no roof, no windscreen and lots of speed! Race suit was soaked all day, nothing worse that putting wet stuff on and then going back out into the cold:(
Car was faultless with it's new taller differential ratio, new wide track and flat shift kit (quite a few flames on up shifts down the hill from the hairpin, sweet!), exhaust etc. the car has been in bits so well done bruv for getting all that back together in time! :)
Car was faultless with it's new taller differential ratio, new wide track and flat shift kit (quite a few flames on up shifts down the hill from the hairpin, sweet!), exhaust etc. the car has been in bits so well done bruv for getting all that back together in time! :)
Monday, February 07, 2011
WCF 4 Exam (70-513)
After searching and searching for something to help me along with my studies I have eventually found a practice exam up on Self Test Software, there's gotta be people other than me out there looking for this so I hope this info helps someone!
Nearly there!
Adaptec 2405 card now in the second Hp MicroServer so the storage side of things are sorted. LG Blu Ray / DVD drive turned up today so that's been fitted and seems to be working OK, although to be fair it hasn't had to do too much yet, need to give that a bit of a workout later! Have ordered a couple of Intel NICs which will occupy the remaining x1 slot in each of the machines, whilst the internal NIC seems to work OK in general and in vSphere they are not, IMHO(!!), in the same league as a good Intel card, I'm tempting fate I know! ;)
What did we do before virtualization? To be able to conjure up entire new machines in a little home lab within a matter of minutes is just so useful, having used VMWare workstation for a good while now and thinking that was good I even more impressed with VMWare's vSpehere offerings, the tools just make life easy. And that's what I want, just want it to be there and working and no hassle for little me;)
What did we do before virtualization? To be able to conjure up entire new machines in a little home lab within a matter of minutes is just so useful, having used VMWare workstation for a good while now and thinking that was good I even more impressed with VMWare's vSpehere offerings, the tools just make life easy. And that's what I want, just want it to be there and working and no hassle for little me;)
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
GUID as Keys in EF4
I can't quite believe this is an issue, i.e. doesn't work! Lee Drummond's article on the subject explains things well, but how does one get round this, manual editing of stuff all the time is not really an option:( Perhaps there are some tools out there to help, if there are, I haven't managed to find one yet! What a PITA this really is.....
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Upgrade to 50MB line completed and some unexpected configuration required
Upgraded the line at home to 50mb whilst a Virgin engineer was here last week to check what was looking like a fault with the world's oldest 20mb modem, well it had to be done didn't it!
Having only thought it about whilst the engineer was actually at the house I hadn't thought about a change of kit requirement....what I ended up was some Netgear Super Hub instead of my nice "dumb" 20mb cable modem:(
Trouble with that was that my trusty Draytek Vigor 2910VG was now not handling any traffic so remoting in via VPN wasn't gonna happen:( I did how ever find a nice little article on how to overcome this problem, with the addition of a little port forwarding configuration I could get a PPTP connection but couldn't get an L2TP connection going like I had before...more research required...and if anyone knows how I'd do that then please let me know!
The other thing that I'd noticed is that, via Speedtest.Net, I've only been getting downloads around the 20 mark, have tried testing against different servers and at different times of the day and I *seem* to get the same thing all the time. I had a quick look around and found an eBay listing for a 2910VG which might explain my predicament in terms of throughput. I've e-mailed Draytek support to confirm whether or not the throughput is an issue, why do I get the feeling I might be buying another router sometime real soon?
Having only thought it about whilst the engineer was actually at the house I hadn't thought about a change of kit requirement....what I ended up was some Netgear Super Hub instead of my nice "dumb" 20mb cable modem:(
Trouble with that was that my trusty Draytek Vigor 2910VG was now not handling any traffic so remoting in via VPN wasn't gonna happen:( I did how ever find a nice little article on how to overcome this problem, with the addition of a little port forwarding configuration I could get a PPTP connection but couldn't get an L2TP connection going like I had before...more research required...and if anyone knows how I'd do that then please let me know!
The other thing that I'd noticed is that, via Speedtest.Net, I've only been getting downloads around the 20 mark, have tried testing against different servers and at different times of the day and I *seem* to get the same thing all the time. I had a quick look around and found an eBay listing for a 2910VG which might explain my predicament in terms of throughput. I've e-mailed Draytek support to confirm whether or not the throughput is an issue, why do I get the feeling I might be buying another router sometime real soon?
Thursday, January 20, 2011
HP Microserver & VMWare vSphere
A last I have a little time to sit down and have a play!
Bought two HP Microservers since they were soooo cheap with the £100 cashback of late. By FAR the best source of information on these was TechHead, just a goldmine of information on there!
Plan was to keep one (Machine 1) at a relatively low specification so I could leave it on and just stick a Domain Controller and a few other things on there that were not going to tax the hardware too heavily. So for this first one I just pulled the pointless (!!) 1GB out and put in 2 x 4GB which I sourced from OrcaLogic, left the 160GB that came with the machine in there and took the 160GB drive out of the other machine.
I wanted the second machine (Machine 2) to a have a little more oomph so again I added 2 x 4GB from OrcaLogic but this time I gave it a little more horsepower on the storage front! Following advice from a TechHead article I went ahead and bought an Adaptec 2405 because the cable that usually goes into the motherboard is pretty short and this card has the appropriate socket sticking out of the back of the card, result! Decided to go for a RAID 10 setup, I had a couple of newish 500GB drives which I'd sourced from Overclockers a little while ago so in these went! Then temptation got the better of me and I decided to try and make use of the Hybrid RAID functionality on the 2405 so picked up a couple of OCZ Vertex 2(E!)'s from Scan. There was a little confusion here in that when the drives arrived they are not "branded" as 2E's, after some communication with Scan and some research myself it does indeed seem that they are 2E's, part number is OCZSSD2-2VTXE120G.
Hooked both machines up to my Gigabit network and all seems to be well!
The whole point of this was to be able to get a VMWare vSphere lab up and running to support my studies, particularly the WCF and WWF side of things in .NET 4. I installed ESXi on to a couple of USB sticks (very easy!) and pushed them into the internal USB socket on the motherboard, switched on all booted up OK, honestly, it couldn't be much more straightforward. Initially I put the vSphere client on my laptop and managed it that way.....yesterday I took the plunge and installed vCenter Server on a VM (!!) which again was a no brainer. Had one minor issue where the Tomcat server failed to start, turned out to be that a path to one of the Java DLL's had two backslashes in it, changed that and all seems well!
Have been spending the last few days getting the required VM's up and running, so far we have...
Machine 1
Primary Domain Controller
VMWare vCenter Server
TFS 2010 (Basic install with no build server, yet!)
Machine 2
SQL Server 2008 Standard
Web Server 1 (Load Balanced)
Web Server 2 (Load Balanced)
Literally just got the last of these going this morning so now time to get down and actually do some work and study! :)
I'm not sure about the performance of this setup yet but for me this is not the overriding factor.....for me I need to be able to create VM's on a whim and I can certainly do that and secondly I needed the machines to pretty easy on the power front and these certainly are.
Lastly, and probably most importantly, they needed to be quiet, I work/study lots from a little office with all the kit right next to me and whilst something with a bit more beans was easily attainable on a similar budget it would almost be certainly be louder and I value a bit of peace and quiet....
All I have to do now is save up for a VMWare vSphere license so when I get to the end of my eval I'm not left high and dry:)
Bought two HP Microservers since they were soooo cheap with the £100 cashback of late. By FAR the best source of information on these was TechHead, just a goldmine of information on there!
Plan was to keep one (Machine 1) at a relatively low specification so I could leave it on and just stick a Domain Controller and a few other things on there that were not going to tax the hardware too heavily. So for this first one I just pulled the pointless (!!) 1GB out and put in 2 x 4GB which I sourced from OrcaLogic, left the 160GB that came with the machine in there and took the 160GB drive out of the other machine.
I wanted the second machine (Machine 2) to a have a little more oomph so again I added 2 x 4GB from OrcaLogic but this time I gave it a little more horsepower on the storage front! Following advice from a TechHead article I went ahead and bought an Adaptec 2405 because the cable that usually goes into the motherboard is pretty short and this card has the appropriate socket sticking out of the back of the card, result! Decided to go for a RAID 10 setup, I had a couple of newish 500GB drives which I'd sourced from Overclockers a little while ago so in these went! Then temptation got the better of me and I decided to try and make use of the Hybrid RAID functionality on the 2405 so picked up a couple of OCZ Vertex 2(E!)'s from Scan. There was a little confusion here in that when the drives arrived they are not "branded" as 2E's, after some communication with Scan and some research myself it does indeed seem that they are 2E's, part number is OCZSSD2-2VTXE120G.
Hooked both machines up to my Gigabit network and all seems to be well!
The whole point of this was to be able to get a VMWare vSphere lab up and running to support my studies, particularly the WCF and WWF side of things in .NET 4. I installed ESXi on to a couple of USB sticks (very easy!) and pushed them into the internal USB socket on the motherboard, switched on all booted up OK, honestly, it couldn't be much more straightforward. Initially I put the vSphere client on my laptop and managed it that way.....yesterday I took the plunge and installed vCenter Server on a VM (!!) which again was a no brainer. Had one minor issue where the Tomcat server failed to start, turned out to be that a path to one of the Java DLL's had two backslashes in it, changed that and all seems well!
Have been spending the last few days getting the required VM's up and running, so far we have...
Machine 1
Primary Domain Controller
VMWare vCenter Server
TFS 2010 (Basic install with no build server, yet!)
Machine 2
SQL Server 2008 Standard
Web Server 1 (Load Balanced)
Web Server 2 (Load Balanced)
Literally just got the last of these going this morning so now time to get down and actually do some work and study! :)
I'm not sure about the performance of this setup yet but for me this is not the overriding factor.....for me I need to be able to create VM's on a whim and I can certainly do that and secondly I needed the machines to pretty easy on the power front and these certainly are.
Lastly, and probably most importantly, they needed to be quiet, I work/study lots from a little office with all the kit right next to me and whilst something with a bit more beans was easily attainable on a similar budget it would almost be certainly be louder and I value a bit of peace and quiet....
All I have to do now is save up for a VMWare vSphere license so when I get to the end of my eval I'm not left high and dry:)
Monday, October 19, 2009
What will today bring!
Off to my girls harvest festival assembly this morning so that will take me until 11am, should be fun though, first time both of them have been in one together! :)
Next up is to speak to Dell about my server, getting low volatages on the backplane and now idea why, might try my luck with a quick call to Dell later on....no point spending much money on it really, especially since it seems to be running OK!
Once I stick the server back in it's rack I'm gonna stick TFS 2008 on there and see how that pans out!
Had loads of issues over the weekend getting my Windows 2008 Domain Server which runs on VMWare on my laptop to function over my WiFi connection in the house....came to the conclusion that it doesn't seem to be possible (at least for someone of my limited networking abilities!).....if I attach the notebook via Cat5 all works OK, more than a few frustrating hours at weekend getting to thate point!!
Next up is to speak to Dell about my server, getting low volatages on the backplane and now idea why, might try my luck with a quick call to Dell later on....no point spending much money on it really, especially since it seems to be running OK!
Once I stick the server back in it's rack I'm gonna stick TFS 2008 on there and see how that pans out!
Had loads of issues over the weekend getting my Windows 2008 Domain Server which runs on VMWare on my laptop to function over my WiFi connection in the house....came to the conclusion that it doesn't seem to be possible (at least for someone of my limited networking abilities!).....if I attach the notebook via Cat5 all works OK, more than a few frustrating hours at weekend getting to thate point!!
