I am currently working on a project where we have developed a portal on SharePoint. Currently we have two servers which is using Load Balancing. We're experiencing a lot of difficulties connected to this, so we are thinking about removing one of the Web Front-End servers from the farm.
Could this cause any kind of problems that you can think of? I want to be sure before I recommend to this to our client. Anything you could think of would be great. Also pro's you can think of by doing this is appreciated.
The load balancing was agreed on from the beginning of the project, before we came in as consultants.
(I know this could be posted on SharePoint.Stackexchange aswell, but this could be general knowledge for anyone else as well.)
Since "two servers" is not a good idea anyway (you'd normally create at minimum a three server farm - two load balanced web front-ends and one indexing/job server), you can easily merge them into one server. Steps would be like this:
- enable all the services on the server which stays there
- remove the other server from "web front-end" role
- uninstall sharepoint from the other server
This might require recreation of your shared services provider if you are hosting some of the SSP things on the server you are removing.
Related
Hopefully my question is in the right forum here. I've just checked out the pricing model of windows azure and checked out the different configuration options:
http://www.windowsazure.com/de-de/pricing/calculator/
I have been working as a developer for almost two years now and worked a lot with IIS and the WPF technology. As a little private project I checked out HTML 5 and JS with MVC4 Web API and wondered what azure configuration I'd need to host a MVC 4 Web API project. Would it be rather a virtual machine or a full calculator? What benefits grants one over another?
I am going to start my studies soon, so I'd like the cheapest I can possibly get. I won't use it a lot (mainly for testing reasons), as well I think there won't be too much traffic either. Would a virtual machine also include the possibility of using IIS?
Could I also run a MVC project with something else than VM/full calculator?
And what would happen if for some reason my traffic just explodes? Would my services just be shut down until I increase the power of my machine? Or would I just get a huge bill and be surprised quite a lot?
Use websites.
You can start with 10 Web Sites absolutely free! So this is the cheapest. And it certainly supports MVC4 Web API.
For starter you can get a 3 month trial with enough credits to start. By default you'll have a spending limit on your account. This mean if you start to get too much traffic your services will shut down and you won't have to pay any extra. I think you can configure how much you are willing to pay but I never tried, it is still the default which is 0$.
You should start with Shared Web Sites and move to reserved instance, VM or web role later if you ever need to scale up or out.
What I want to build is an application that sits online and it's used by different groups that each have their own intranet. Now, because of a stupid security policy the data can't sit outside the intranet. How would you go about building an app that it's still online, so you can push updates to everyone at once, but has a DB on each intranet's server?
My initial plan is to use Node.js and MongoDB.
If your db really has to be onsite, and your app really has to be offsite, then probably your only option is to set up a secure connection from your app, to the onsite db, and pretend as if its hosted locally to the app. This may/may not violate the security policies. You could in theory lock it down pretty well, with a vpn between the two networks. But this is not for the faint of heart, performance will suffer, and it does have security issues. It also means a bit of work for every site.
If the only reason you're wanting it to be "online" is for pushing updates as you stated, then you'll do better installing the app on-premise, and getting it to poll into a central server for notifications about new versions, download updates to itself, and install them automatically. Once you've created this, a new installation requires no new work.
I'm facing a similar problem right now, so here's my take on it, not really mongo or node specifc.
Put a db and a simple restful server on each of client's intranets. Servers can be exactly the same.
Put a routing facade accesible from internet that redirects requests to apropriate server based on url, ie: http://facade/server/resource becomes a request to http://server/resouce.
Configure the facade so that a requests to http://facade/resource go to each server, retrieve results and return all of them in some aggregated form.
Obviously there are more details to take into account, like permissions (can everybody publish to each server? if not, who can?), but the general idea is there.
What is the limit of IIS 6.0? like for example if i need to host 100,000 or 200,000 websites on IIS 6.0, how many machines would i need? or is IIS7 would be a better choice in this case for some reason?
As mentioned in the comments above the scale isn't so much the number of websites you create in IIS, but how complex and how busy those sites are.
In IIS6 one website does not necessarily equate to one executing process on the server. Application pools can group multiple websites into a single executing process to group and/or isolate applications. Alternately a single app pool can spawn multiple executing processes to make better use of server hardware.
It might help if you were to provide more detail in your question about what exactly you're trying to accomplish. If you're going to be serving hundreds of thousands of sites it would probably be a good idea to partner with a hosting company, or get some assistance from someone who knows the ins and outs of IIS, or another platform in detail and has operational experience with working through large-scale hosting scenarios.
IIS7 is not radically different from IIS6 in any performance-related way; with one exception: you can run ASP.NET in a "native" pipeline mode that bypasses some processing steps. I prefer IIS7 (if I can choose) because of its manageability advantages. But like everyone else said here: the question is impossible to answer without more information.
Hosting that many websites with IIS will be cost-prohibitive in licensing fees. Most large scale web hosting is done on Linux using Apache.
I'm setting up an Internet-facing ASP.NET MVC application, on Windows 2008. It uses SQL Server 2008 for its database. I'm looking for best-practices for securing it.
I found this article, but it's a bit dated now. How much of that advice is still valuable?
Some background -- it's a personal site, behind my home NAT/firewall box; and I'll only forward ports 80 and 443 to it. The IIS server itself is a Windows 2008 host running on HyperV (I only have one physical box to spare).
One useful thing that's mentioned in that article (which had occurred to me already) is that the IIS box shouldn't be a member of the domain, so that an intruder can't easily get off the box. I'll be removing it from the domain in a moment :)
What other tips should I (and anyone deploying to a bigger environment) bear in mind?
I know that this isn't strictly a programming-related question (there's no source code in it!), but I guess that most programmers have to dabble in operations stuff when it comes to deployment recommendations.
You might take a look at these two tools:
Best Practices Analyzer for ASP.NET
SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer (even though you are using 2008, still might be of help)
I don't know about removing it from the domain, but I'd certainly disable LanMan hashes, keep the system fully patched, and use good password security. Make sure that any processes running in IIS run from least privileged accounts, i.e., don't run the worker processes under IDs that are in Local Administrators.
This will be of great help, certainly:
Microsoft Web Application Configuration Analyzer v2.0
Has anyone been able to get an NHibernate-based project up and running on a shared web host?
NHibernate does a whole lot of fancy stuff with reflection behind the scenes but the host that I'm using at the moment only allows applications to run in medium trust, which limits what you can do with reflection, and it's throwing up all sorts of security permission errors. This is the case even though I'm only using public properties in my mapping files, though I do have some classes defined as proxies.
Which companies offer decent (and reasonably priced) web hosting that allows NHibernate to run without complaining?
Update: It seems from these answers (and my experimentation -- sorry Ayende, but I still can't get it to work on my web host even after going through the article you linked to) is to choose your hosting provider wisely and shop around. It seems that WebHost4Life are pretty good in this respect. However, has anyone tried NHibernate with Windows shared hosting with 1and1? I have a Linux account with them already and I'm fairly satisfied on that front, and if I could get NHibernate to work seamlessly with Windows I'd probably stick with them.
I have had no issues with running NHibernate based apps on WebHost4Life, although I don't like them.
Getting NHibernate to run on medium trust is possible. A full description on how this can be done is found here:
http://blechie.com/WPierce/archive/2008/02/17/Lazy-Loading-with-nHibernate-Under-Medium-Trust.aspx
I ran my my own geek siteoff N2 (which uses NHibernate and Windsor Castle) and 4 pet NHibernate/Fluent projects on dailyrazor.com for a while.
You get a good deal for $5 a month, including unlimited SQL Server databases and subdomains and it runs off Plesk with FTP and remote SQL Server Management Studio access.
I'm using a Finnish host called Nebula that happily runs my NHibernate-leveraging applications. I had an issue once with trust levels; the machine.config on the host was configured to deny reflection but I successfully overrode it in the web.config.