Fail!

Ok, this blog is obviously beyond dead. Not sure I'm much for keeping up a random thought blog. I just started one for my new house though, to keep track of projects there. Being a little more focused I should be more motivated to update it. Plus, it will be nice to have a record of the work I've done (or had other people do :)).

See the new blog!

Accessing File Shares Without A Domain

[This applies to ASP.NET 2.0, Windows Server 2003]
We have a load balancing setup for our web site, with two machines sharing the load equally. Any supporting files are stored on a third app server which the two web servers access. We didn't want the overhead of a domain, but initially had some trouble getting this to work.
We set up a virtual directory on each web server, pointing to the share on the app server. The virtual directory used an account name and password which was duplicated on the app server. This worked fine, until we tried to write files and directories. Since we had to resolve the virtual path to an absolute one, we were trying to write not with the special account we had set up, but the default Network Service account. This did not have permission, and since the account is managed by Windows it had a different password on each machine, so it could not be used to access the share.
What we ended up needing to do was have the user with permission on the share run the app pool (instead of the default network service). To ensure it had the permission needed to run ASP.NET we added it to the IIS_WPG group. We had to ensure the passwords were the same across machines so this would work.
Watch out here though. The Network Service account has permissions on WINDOWS\TEMP, but IIS_WPG does not. This cause problems with a web service call we had. Once we added IIS_WPG to the permission list, duplicating Network Service's permissions, we were fine. There may be other situations like this, but it's the only one we've come across so far. The next time we see a strange, unexplicable error though, this will probably be the first thing we check.

Why Didn't I Think of That?!?

I'm starting a new section of links for good ideas that I didn't come up with. Some things that seem so simple once they're out there :-P.

I heard about prosper.com the other day, which is what prompted this post. It's a very good idea that seems to be well thought out and implemented. This is a person-to-person loan site. You enter a loan request, and the maximum interest you're willing to pay. Prosper runs your credit, and other people can bid in an ebay-style system up to your maximum rate.

It won't save you a ton of money borrowing, but you can probably shave a couple % off the interest rate at least. And for lenders, although it's a higher risk (people can default, although it hurts their credit just as much as if they defaulted on a bank loan) it's also much higher interest than you get in a bank right now.


Not too much else interesting going on in my life right now, as you can probably see from the lack of posts. I'll be going to the Daily SHow on 5/8, so I'll definitely have something to report again then, if not sooner!

Conversions and Global.asax

We had an interesting situation pop up last week. Some of our pages use Peter Blum's VAM and/or Date controls. These require the licenses to be initialized in global.asax Application_Start (or other locations, but this option was best for us). On our development machines this worked fine, but when attempting a deploy last week any pages using these controls broke.
What we found was that this event was never firing, so the licenses were never initialized. The global.asax file was not in the deployed project folder, so we added it. The resulting error told us that the code was already in the compiled dll. Apparently, the issue here is that the conversion tool took the global.asax's codebehind file and put it into the App_Code folder. This is a "Bad Thing," as ASP.NET 2.0 gets rid of codebehind for global.asax - everything is in one file now.
Deleting the code file and incorporating everything into global.asax, then re-deploying, fixed the issue. I have seen some other posts with people having difficulty with Session events - hopefully this will help someone! :)

Seasons....

Pretty standard thing you'd think. Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall.
I even accept that "The Holidays" or "Christmas" is another season now. It's annoying that unlike the others, this one gets more time added to it every year, but so be it.
However, there I have to draw the line. "Valentine's Day" is, unfortunately, trying real hard to get to the season status. I'm not a fan. That isn't what prompted this though. No, what prompted this is that apparently the other saints are starting to get greedy too. Why am I hearing about "St. Patrick's Day" season on TV now? IT'S NOT A SEASON! Like Valentine's, it is a DAY, as put forth in the name of the holiday. And a day is more than enough for the card companies and pubs, since the saints themselves don't seem to get too much attention on these days ;).

Yyama!

Not much interesting in my life, but Donna found something funny for those of us who like llamas :).
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/llama.php

Merry New Year!

Well, it took me a while to get around to this one, but here it is :). Hope everyone's 2006 is off to a great start. Despite how long it took me to post, I really don't have too much news.

We're finally making the transition to .NET 2.0 at work. The new conversion tool seemed to work very well for us. We'll be hitting the errors tomorrow though, so I can't say for sure yet. The only errors we have so far are with third party controls, which we were expecting.

On the Linux front, things are not too good :(. I haven't really felt like putting the energy into it, hopefully now that the holidays are past that will change. Last time I used it I was trying to upgrade Firefox, wth the result that I now have no working browser. And this is the easy release :). It will definitely take getting used to.

Mostly I wanted to make this blog to throw out my thoughts leftover from work, and anything in my own life that might be worth mentioning to noone in particular. I've been kind of off the mark on it so far, in that any code stuff I've posted has really been too vague to be helpful (the idea was to put some solutions out there for others, as I have found many in other people's blogs). This comes from the fact that I really like to move my mind to other topics once I get home from work (such as hardware, troubleshooting, Linux, or - God forbid - something else entirely). I do want to start working on a site and playing with CSS design however - and at that point I'm hoping this will have a lot more detail as it will be my personal work, and as such I would be allowed to post it.