The first thing we need to do is install the pre-requisites via a privileged PowerShell;

Import-Module ServerManager
Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework,RSAT-ADDS,ADLDS -Restart
















Once the machine has restarted you will need to ensure you set the machine name and a DNS suffix.

Assuming the checks all work you can click install and off you go;















Once all is installed the next step is to prepare a config bundle / auth package (I can’t quite remember what Microsoft call it) by issuing the following command in the EMS on the Edge server;
New-EdgeSubscription -FileName "C:\EdgeSubscriptionInfo.xml"

With that done you can either attempt to import the file via the EMS on a Hub Transport server or utilise the EMC. I chose the EMC as I kept on running into syntax errors and I was being impatient;















Unfortunately I hit an issue which was probably due to a very poor choice of mine in transfering the file. A quick rethink of moving the file and the Edge Synchronisation was complete;















The dialog shows a warning claiming the port 50636 needs to be available and the host be contactable, I checked with telnet and all was OK. So maybe the warning icon was just to draw my attention to it.

Once that is done simply issue the command;

Start-EdgeSynchronization

Unfortunately within minutes of me adding this server as a secondary MX I received a spam message which wasn’t very fun;

Return-Path: XXXXXXXXXX@yahoo.com
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-PRD: yahoo.com
Received-SPF: None (XXX-XXXX-XX.networksaremadeofstring.co.uk: XXXXXXXXXX@yahoo.com does not designate permitted sender hosts)
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-PCL: 2
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-Antispam-Report: DV:3.3.5705.600;SID:SenderIDStatus None;OrigIP:195.XXX.XXX.122
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-SCL: 5
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-SenderIdResult: NONE
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthSource: XXX-XXXX-XX.networksaremadeofstring.co.uk
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-AuthAs: Anonymous

The first thing to do is to create a custom AVD that reflects the hardware feature set and resolution of the Joggler.
To do this load up the Android SDK and AVD Manager (Window -> Android SDK and AVD Manager ) and then select New.

Once that is done you will want to add a friendly name, choose the target to be Android 1.5 (the prebuilt Joggler image is 1.5 at the moment.)

I’ve set an SD Target to be 2Gb as that is what I’ve set mine to be.

Set the Resolution to be 800 by 480 (Joggler resolution).

Finally add a Hardware property of Touch-screen support to be yes.

You can now choose your new AVD name from the drop down box when designing your layouts within Eclipse and they will show the correct size which can help if you are developing a full screen absolute layout app as I’m doing.

Keyboard Controls

The core of this setup was a series of 3G Modems linked up with 3G to ethernet devices such as the Solwise NET-3G-3GWIFIMRW.

These were backed off onto a server running Squid and BIND with DHCP containing all the relevant proxy auto config data (plus some IPTables magic for those that didn’t play nice).

Couple this with three Access points with 8db omni’s spread about to acheive maximum coverage I was pleased to see that at one point the network was sustaining over 8mbit/s of throughput!

There was a lot of web browsing, I was streaming spotify, people were blogging and tweeting and despite the heat it all stayed alive.

Next time I’ll be doing it without mains power either so mount up the UPS’s and gas the generators!

This is extremely easy to do but I haven’t posted anything in a while so I thought I’d document the process.

To start just load up the Programs and Features section of Control Panel, choose Exchange and select Uninstall.















The first screen is utterly pointless

At the next screen you need to deselect the options you no longer require. Ideally as I’m Uninstalling and not Modifying the installation I’d have thought you’d select that which you want to remove.






























Clicking next will start the uninstall process

Unfortunately even though this machine wasn’t actually doing anything there was still a connector that used this server as a source transport server so the uninstall of the Hub Transport Role failed.















To resolve this all you need to do is load up the Exchange 2010 Management console, navigate to the Hub Transport role within the Organisation Configuration and in the Send Connectors tab remove the Connector that uses the server as a source.















Running the uninstaller again allows all the Readiness Checks to pass















Nearly 2 hours later (This machine had virtually no RAM as I’d allocated it elsewhere) the uninstall completed















Easy as anything.

A base copy of Windows Server 2008 (non R2) will have the following pre-requisites;

.Net 3.5 (SP1)
PowerShell 2.0
Office 2007 System Converter Filter Pack

Once these are installed you will need to wield ServerManagerCmd and get some other things installed;

ServerManagerCmd -i RSAT-ADDS
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Server
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-ISAPI-Ext
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Metabase
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Lgcy-Mgmt-Console
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Basic-Auth
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Digest-Auth
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Windows-Auth
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Dyn-Compression
ServerManagerCmd -i Web-Net-Ext
ServerManagerCmd -i NET-WIN-CFAC

This went exceptionally smoothly and then it was time to run the Exchange 2010 setup.

Unfortunately it threw an error regarding the Net.Tcp Port Sharing service needing to be set to automatic;



















To fix this just set the service to auto start;
sc config NetTcpPortSharing start= auto

A quick retry of the Readiness checks came back with a clean bill of health and we are good to go!

Just over half an hour later Exchange 2010 is installed and ready to go!



















Since my last post regarding Exchange I’ve been using the Active Directory Certification Services to handle all my SSL stuff which worked lovely with IIS7 and Exchange 2010 so there was no need to do any of the crazy private key recovery stuff as we did with Exchange 2007.

A full install and even a test mailbox migration in just over an hour, not bad.

I moved to a shiny ‘new build’ flat a year or so ago and unfortunately my old Compaq 9000 Rack Cabinet wouldn’t have fitted up the stair case :/ so I bought a nice flat pack 28u Rack Cabinet and set about virtualising all my legacy stuff.

VM Hosts

Using the 2 S411 cases I already had I installed;
2x ASUS P5B-VM
2x Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
8x Corsair 4GB DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2
2x Hiper 880W 85% Efficient PSU
4x Adaptec 1430SA 4Port PCI Express SATA II RAID Card
16x Western Digital Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS 500Gb SATA II Disk Drives
2x Plexus MV 1200VA UPS

Because I wanted performance at cheaply as possible I had to use HyperV instead of ESXi because all the hardware I had chosen worked flawlessly in Windows Server 2008 but is obviously unsupported in ESXi.

I upgraded my workstation at the same time but that was basically the same other than the motherboard ( ASUS P5N-D ) and two XFX 9800GTX+ 765MHz Edition graphics cards.

I didn’t bother with any P2V stuff as the old VM’s / physicals were a mix of Windows Server 2003 and CentOS 5.2.

Networks

I’d recently moved to Be* Internet and had ordered 16 IP’s (to go with my /48 IPv6 subnet) I had to split the Network off using 2 physical firewalls (a Cisco Pix 501 and a Netscreen NS5GT). Eventually I’ll probably replace one of them with a Cisco ASA 5505 Security Pack to do the multiple subinterface VLAN stuff but at £600 still I can live without it!.

The 3Com SuperStack 3 4400 proved itself a good investment yet again allowing me to VLAN off the internet facing VM’s from my internal ones using HyperV’s VLAN tagging config.

The Cisco 2600 router coupled with a Windows 2008 VM sorted out the IPv6 Network again.

All in all it was a pretty painless process and to the point of this post, pictures;

The Old Kit

All the old kit was either FreeCycled or otherwise donated to those who would benefit from DL380′s, switches, Fibre/Ethernet converters etc etc.

The saddest thing was smashing 5Tb of 300Gb / 250Gb / 160Gb / 80Gb / 40Gb disks into powder.

New features include;

• Embeddable YouTube video’s for sites and retailers
• Dynamic / On Demand Weather forecasts for sites
• The Airbana Twitter bot (http://twitter.com/Airbana )
• Edit History – See whats been changed recently
• Per Site Date Listing – Simply find your site and click to get a list of Skirmish dates!
• ‘Custom View’ Links – zoom / pan to an area on the Airbana map and get a custom link for that view
• Regularly updated ‘Static Image’ of all Site locations
• Auto generated TomTom Point of Interest files updated every 30 minutes [ http://static.airbana.co.uk/TomTom/Airbana.rar ]
• Airbana.com – A US version of Airbana
• Airbana.eu – A European version of Airbana
• Language support – Due to the launch of Airbana EU parts of the site have been translated to make it easier to use.
• ReCaptcha support – Airbana now uses ReCaptcha so not only will you be updating Airbana but helping to translate old books too!
• Facebook Application – Find a list of upcoming Airsoft events and flag which ones you’ll be attending [ http://apps.facebook.com/airbanaskirmishes/ ]
• Mobile Accessible Version – A mobile accessible airsoft map optimised for phones. ( http://mobile.airbana.co.uk )
• API V4 – Allows greater access to the Airbana database including write access
• Mini Map Addition Fixed – Being able to add a new site using the little mini map now works on more browsers!
• Send a text to get info – simply send an SMS to 83010 followed by the word Airbana and a site name to get the details sent back to your phone! (Costs 25p + Standard Network charge) [Sending a text from the website is still free!]
• Plus loads of other improvements and new features!

After some initial experimentation with their frontend app and the API I had moved all the content for one of my project sites to the ‘Cloud’ and (I hope) through to the CDN.

The Setup:

The configuration for the experiment is as follows:
2x LAMP Server [ Core2 1.86GHz / 4Gb RAM / RAID 1 SATA]
1x Static Content Server [Quad / 4Gb RAM / RAID 1 SATA / Server 2008]
1x Mosso CloudFiles account

The first LAMP server is configured with mod_deflate & mod_expires and does the PHP processing / general page stuff, the second is configured the same and used solely to pull email addresses from the database and displays them as a JPEG via PHPGD.

The static content server serves all the PNG’s, Javascript and CSS and is configured with ETAGs and Expires settings.

The Mosso account is set to whatever defaults are configured.

The Test:

Utilising a machine in a remote Datacenter I used ApacheBench with the following settings to hammer the server:
ab -n 10000 -c 100 http://the.testurl.com

The website (including all the dynamically generated images) weighs in at 830Kb of which 332Kb is static content and another 336Kb is text generated by the LAMP server.

The Results:

Unfortunately it seems that the Mosso CDN not only increased the total document size (granted only by 11Kb) but it also suffered from 836Kb/s less throughput.

Round 2

Just to make sure it wasn’t the DB stuff causing an issue (the MySQL process didn’t appear to be a bottleneck but it can’t hurt to check) I wrote a quick page that dumped some of the static images out to a page with a bit of formating. The new page weighs in at 160kb, 4Kb of PHP outputted text and 156Kb of static images.

This time around the CDN beat the throughput of the other tests by 26Kb/s which isn’t exactly ground breaking, the timings are pretty much the same and once again the document size was slightly bigger when using the CDN.

Conclusions?

Mosso has the advantage of being a ‘cloud’ and should therefore never break whereas having a (single?) seperate server for handling static content could result in a very ugly looking website if it failed.

Cost wise Mosso would win as Dedicated servers (such as the Static Content Server) are quite expensive compared to the cost of Mosso at 22¢ a Gb for transfer and 15¢ a Gb of storage on a Pay as you Use basis. Don’t forget that even with Dedicated servers if you go over your transfer allowance then you’ll be paying per Gb too and it probably won’t be 22¢ a throw!

Would I utilise cloud storage? Maybe, but as it stands at the moment using the same Apache instance that processes the PHP configured correctly with mod_deflate and mod_expires seems to do the job just as well.

Criticisms / Notes

Mosso provides you with a URL that cannot be pointed to with a CNAME as it contains a folder (some form of hash) as part of the path. This results in the Mosso URL ( http://cdn.cloudfiles.mosso.com/hash/file.ext ) showing up not only in the status bar but also throughout your source code.

If you happen to change your ‘Container’ from Public to Private and then back again you’ll have a new hash meaning your source code and clients browser caches are out of date.

The mod-rewrite script used for redirecting to Mosso:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)(file|exts)$ http://cdn.cloudfiles.mosso.com/hash/$0 [NC,L]
</IfModule>


Since adding myself to Twitter (http://twitter.com/N_A_M_O_S) I’ve wrote a few bots.

The L4DStats Bot only updates stats regarding recently played games and shows top player and top weapons for that game. It is a recognised Twitter app and hopefully Clans / Dedicated Server owners will make use of it. The L4DStats Bot can be followed here: http://twitter.com/L4DStats

The Airbana Bot will Tweet any updates made to the Airbana database including Event Dates, New Sites and Site edits. All posts are hash tagged with #Airbana. The Airbana bot can be followed here: http://twitter.com/airbana

I took a selection of decommissioned mid-range [Pentium Dual Core / SATA I Disks etc] Workstations to which I installed CentOS 5.0 and the CleverSafe software. 4 IDE SliceStores and an Accesser provides enough IOP throughput for around 50 mailboxes. Ramping this up to 6 SATA SliceStores and there is enough IOP throughput for 70 mailboxes.

We’re obviously not talking about large scale Enterprise / Data Centre solutions here but for a small scale Exchange install [I'm thinking Test Lab setups maybe at a push a SOHO install] that needs reliable disk storage this seems to work quite well especially if used as the target storage for LCR [Consider that powering up a couple of old workstations is probably cheaper than the purchase of a decent SATA II hardware RAID card and extra disks.]

Utilising a 1Gb/s Network would improve the throughput considerably but for this test I was only utilising 100Mb/s between the Accesser and the Exchange server with a latency of around 40m/s so a constant Read Throughput of 2.8Mb/s will have to do.
 
 
DSNet offers access to the Storage ‘Vault’ via an iSCSI interface so there isn’t any extra work involved in preparing the Vault for use with Exchange 2007. Since this isn’t a normal SCSI device you have to disable “Synchronous Transfer” and “Tagged Queuing”. Their purposes are detailed here. Since these are enhancements to the operation of SCSI it shouldn’t adversely affect the operation of Exchange.

With the disks mounted and formatted it was a simple matter of changing the Queue and DB locations with PowerShell:
Move-StorageGroupPath -Identity "Second Storage Group" -LogFolderPath:"D:\Mailbox\Second Storage Group" -SystemFolderPath:"D:\Mailbox\Second Storage Group"

Running the Exchange server for a couple of days shows no degradation in usability even when a DSNet storage Vault was used for the Mailbox stores as well as the LCR.

Looking at other DSNets that are out there and looking at the potential for improvements in this DSNet then it may be possible to scale a DSNet out to production grade usability, if I have enough time and can get hold of some newer SATA II disks, better machines and a gigabit LAN infrastructure I’ll do a proper experiment and see what can be acheived.