Volleybaltoernooien.nl

April 2, 2010 in Sports, Webdevelopment | No comments

image

 

Together with a friend of mine, I’m the owner of Volleybaltoernooien.nl. We started this site back in 2006 in order to provide the Dutch volleyball community with a searchable calendar of tournaments played throughout the year. We decided to build this site on asp.NET (because we both work with Microsoft products) from scratch. Because this was our first encounter with developing websites we had some flaws/omissions in the site:

  • usage of tables for layout. The site had a different look in almost every different browser :-(
  • results only displayed in a table

Volleybaltoernooien.nl

Now after almost 4 years we found the time to update /upgrade the site. The main reason is that we wanted to implement google maps to show the results. So we started to develop a new version of volleybaltoernooien.nl based on the following requirements:

  • Same look in all major browsers
  • Easy
    • to search
    • to add a tournament
  • Show results in Google maps
  • Show results in ordered list
  • “clean” site
  • “Europe / World ” ready (requirements are in place, globalization is in progress)

Volleybaltoernooien.nl 2.0

Because both of us aren’t a developer or designer it took some time and probably things can be done smarter, but it’s another improvement of a site that attracts more than 10.000 unique visitors a month since the start.

Please feel free to visit the website (if you can read dutch) and comment on this topic. In a few weeks the site will also be available in English, German (& hopefully French).

XenApp: Server load 20000???

March 16, 2010 in Citrix, Microsoft, Windows, Windows Server 2008, XenApp | 1 comment

citrix  W2k8

Ok, before continuing I have to say this wasn’t one of my finest moments, but to my defense, 2 other colleagues on the job hadn’t a good idea/clue either.

The problem:

We were troubleshooting another problem and decide in order to troubleshoot to manually install some components (among them was XenApp Server) on the Microsoft Windows 2008 Server (x86). After restarting the server and performing a qfarm /load the server returned a server load of 20000.

What the heck?

In the past this indicated that a load balancing license was not available, but in our case this couldn’t be the problem because we’re running Citrix XenApp 5.0 Advanced Edition (with licensing in place).

The solution:

After some checking I discovered that RDP wasn’t enabled (this was normally done through a SCCM task(which we disabled during troubleshooting)). The reason I didn’t discovered this right away is that I prefer to use the console for installing software, and I installed the Terminal Services role. After enabling RDP and restarting the server I got a user load of 0, so whoohoo the problem was solved.

The error code put us on the wrong foot, so that’s why I wanted to share this “not so fine” moment :-) with all of you…

!!! ALWAYS ENABLE RDP on a XENAPP SERVER !!!

Application Virtualization 4.6 RTM

February 23, 2010 in App-V, Microsoft | No comments

 App-V 4.6

Yesterday Microsoft released Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.6 (which is now compatible with 64-bit Windows client and server platforms). Because this release was tightly coordinated with the App-V MVP’s there’s a lot of information already out there, like the following blogs from the MVP’s:

Ment van der Plas also wrote a whitepaper about Choosing the right App-V Delivery Model. App-V integration: possibilities and impossibilities. You can download this whitepaper here (registration required)

App-V can be access immediately via MDOP 2010.

Existing MDOP customers can download MDOP 2010 at the Microsoft Volume Licensing Site (MVLS). For evaluation, MDOP 2010 can be downloaded from MSDN and TechNet.

App-V 4.6 for RDS (formerly App-V for Terminal Services) can be downloaded immediately here.

Windows Server 2008 R2 features

February 22, 2010 in Microsoft, Windows, Windows Server 2008 | No comments

Windows Server 2008 R2

Microsoft put an amazing (IMHO) poster online which provides you with a visual reference in order to understand key technologies in Windows Server 2008 R2. Focus areas are:

Visual reference

So my advice, download the poster and print it out (in color) on a large size paper and hang it on your wall in your office.

Windows 2008 R2 Mandatory Profiles

February 9, 2010 in Microsoft, Windows, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 | No comments

Windows Server 2008 R2

Microsoft has disabled the Copy to functionality which allowed administrators to copy profiles to a central share and set security while doing this so all users User Profilescan access this profile. This is (as far as I know) deliberant.

Well this posed me at first for a problem, because I had to define a Mandatory profile and one of the first steps was to copy the profile. Luckily enough I have a lot of colleagues that are smart and after a short discussion with one of them we came to the conslusion we have to create a mandatory profile the “old-fashioned” way.

 

The “old-fashioned” way

Back in the 90’s (last century) the way to create a mandatory profile was considered quite cumbersome and error-prone, but if you know how to do it, it’s really not that hard. It’s a bit more work than using Copy To but in the end you get the same result and you know what the button does :-)

I made a short video which explains how to do this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alternatively, my colleague Ivan de Mes found an alternate solution:

Enabling the greyed out button through the windows enabler.

I didn’t have any experience with this, so as always be careful.

Mandatory profiles is great to lock down your environment, but in order to keep your end-users happy you have to make sure that come customizations are allowed (i.e. layout of Word). To make sure you’re able to do this you should enable folder redirection and make use of Microsoft Application Virtualization and/or Immidio Flex Profiles so your mandatory profile will become a hybrid profile.

« Older entries