Larry Brouwer

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Solving Windows 7 Performance Issues

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This morning, I got a call from a friend of mine who was having some terrible performance issues with her new Dell Latitude E6500 laptop running Windows 7 Professional. I had some extra time, so I offered to drop by and have a look.

I did the usual things like run msconfig.exe, and disabled as many startup programs and services as I could without interfering with anything. This may have helped some, but not much. The machine would boot up fine, but then hang out for a considerable amount of time after logging in but before it would be fully loaded.

I went into Norton Security Suite, and found that she had configured her machine to run backups to a non-existent USB drive. I disabled the backup feature of the software since she really didn’t understand how it could have been activated in the first place. I also went into the Task Scheduling and disabled all of the PC Tune-up settings. I rebooted, and this time the machine completed the startup process much faster. But I wasn’t finished just yet!

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Installing WordPress on my web server

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I spent most of the day installing and configuring WordPress for my personal web site. The site that I’m currently posting this blog entry. I’ve decided that BlogEngine.Net, while a nice blog server, it isn’t best suited for my needs. I need something really lightweight as my web server is not exactly a speedy machine.

This will be a brief summary of my steps from my feeble memory! What I’ve done so far…

Logged into IIS7 Manager Console and used the Web Platform Installer to install WordPress. I installed it several times to different locations before I got it just the way I wanted it. I also installed the latest MySQL Workbench 5.2 beta. This will come in most handy.

I also installed a WordPress instance to begin developing a new web site for Clear Lake Auto Service, a client of mine who really wants to get a new design.

I installed the Arjuna Theme, and began some minor customizations. I read through some of the WordPress online documentation as well to start getting an understanding of the design as I’m sure I’ll want to customize it.

I installed several Plugins. First, the Fast and Secure Contact Form, and second was the SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam.

I added several pages and customized how the home page works (as a static page). I added several users, my page categories, and began moving the posts over from my Technotes Blog.

One key point I wanted to make note of is that upon first installing WordPress, delete the original page that is listed. Then re-create a new page to show your blogs. This will prevent a problem with duplicate ‘Home’ pages showing if you wish to implement a static home page some time later. I learned this the hard way!

That’s all I can remember for now…

SmarterMail and more Outlook 2007 blank emails

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I was unable to get to my SmarterMail account this morning by going to mail.larrybrouwer.com. I remembered that I had changed SM from using its own web server to IIS7. So I went into the IIS7 Management Console and edited the bindings to add mail.larrybrouwer.com to it, and now it works fine.

Logged into SmarterMail as admin. There are nine (9) reminders. They are File permission warnings for the App_Data directory. Navigated to Settings | Activation | SmarterMail Self Diagnostic. Failed permissions on /MailProcessing/ and /App_Data/. Needs write permission to both. Opened IIS7 Management Console and navigated to Application Pools. Right clicked on SmarterMail Application Pool and selected Advanced Settings… Changed it to NetworkService from ApplicationPoolIdentity. Restarted web site. Reran diagnostics. All passed.

Blank emails re-appeared in my OfficeLive account in Outlook 2007. What a bummer. Googled on ‘microsoft outlook 2007 OfficeLive Connector blank emails’ found a post Outlook Connector probs. It recommended uninstalling and reinstalling antivirus or trying the Outlook Hotmail Connector 32-bit (Beta). I checked my current version and I’m running 12.0.6423.1000. This seems to be the latest production version. I decided to try out the beta version. The new version is 14.0.4514.1008. I was unable to get the blank emails back into my Outlook inbox, so I forwarded them back to myself.

Needed to enable Telnet on my Windows 7 workstation. Go to Start | Control Panel | Programs and Features. Click on ‘turn windows features on or off’ and click on Telnet Client.

Installed WordPress on my development web server. Began configuring it.

Also installed MySQL Workbench 5.1 and 5.2beta.

Blank emails with OfficeLive Outlook Connector and repairing Outlook 2007 .PST files

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This morning, my Outlook inbox has messages with no ‘From’, no ‘Subject’, and nothing in the ‘body’. So, I’m thinking that the .pst file has been corrupted at some point. I Googled on ‘Outlook 2007 repair tool’ and came up with this Microsoft Support article “How to use the Inbox Repair Tools to recover e-mail messages in Outlook 2002, Outlook 2003, and Outlook 2007”. I followed the instructions to repair my outlook .pst file as follows:

Open windows explorer and navigate to the folder where my outlook files are stored. Normally, this would be in: C:\users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook, however, I’ve moved them to: My Documents\Exchange.

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IIS7 Extensions Loaded on development web server

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In this post, I just want to keep track of what IIS7 extensions I’ve installed on my development web server, and some brief notes about them. The extensions are located at http://www.iis.net/.

1. Search Engine Optimization Toolkit.

2. Web Platform Installer. This allows for installation of Web Platform Extensions, New Web Applications (i.e. BlogEngine.Net), and Beta Extensions from within the IIS manager. You should really check out the samples. They are also located at: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery

3. Advanced logging.

4. Admin Pack 1.0. Originally, I was doing some googling on reporting tools for IIS7 and came across a post for an open source report framework that is an extension to IIS. In the post it said that the reporting tools had been added to the Admin Pack. However, once I installed the Admin Pack, I could not find the reports anywhere. Upon further digging, I found some posts stating that the Reporting extension had been pulled at release, but was still in the Admin Pack RC. I could not find anything to suggest that a report extension is forthcoming.

5. URL Rewrite 2.0 (2010-04-05).

6. Microsoft .NET Framework 4 (2010-04-29)

7. Windows Powershell 2.0 (2010-04-29)

8. Visual Web Developer 2010 Express (2010-04-29)

9. Database Manager 1.0 (2010-04-29)

10. ASP.NET MVC 2 (2010-04-29)

11. Windows Cache Extension for PHP 5.2 (2010-04-29)

12. Update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI (KB980363) (2010-04-29)

13. PHP 5.2.13 (2010-04-29)

14. WordPress (2010-04-29)

15. MySQL Connector/Net 5.2 (Dependency) (2010-04-29)

16. MySQL Windows Essential 5.1 (2010-04-29)

17. Hotfix for IIS DB Manager (2010-04-29)

Researching WordPress for Clear Lake Auto Service

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Today I’m researching WordPress for Clear Lake Auto Service a client of mine. They are looking to upgrade their website to be more easily updated. So, I thought this software to be a perfect fit. They are currently being hosted by c-beyond, and c-beyond allows them to run PHP and MySQL, so it should install quite easily.

To install the WordPress software, I first read through the installation instructions found at installing WordPress. After verifying that c-Beyond’s hosting does meet the requirements, I downloaded the latest WordPress software release download (v2.9.2 as of 4/29/2010) and extracted the wordpress folder to a temp directory.

Next, I logged into the C-Beyond control panel for the web site and initialized the MySql database. I then looked under the AddOns folder, and I noticed that WordPress is already an installable package. So I installed it directly off the C-Beyond site. I then upgraded it to the current version using the auto-upgrade tab already in the software.

Fixing SqlServer Database Mail for HCMGA

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I got a call this morning that Master Gardener’s system is not sending emails. So now I’m in troubleshooting mode. I first logged onto the server and checked the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) service. It’s running. I then went into the application and sent out a test message. Did not receive it. I then went into SqlServer Management Studio (SSMS) and logged into prod. Clicked on Management. Then right clicked Database Mail and selected Send Test E-Mail. I sent a test email out from there. I did not receive the email. I then right-clicked and selected View Database Mail Log. There are many errors being displayed. The error message follows:

Message
The mail could not be sent to the recipients because of the mail server failure. (Sending Mail using Account 20 (2010-04-28T09:37:27). Exception Message: Cannot send mails to mail server. (Mailbox unavailable. The server response was: 5.7.1 Unable to relay for [email recipient]).)

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IIS7 Statistics Reporting with Log Parser and AWStats

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Today, I decided that I needed to see a little bit more about the traffic hitting my website. So I set off attempting to find a tool that will help me do just that. After doing some Googling, I ran across a Microsoft utility called Log Parser. So I downloaded and installed it. A great post to read about Log Parser is by Steve Bunting. Another post by Jeff Atwood here. Microsoft Technet has an article about how Log Parser works here. Log Parser is not officially a supported Microsoft tool, the forum site can be found here. Another article from Symantec discusses the fields for parsing and some examples here. I played around with Log Parser some and got some rudimentary results. But since I didn’t want to recreate the wheel, I decided to keep searching.

After Googling on “IIS7 Statistics”, I stumbled upon AWStats. I decided to install it. The documentation for installing on Windows Server 2008 is pretty weak. I found a  great guide to installing AWStats here. The steps can be summarized as follows:

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Adding AWStats to DotNetNuke (DNN)

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I’ve just configured AWStats to work with IIS7 on my web server (see my post, IIS7 Statistics Reporting with Log Parser and AWStats), and now I would like to integrate it into my DotNetNuke (DNN) website.

Here’s an outline of what I would like to do:

  1. Be able to log into my DNN web site as an authenticated user and navigate to a web statistics page. I don’t want anonymous users to view my stats.
  2. Create a script that runs in the background to keep the statistics up to date and have it re-generate the html page for the stats.
  3. See if I can programmatically adjust the LoadPlugin=”timezone –7” for US Central daylight savings or standard time. I really don’t want to have to remember this 2x per year.

So the first thing I did was to open the IIS7 Manager and navigate to my DNN website. I then Right Clicked on it and selected ‘Add Virtual Directory…’. I then choose ‘Statistics’ for my Alias, and navigated to the correct directory path of the AWStats webroot or ‘C:\AWStats\wwwroot’. I then opened up IE and navigated to my web site at https://www.larrybrouwer.com/stats/larrybrouwer_com_stats.html, and it displayed just fine.

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Debugging D-Link DIR-655 router issues

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Today started out with discovering our phone wasn’t working. Since we have Vonage or Voice over IP (VOIP), this usually means our Internet is down. At least I know when the Internet is down! My usual routine for this sort of thing is to first unplug everything (the cable modem, router, switch, and the Vonage router), let it sit for a good minute or so to discharge any kind of inductance build-up (or whatever), and then re-plug everything back in starting from the modem, then the router, then the switch, then the VOIP box.

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