Xavier's dreams, thoughts, tech tips…

I recently opened an account in Mosso (www.mosso.com, part ofwww. rackspace.com) to host my sites.  Indeed it is more expensive than other options.  I pay $100 a month, and in similar services I could get something similar for $10 a month. (Similar services at least offer roughly same amount of space, unlimited sites, many GB of bandwidth)

So why I am paying 10x more.  Well, for starters I am in the process of creating an app that I hope/dream will grow and I need the stability, scalability and performance of Mosso.  That is one reason, the other is that they offer a customer service like I haven’t seen anywhere else.  Email, knowledge base, forum you can get anywhere.  But with Mosso I have a problem, I log in, click on live help and in snap I have someone helping me.  Maybe not worth the full 10x difference, however it definitively pays.  

They offer more services that no one else does, like billing your customers, and best of all you get 50 GB space (which is a lot for asp net sites) and 500GB of transfer.  Quite a bit and enough for what I need now. And you pay more for what you need.

Of course you always look for a catch, and in this case I thought it is the compute cycle.  They offer 10,000 compute cycles. Of course I have no idea of what that is, and was afraid of ending up paying a lot more for them.  So here is what they say a compute cycle is.

Compute cycle: Compute cycles measure how much processing time your applications require on the Cloud Sites. Using 10,000 compute cycles in a month is roughly equivalent to running a server with a 2.8 GHz modern processor for the same period of time.

You can read it here http://help.mosso.com/article.php?id=268

And then, how much is that?  They also have an estimate.

Mosso says the following:

http://help.mosso.com/article.php?id=269

Well, hope that helps

Let’s say you host your site in www.godaddy.com or Mosso or someplace else. You don’t have access to IIS and you need to set the default start page in your ASP NET application.

If you are working with ASP.NET just do it by setting it in the web.config:

<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <defaultDocument>
            <files>
                <clear />
                    <add value=”yourstartpage.aspx” />
            </files>
        </defaultDocument>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

If you are using FormsAuthentication do the following to set the default page
<authentication mode=”Forms”>
<forms name=”.COOKIENAME”
loginUrl=”YourLoginPage.aspx”
defaultUrl=”YourDefaultPage.aspx”
protection=”All”
timeout=”30″
path=”/”> 
</forms>
</authentication>

I watched this video today. Definitively worth taking 10 minutes and looking at it.

http://www.clarin.com/shared/v8.1/swf/fullscreen_video.html?archivo=http://videosfla.uigc.net/2008/07/29/rp.flv

Live your life, enjoy, throw soda in the back of your convertible

“To enable trus, install this certificate in the Trusted Root Certification Authorities store.”

If you ever get this error and can’t install the certificate, then add the site you are currently accessing to the trusted sites. You will be able to install the certificate

If you are installing SharePoint and you bump into the issue that ASP Net v2.0 is not in the Web Server Extensions, then you could do a research and find out that you installed a newer version of the framework, namely SP1.

According to Microsoft, you need to uninstall SP1, install .Net 2.0 and then move from there: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/KB/906894

Sounds a bit dumb

But don’t worry, go to
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727> or C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727> for 64 bit

Type aspnet_regiis.exe –i

A lot easier!

I decided today to give it a shot installing SQL Server 2008 Express. http://www.microsoft.com/express/sql/default.aspx

One note, I am doing so in Windows Server 2003 R2.  Why? It is a VM and I had the license for an Enterprise so I decided to use it.

For starters, I needed to install .Net Framework 3.5 SP1

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=ab99342f-5d1a-413d-8319-81da479ab0d7&displaylang=en

Guess what…. reboot! (I really hope that the day comes when it is not required to reboot every single time I change something in Windows….

Another step more

“Setup requires Windows Installer 4.5 or higher”….

So http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/details.aspx?familyid=5A58B56F-60B6-4412-95B9-54D056D6F9F4&displaylang=en

Installed.  Reboot…again….

Now what else? 

Lot of tests passed, however Windows Power Shell missing

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=10EE29AF-7C3A-4057-8367-C9C1DAB6E2BF&displaylang=en

Installed, re-run tests.  Pass.

Select what to install.  Personally selected Database Engine and Management Tools.  Next, next, next….

Added myself as admin and use my user.  I just need to install a test db.  However, long process!

Finally, installing!

Wait quite a bit, and you are ready to roll.  Looks pretty nice, however installing should be a bit easier.  Especially since it is Express.