Yoda's Blog

Unhandled exceptions cause ASP.NET-based applications to unexpectedly quit in the .NET Framework 2.0:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911816/en-us

The nice Doctor on the phone is still looking at my tummy but he gave me that KB to look at in the meantime.  He said that the second chance dump files are the ones he needs to look at.

One of the debugging blogs I've been looking at lately had a post about this a bit back....I'll keep you posted what the Doctor says.

If broken it is, fix it you should : ASP.NET 2.0 Crash case study: Unhandled exceptions:
http://blogs.msdn.com/tess/archive/2006/04/27/584927.aspx

FIX: The ThreadPoolMgr::WorkerThreadStart process may become locked in a loop condition in a .NET Framework 2.0-based application, and CPU utilization may increase to 100 percent:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926594/en-us
FIX: A .NET Framework 2.0 application that runs under a user account context when no user profile is associated with the user account context may crash, or you may receive an access violation error message:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/913384/en-us

So far we've tried doing that to my tummy but we still have a bit of CPU spike.  So now we've called in the doctors to look at me.  We did a IIS crash dump.  We had already installed the debugging tools on me (placing them at c:\debuggers like all good debuggers do) and then we did a Cscript Adplus.vbs -crash -iis to get it to dump.  We called the Hospital (Microsoft) and they've set up an outpatient triage (FTP site to upload my event log and the event dump files) and we'll see what the Doctor says.

Last night one of my blog handlers... the blonde one... rebooted me right as I was in the middle of one of Nick's scripts causing my database to have to recover.  Sometimes rebooting is not the answer and we do that too much around here..ya know?

Well Nick cleaned out my tummy and I went from a 17 gig database down to a 10 gig database and since I'm still in shrink mode I'm going to be a tad choppy for a few...

We got the Adsense re-enabled for folks by re-enabling the inline ads and placing <script src = "true" type ="true" language = "true"/>  in the config file.  We reenabled the YouTube module as well while we were at it.
<add name = "YouTube" applications = "Weblog,Forum" type = "ScottWater.CS.Modules.YouTube, ScottWater.CS.Modules" />   

Now I need to get search reenabled and then see if all that throttling of SQL and cleaning out my spam innards will do the trick.  We're set it so that spam will dump out after a day.

Oh yeah... and I need to clean up the front page of the blogs... it's sorta messy up there right now.

My Secondary SATA drive is freaking out a bit and it's giving me a tummy ache tonight.. we've called a doctor..but in the meantime I'm not going to be my chipper self tonight....

Sorry...

For those that view the Blog front page on a Pocket PC can you let me know if that front page/two column format works for you on http://msmvps.com/ ?  I need to redo that front page and see if I can "mirror" as many MVPs as I can in my OPML/RSS feed better than I am now.

 Oh yeah and I need to apply CS 2.1 sp2 and then SQL 2005...and.... man still need to do upgrades around this place don't I?

If you haven't seen this "Tubes of the Internet...."

Well Susan was in a mood to upgrade tonight... she's now kicked the underlying .NET from the 1.1 to 2.0.  So the only two upgrades left are my tummy surgery and the upgrade to SQL 2005. 

She's now going to look for that YouTube video plug in that folks were wanting but needed 2.0 to do it.  In the meantime she's installed the Akismet spam engine rules to block some more of the gunky stuff.

I'll post again when she's got the You Tube stuff loaded up.

"Your version: 2.1.61025.1 "

And we are now on CS 2.1 sp1

Sorry I havent' blogged in a while ... And I have some changes in the future that I have to plan on.... I'll blog about the upgrades when we do them but here's what's planned for me:

I need to have a stomach surgery to increase my tummy size.. right now I only have a 36gig tummy and I need a bigger one for the changes in the future.  I want to upgrade to .NET 2.0 and up my SQL server to 2005.  And I'm looking at my SQL database and I need to see if there's anyway to run a script through there and remove all that spam stuff.  Susan has had to kick the blog spam scores a bit this week at the spamming was a bit much again. <sigh> Those spammers just won't stop, will they?

But for now.. I'm up on CS 2.1 SP1....hmmmmm feels nice to be up to date!

Changes between Community Server 2.1 RTM and Service Pack 1
-----------------------------------------------------------

http://communityserver.org/blogs/announcements/archive/2006/10/30/community-server-2-1-service-pack-1-now-available.aspx

User Experience Improvements

4514 - If a gallery is in tag mode, the next/prev and album highlight image are shown when viewing a photo but don’t do anything.                                            
4515 - Subscribing to a gallery photo uses a process which is not back button or refresh safe.
4604 - Inline Tag Editor text area too small when first opened in IE7.
4612 - Notify All Owners option always hidden on blog create new post screen. Also add default setting for this to the Default Options blog setting screen.
4647 - Blog control panel Post List screen should use User Time (adjusted to user time zone) instead of server published time.
4646 - Weblog number of moderated comments includes ones rated as definite spam. Change behavior to ignore spam comments in the moderation count.
4679 - CSS fixes and improvements for blog skins
4678 - Updated blog post auto-naming to remove extended characters and convert all text to lower-case.
4682 - Blog comment form does not remember name/url when "remember me" is checked. Cookie expiration should be set to +1 year.
4685 - Telligent store web service update.
4696 - Trackback subjects are not properly parsed from HTML documents 

Help text clean-up and Improvements

4236 - Enable comments now says "enable comments to your blog" when editing a photo (text change).
4255 - Help text for "Enable Download Disclaimer" is incorrect (text change). 

Security Improvements

4260 – Address potential cross-site scripting issue
4356 - Weblog post IP address property not populated.
4625 - Added additional Control Panel web.config authorization 

Performance Improvements

4285 - TinyMCE editor is slow when editing long posts due to HTML validation.
4626 - Aggregate blog caching and performance improvements. Changed default cache time to 1 min from 15 mins, removed double permission checking in GetWeblogs, weblog cache cleared immediately when updating or adding a blog.
4657 - DiskUsage field not returned by cs_weblog_Weblogs_Get sproc. Degrades performance by causing handled exceptions when retrieving a list of weblogs.
4684 - Very long trackback names can cause the form options to stretch off of the blog Comment Manager screen.

Feature Enhancements and Bug Fixes

4173 - ContentParts with default content duplicate the ContentPart control javascript.
4228 - Moderate.GetForumsByForumGroupID() could cause a null reference.
4241 - Content duplication bug in TinyMCE when using IE.
4256 - When using an external blog feed (FeedBurner), category/tag feeds are also redirected.
4283 - In Forum Admin TreeView, creating a subforum of a deleted forum is some times possible and causes an exception.
4517 - Gallery web service does not save tags/categories when creating a photo.
4579 - All elements in the blog sidebar for all core blog skins should be wrapped in a div tag with a unique ID. This makes it easier to customize the blog appearence with the CSS Override field.
4516 - When subscribed to a gallery photo, the gallery fails to send emails.
4608 - Every other row on the Blog Tags and Snippets pages in the Control Panel are missing the delete confirmation dialog and will automatically remove the tag or snippet when clicked.
4658 - When you toggle a blog comment's properties in the Blog CP Comments creen, the comment body gets stripped of its formatting.
4681 - Save additional data to the deleted post archive to allow us to better investigate why posts were auto-deleted and improve the spam engine. We now collect SpamScore, PostStatus, and PropertyNames/Values.

Amy Babinchak and Steve Friedl have now been added to the MSMVPS.com aggregate roll.

This is really cool!  Amy's blog is externally here and linked to here.

Steve's is here and linked here.

Soon they will be pulling snippets of their master blogs into the blog roll on this server... I'll say it again, that's a super cool feature of CS 2.1!

This is really cool... I've added Brian Desmond's blog and Marshall Harrison's blog to the master feed.

But we've already established a couple of rules:

1. I must always ask before mirroring a blog feed
2. I will only pull in a snippet of the blog - as the goal here is to drive traffic back to the blog owners original blog site

But so far this is really cool!  And thanks to Brian for de-spamming Tr1gg3rman's blog and he was so patient about that....  It had gotten totally fried with a spam attack and Brian cleaned it up.

Yoda, the blog server here after a long absence.... with the new CS 2.1 engine I can pull in blogs that are not on my server and reflect them in the master aggregate.  That's really cool!  One of the things that many folks have wanted is a master roll of all MVP bloggers and we could never do that.  Now it looks like we can!  Cool!

Right now I got Dana Epp's authorization to place part of his feed on my blog aggregator.  Really cool, huh!

So while you can generate a OPML from The Working Network folks, I'd love to build a master RSS feed of all MVP blogs.  If you are a MVP and don't blog on the site itself and you want to be included in the aggregate on this site, ping me and let me know that you want to do this.  I'll be emailing folks that have already had me list their names on the front.

Well here it is 2006 and I received my first patch MS06-001 which is working out very well.

So you patched?

My server and blog handlers had to move a few switches and networking things above me.

Well this weekend was the big upgrade, maintenance weekend.  Yesterday was the Community Server upgrade, today was the day when a few switches and things were moved.  I'll tell you all about it later.  Tomorrow my blog/server handlers start doing those "tickle tests" on me again where they run a 6 hour perfmon on me to see what being on Community Server does versus .Text among other things.

We'll probably start doing it about 9:00 a.m. pacific time.

Prior to the upgrade I was getting these in my log files:  Event 2262s. 

Kudos especially to Chad for all his hard work during the upgrade.

In about 15 minutes I'll be upgrading to Community Server. 

Stay tuned and I'll let you know how we did the upgrade and how it went!

Okay so I'm running a hyperthreaded processor, with two 10,000 rpm disks on a hardware controller RAID 1.  Now I  could have had 7200 rpm disks in my tummy, but Susan said she doesn't consider anything less than 10,000 rpms as “Server quality”.  Which reminds me... I was kinda hanging out in the SBS newsgroup the other day and someone wanted to use a beefy desktop to run a SBS 2003 server for an office. 

Hardware. 

People.  When you expect a piece of machinery to 'serve' you, you have to spec out hardware that is ready to serve.

I think I'm up for the task.

I can have all the good software in the world, but if Susan didn't go with reasonable stuff, I wouldn't be able to properly handle these blogs like I'm doing.  So let's get down to talking about all this prodding and poking that folks have been doing to me to make sure I'm in good shape.

• App pool

First off my excellent keeper Vlad Mazek, CTO of OwnWebNow, wonderous being, fabulous guy, extreme all around good guy [I'd say Vlad rocks but it's been seen that “rocks' is too much of a buzz word around here, so I'll refrain for now], noticed that my page file use kept ticking up a bit, which was the same symptom I had before at my old home that kept killing the blogs.  So for now until we get up to Community Server we have a routine where the App pool is cycled.  So for now we're going to let that handle that issue until we can get updated to the CS engine once the version 2.0 releases.

• Perf Mon testing

So remember the other night they were doing testing on me?  Here's some of the comments I overheard... now I didn't catch everything...but I jotted down a few things.....

.....This data looks pretty good. smlogsvc is down to half a %....this is goodness...... Sqlservr - No surprise here  W3wp - again, no major surprise.  From an I/O perspective, I'm quite happy with things. You're averaging <50 IOPS (read+write), and on a 2 spindle 10K RPM RAID1 with a little cache, this is just fine. You definitely have headroom to spare.

Goodness... hey that's sounds pretty good.  I got “goodness“.  I must be performing okay.  So I think I heard them say they are going to take that test on me again next week as with the holidays they didn't think I had a full load hitting me and then again if/when they start changing things.  Some of the things I heard them say was .....

 I'm interested to see another 6 hour snap after you make any of the following changes:
- SQL upgrade
- .Text -> CS
- gzip enablement
- conditional GET enablement
- TTL changes
-  any other change that might affect the load profile of the server

It sounds like they want to do more testing on me.  So I'll keep you guys posted if I overhear them say anything else of interest. 

Oh yeah...I know...since I moved to Vlad's home town of Orlando I've been losing the accent... as sometimes these days I sound more like Vlad does in case you are wondering...

May the force be with you.....

So here's what they are doing to me...

First they went into Counter logs in Perfmon and set up a new log.  Called it “LoadMeasure-QuickSnap” and doing a 5 minute monitor of what I'm doing with a 2 second interval for the following items.....

• ASP.Net application
• Cache
• Logical Disk
• Memory
• Physical Disk
• Process
• Processor
• System
• Thread
• Web Service Cache
• Web Service

They just ran it on me...heh...that tickles.....tomorrow they run a 6 hour monitoring on me that will grab stuff every 30 seconds.