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The new Yorkshire Extreme Programing Club seems to be getting off to a good start. The first meeting was well attended and there is activity on the message board. Take a look at http://www.extremeprogrammingclub.com/

I recently had one of our Windows 2003 server lose it’s disk mirrors and locked up. When it was restarted it has two (virtually idenitical) drives C: and E:. It booted off the primary mirror disk (C:) and all seemed OK except SQL. I also tried booting off the secondary mirror (E:) but this would not boot (this drive it turns out had some bad blocks). So I went back to the primary disk. The actual problems was SQL server started but then stopped after a few seconds, the Windows error log showed the unhelpful 3414 error. I google for this, but all that was mentioned was issues with DTC, but this did not relavent as we not use distributed transactions. There was nothing else on the web of note. ...

If installing the Cassini Personal Server on a PC you will often get the “Cassini managed web server failed to start listening to port 80. Possible conflict with another web server on the same port.” error. You of course think this is a firewall, other web server or anti virus port blocker problems IT IS NOT! Ok it might be those problems as well but usually it is that you need to run ...

Today I moved this blog server from an old server to our nice shinny new ones. This meant splitting it so the DB to the dedicated SQL server and the front end to the new web server box. This cause a few problems. The actual move was fine, just back and restore the DB and copy over the ASP.NET web contents. I then edited the web.config to point at the new server and had some problems, some expect some not. ...

Time for a bit of a follow up on my server name issues with TFS. As expected there is correct way to alter the names of the various TFS servers, it involves editing the contents of one of the TFS database tables, not any config file. The best documentation I have found is that for setting up the new ISAPI filter provided with TFS Service Pack 1 to assist in authentication. Have a look at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/aa833872(… the section ISAPI does detail how to alter the names in various locations. ...

I got the West Yorkshire British Computer Society branch news letter today and I saw there is an extreme programming club being set up locally, the first meeting is in Leeds on Thur 8th Feb at Victoria Hotel, Great George St at 7pm. You can find the blog for the group at http://extremeprogrammingclub.blogspot.com/ I think this is great news, the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper series of events that I have presented at have shown there is an appetite for community events, so lets hope there is enough interest to get this local group going. I for will will be attending. ...

My plan for editing the local copy of the RegProxyFileCache.xml to change the name of the TFS server is OK until you restart the system. I need to look further into this……

I have previously posted on the fun I had getting TFS running in our office. Well thus far it has been stable, other than some ‘user too stupid’ errors, and we have been fairly happy. The next stage was to expose the TFS server out through our firewall to allow home working. This turned out to not be too bad (expect some posts on our experiences with ISA server soon) but raised an interesting issue. ...

I was given a copy of JPod by Douglas Coupland for Christmas, now I will not be adding anything to the range of reviews to say it is very much Microserf V2.0 - similar story but it is just that people seem not to work as hard (but are still in the office as they have little life outside work) and the strange things that occur to them are very strange indeed. In Microserf you could believe it could happen, but JPod, well it is going a bit far. Also I agree with the comments that this book it is rather self referential. ...

Yesterday I posted about problems with accessing remotely the Virtual PCs from the Virtual Server console. It turns out the problem was domain name related. We had a different name on the internal DNS to that on the external side. In effect the server was trying to call: vmrc://virtualserver.mydomain.co.uk:5900/my pc when we should have been calling vmrc://virtualserver-external.mydomain.co.uk:5900/my pc even though we had actually accessed the system via http://virtualserver-external.mydomain.co.uk This has been fixed by getting all our DNS entries in line. ...