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Our SunFire x2100 application servers, running Windows 2003 R2, are configured with Nvidia RAID system (built into the motherboard) to mirror the pair of SATA drives in each servers. Two of these servers keeps losing the mirrors, but a third, and a SunFire x2200, do not. When this happens Windows hanging - not good in a server. We have had a support call open with Sun and swapped bits of hardware, but it keeps happening. During the support calls we discovered that the Nvidia RAID is not true hardware, but a ‘software trick’. So not a great step up from letting Windows do the mirroring itself. ...

I did my presentation on Scrum last night for the Extreme programming club in Leeds, seemed to go down well. A lively discussion was had on Scrum and a whole bunch of agile issues. If anyone has questions post them on the club forum. The next meeting on 12th of April an Extreme Hour, an audience participation event on doing an XP project in a an hour - sounds interesting.

I decided to completely rebuild my media center PC as I was making no progress on the problems I had discussed in my previous post. I dropped in a new hard disk as drive C: (leaving in my old one to allow me to copy data off) and installed Vista Ultimate, no problems there. It did not find drivers for my ASUS motherboard SoundMax card or for my Hauppauge Nova T 500. ...

I will be speaking about Scrum at the second Yorkshire Extreme Programming Club meeting next Thursday 8th March at the Victoria Hotel in Leeds. So if you are interested in a quick introduction to Scrum, or just want to meet other developers in the Yorkshire region interested in Agile methods come along.

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. ...