Okay I have a customer who has a .deb file that he wants to link to in his blog, which I have created for him in DotNetNuke.  DotNetNuke is an ASP.NET CMS. (content management system)

When he links to it, the user gets a 404 error, which is not what was wanted, so I needed to figure this out.

My assumption is that I need to add a MIME Type to IIS.  I found the following MIME Type, and it worked.

application/x-deb  

I first looked through several “Common MIME Type” web pages and couldn’t find the .deb extension.  Then I went to Wikipedia just because I wanted to find out more about the debian extension.  Once there I was happy to notice that it gave the “internet Media Type” (MIME Type) on the right hand side of the web page.

So make a note.  If you want to find an uncommon MIME Type, look for the extension on Wikipedia.

I have been setting up a customers MindTouch 2009 site and I ran into an issue where I couldn’t search the contents of the PDF and Office 2007 attachments I had uploaded to MindTouch.

  I found I could search and find the titles of the documents, but not the contents.

Fortunately I had the #mindtouch irc.freenode.net channel to go to.  The people there are very helpful there.  It turns out that I needed to download and install IFilters for both PDF’s and Office 2007.

They directed me to IFilter.org, and once there I found a whole bunch of links for all different types of IFilters. 

The PDF link brought me to the Adobe site, and the Office Suites link brought me to the Microsoft site.  I downloaded each of the IFilters and then logged onto my Windows Server 2008 box to install.

NOTE:  I found out something interesting though.  It turns out that if you use the Debian/Linux VM’s you will not have any of these issues because they do not have IFilters and use various other tools to those conversions.  I have been told that the IFilters seem to be a better method, but that may be up for argument by people smarter than I.

Once on my server I just ran the IFilters exe files and after both installs went easy, I restarted the server.

Once restarted I went to the control panel under Cache Management and clicked on the “Rebuild Now” button and within a couple minutes all was good and I could now search the contents of PDF’s and Office 2007 documents.

NOTE:  I only had a small amount of attachments and very few pages.  It might take a longer time to rebuild for bigger sites.

I hope this helps any out there who is having the same issues.  I also want to remind people about the IRC support that can be had at the #mindtouch channel at irc.freenode.net.  It is well worth it and they people are VERY patient.

My last post was going over issues I had setting up NLB clustered servers within an ESX or VMware environment. 

I thought I had it all figured out and then I had another issue.  Whenever I would restart one of the NLB servers, the other server and the host would be unreachable.  I had a –t ping up to all three IP’s to troubleshoot the issue.

I did some research and found that VMware recommends to use Multicast, and that if you used Unicast, there were a couple steps to follow.   (Wouldn’t you know I was using Unicast.  We are using Unicast because the network guys didn’t want to add ARP entries to our switches at the moment.)

Being that the vSwitch sends out RARP broadcasts to the switch, you need to set the “Notify Switches” to be NO.

Below are the steps.

Within your VI Client

• click on the Host name in the left column.
• click on Network under “Hardware” column.
• click on Properties on the right (next to remove)

This window will pop up.

Next …

• click on VM Network as shown above
• click “Edit” button

This window will pop up.

Next ….

• click on the NIC Teaming tab
• make sure the “Notify Switches dropdown is set to No
• click OK
• click close on the vSwitch properties window

Now you should have NO issues. 

Remember however that it is not recommended to use Unicast with ESX NLB clusters.  Unless you run into some reason not to, I would recommend using Multicast.

I hope this helps,

Michael Silva - MikePixel

The last couple days I have been struggling a lot while setting up NLB (Network Load Balance) between two web servers.  I was beating my head up against the desk when I was trying to add the second host to the cluster inside the Network Load Balancing Manager on Windows Server 2003.

For background, I have a web server that we will call ws1.  It is working fine and is a guest on an ESX server.  I wanted to make two more servers out of this one so I used VM’s Converter.  This worked great.

Now I had ws2 and ws3.  The next step was to some how get the ESX Host to assign these VM’s with new UUID’s.  I ended up in the datastore renaming the folder with the VM’s in them.  What this does is it copies the entire folder, renames it and then deletes the old folder.  I think it does this because ESX is running on Linux server.

Once this is done, I can add the VM’s back into the inventory and it prompts me to do something with the UUID.

I chose to Create a new identifier.

Once this was done, I came across a different issue when I tried to create the NLB cluster.  I was able to create the cluster fine.

I also could add the first VM just fine.

But as soon as I tried to add ws3, I had an issue.  When I tried to connect to the host (ws3) I go the following error. “No interfaces are available for installing a new cluster”

What I found out was that their was an issue between the Network Connections.  Since they were actually both the same machine (since I converted both VM’s from the same server (ws1)), the Network Load Balance Manager was seeing the Network Connections as being the same.  In order to fix this I had to go into the VM settings for both ws2 and ws3 and add another network connection as seen below.

Once I started the VM up, I just changed the IP settings for the new Network Connection and named it External, and renamed the old Network Connection “Do-Not-USE”

After all that I could now add both servers to my Network Load Balance Manager and to the cluster.  I am not sure if this all makes sense, but for those who come across the same issue, I hope this will help. 

~Michael Silva - MikePixel