I work in the IT consulting line. My job is to penetrate into whatever client/customer environment I have been assigned to and bring about technological improvements (or sometimes, black magic tricks) to boost their business/domain. As I am sure many out there are just like me, you would know first hand the situation I describe. The env...
Hi, I'd be leading a new project soon. And I've been pondering over what are the basic infrastructure for a software project. These are the stuff that I think every project should have: -Coding style conventions -Naming conventions -Standard project directory structure(eg maven standard dir layout, etc) -Project management and issue...
I currently use my local web server to allow costumers to preview some applications and also to allow downloads of "nightly builds" of my open source library. Problem is I changed my ISP and now my port 80 is blocked. Altough I know I could easily change the port on the Apache server, I'd like to avoid that unless there's no alternati...
Does anybody use Scrum & Sprint for Infrastructure. I'm struggling with the concept of a Sprint that never finishes i.e. a Network enhancement project. Also any suggestions on how Item time can be built up to a Product Backlog, so that I can sanity check that resources are not overcommited on the sprint. ...
How do large server farms handle gracefully shutting down all or part of the farm? I'm thinking of planed and unplanned cases like: "We need to shutdown Rack 42" "We need to do work on the power feeds to the whole block" "Blackout! UPS's running out of Juice! Aahh!" "AC is down, air temp is 125F and climbing" The issues I'm interes...
I'm currently estimating how to best share data between offices at different geographical locations. My current preference is for using SQL Server Merge Replication and have a main database and handful of subscribers. The system will also need to allow a few work sites to work disconnected (no or little connectivity on construction site...
As described before, I work in IT consultancy and move through various customer environments. It is natural to encounter a variety of security policies, and in most environments we have had to go through a security checklist before authorizating our laptops - our mobile development workstations - for connection into their network (most o...
In the ears of working in multiple teams, I've met multiple infrastructure managers that instituted a policy of weekly server reboots. As a developer, I was always against the policy - it seems that this is a hack to work around software bugs and hardware instabilities, instead of correcting them. What are the people's opinions, positiv...
I'm working with a start-up, mostly doing system administration and I've come across a some security issues that I'm not really comfortable with. I want to judge whether my expectations are accurate, so I'm looking for some insight into what others have done in this situation, and what risks/problems came up. In particular, how critical ...
Let's say you work for a huge company which suddenly decides to do custom in-house software development. Additionally, they want to be able to offer successful developments to their customers as well (if any). Now you are in charge of it. What would you see as most important to build a successful software development infrastructure? ...
We have an ASP.NET file delivery app (internal users upload, external users download) and I'm wondering what the best approach is for distributing files so we don't have a single point of failure by only storing the app's files on one server. We distribute the app's load across multiple front end web servers, meaning for file storage we...
How to efficiently create subdomains dynamically that are resolved to different IP than the original domain? Most dynamic subdomain creation solutions I've found here would add a *.domain.com A-record to the DNS server (usually using BIND), but that's not what I want. Does that mean the zone file needs to be set to always Expire? Woul...
My company is planning to implement SAP HR in our organsization. We already have the other modules running. We plan to offer ESS/MSS to approximatly 200 000 users. Our current configuration is one machine with a Central Instance and 3 machines with Dialogue Instances. The DB is on the Central Instance machine. Enterprise Portal + DB is r...
If I simply point to both in my DNS record, wouldn't 50% of traffic be in trouble as well? ...
To start out, I have looked at the following pages and don't quite have my answer: how-would-you-organize-a-subversion-repository-for-in-house-software-projects and how-do-you-organize-your-version-control-repository I have also looked at chapter 8 of Pragmatic Version Control using Subversion. They all have good advice, but I'm having...
Hi, I have the following situation, and I'd like to know what approach would you take to solve this problem. Here's the client needs. He needs a WebSite / E-Commerce and what to be able to customize the look of the e-commerce. He also wants to be able to extend some functionality like product configuration. He have an office in one co...
UPDATE 2009-05-21 I've been testing the #2 method of using a single network share. It is resulting in some issues with Windows Server 2003 under load: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/810886 end update I've received a proposal for an ASP.NET website that works as follows: Hardware load-balancer -> 4 IIS6 web servers -> SQL Server DB ...
I am in the process of trying to graphically represent all of our server racks. So when we receive a new server we can decide where this should be put and where a specific servers currently resides. Are there any existing software packages that stores this kind of data already? I'd prefer open source ones if there are any but anything w...
I work in an IT department that is divided into two groups. One group develops and manages applications, the other manages the company's infrastructure and servers. One of the problems we face is a break down in communication. I work for the application group and one of the problems I have is not being notified when a server is taken ...
Listening to Scott Hanselman's interview with the Stack Overflow team (part 1 and 2), he was adamant that the SQL server and application server should be on separate machines. Is this just to make sure that if one server is compromised, both systems aren't accessible? Do the security concerns outweigh the complexity of two servers (ext...