the ramblings of a crazed IT administrator
Windows Server
Slow Page Load Times with IIS7.5 and PHP 5.3
210 months ago
So today has largely been spent prepping a shiny new VM for our Sugar CRM and Intranet site which I’m hoping to migrate over soon however I have spent most of this afternoon trying to figure out why page load times have suddenly shot up to over 2.5 seconds! This is only a fresh install of Sugar CRM that I have migrated so there is no data and yet *every* page is taking well over 2 seconds to load.
Even testing with a fresh install of PHP from a zip file off of their website (rather than using the Web Platform Installer), still results in long page loads, which is annoying as it means I can’t blame MS!
Downgrading to PHP 5.2 (thanks Web PI for allowing side by side installs of PHP!), instantly fixes the problems and my page loads go from 2.5s to under 1s, this is odd!
Even Google doesn’t seem to have many suggestions, but there are people who seem to have similar problems too, what gets odder is the few people who claim to have fixed it seem to imply that the issue is MySQL????
After an hour or so of comparing various forum posts claiming to have fixed it I have finally figured out the problem, in the 5.3 builds of PHP there is a bug that causes the slowdowns that is caused somewhere in the MySQL module during the mysql_connect phase.
To fix this it is as easy as changing your database connection from using a hostname (such as localhost or server.com), and instead using an IP address (such as 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.1.2). After a quick restart of IIS to make sure the changes get applied page loads are back down where I expect them to be.
How to fix two computers showing as one in WSUS
41 year ago
by Nick
in Windows Server
So this week I’ve been tinkering with our WSUS server, normally it just sits in the corner minding its own business apart from once a month or so I go in and approve the next batch of updates for our desktops. For our server we, until now have always handled updated manually however that increasingly started to bug me so now its time to fix it, or at least make it slightly more efficient!
My aim is to have it so that once a month I can approve all the updates for our desktops and then let them install as normal based on when the PC’s are turned on and off. For the servers what I’m aiming for is to be able to approve the updates in WSUS and then have them only download to each server, thus allowing me to determine when to install them and reboot each server, it still requires some time from me over a weekend but should be much easier to manage (we normally block the MS Malicious Software Check tool and having to decline the tool each month on each server is boring), plus my hope is that this will reduce the frequency of Windows Update trying to ignore me and not offer to install updates after downloading them, or just not even popping up to offer the updates in the first place.
How to Create Self-Signed SSL Certificates (Part 2)
71 year ago
In the first part of this series I showed how to create a Root Certificate that you can use to sign your own certificates and deploy to your users to allow you to quickly and cheaply secure internal websites or applications that use SSL without having to pay for the often costly commercial SSL certificates.
In this part I will show how to generate a Certificate Signing Request and then use your new Root Certificate to create a Self-Signed SSL certificate that you can then install into your webserver.
Once again I will be using Cygwin and OpenSSL to generate the certificates so if you haven’t already got it installed check out my Cygwin Install Guide.
How to Create Self-Signed SSL Certificates (Part 1)
51 year ago
As more and more programs realise the importance of security many are turning to SSL to secure connections between clients and servers anyone who has spent any time with SSL probably knows that SSL certificates can be quite expensive. However there are times when it simply isn’t necessary to pay for an SSL certificate, there is an alternative, and even better is its free!
In this first guide I will explain how to generate your own Root Certificate and then in the next part I will show how you can then use this Root Certificate to sign your own certificates, the final part of this series will explain how to then deploy the certificate using Group Policy.
This magical alternative is to sign your own SSL certificates, however many people are put off this because of the warnings web browsers generate these days when then encounter a self-signed SSL certificate. For Internal deployments though, self-signed certificates are a perfectly valid option as it is possible to deploy the certificates so users don’t receive any warnings. Of course, even this can get tedious as for each new or renewed certificate you have to ensure this is deployed correctly for all your users, if you have a number of different web pages or web-apps that you want to secure this can quickly create additional work and take up time you could be spending on other things.
Don’t worry though, there is a better option! This is to become your own Root Certificate Authority and then use this to sign your certificates, that way all you need to do is to deploy the one Root Certificate to your users and then any certificate that you sign with it is automatically trusted and no warnings are displayed. This method allows you to secure any number of services or websites using an SSL certificate that you know will be accepted by their browser.
How to Install Cygwin
11 year ago
Cygwin is an awesome tool that allows you to access a Linux-like environment from within Windows, you get access to almost all the same binaries as a normal Linux install but without having to run a full-fledged Linux distribution, this can be very handy for when you either just want to learn one particular tool or make use of one particular program.
The best thing is that Cygwin is also really easy to install and use so even if you are a total Linux newbie there is no excuse not to give it a go.
Installing Cygwin is as simple as this:
