Along with the makeover of the site - alot more has been undergoing changes. In fact, the entire site is now hosted at my own VPS (Virtual Private Server). This means that I have full control over everything and this gives me nice options to run other types of servers as well - such as Subversion for Source Control, TeamCity for Continuous Integration - but also more commonly known services such as a mail server.
With this freedom also comes the tiring job of setting it all up and getting it working. I have previously set up several
Linux servers for own use like this - but as I have lately been working alot with
ASP.Net I wanted a Windows server this time, and as such I am now running all of this off a Windows 2008 server.
Getting ASP.Net pages to compile
Seeing as this is my first real time setting up a server like this even the most trivial thing of getting an ASP.Net page to compile was tricky to me (although, to my excuse it was not entirely my fault). The service provider which I am using - preinstall their servers with a 2GB Virtual Hard Disk, which is used to host the page file - I am guessing this is done in respect to performance. This is all great - however it seems that the rest of their setup expect this drive to be mounted to the T-drive ("T:"). For some reason mine was mounted on the D-drive - this caused confusion as this drive is also used to host other temporary files - such as the files that the ASP.Net pages compile down to! I managed to work this one out after having read through their documentation quite a few times, where this mysterious T-drive was mentioned - and I didn't have one.
I had changed permissions on various folders several times - changed the temporary folder where these ASP.Net files were supposed to go and nothing helped - untill I reset all of that, finally managed to re-mount the D-drive to the T-drive (which is some mess when the drive is hosting something important, such as the page file...) - and then it just worked!
Follow up
I've had several other "quirks" along the way - but here's just one of them. I will write about some of the other "fun" things I've had to deal with over the next couple of days - stay tuned.
Technorati tags:
System administration,
Windows 2008,
IIS