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Fatal error CS1647 on one server but not other
This error reared it’s ugly head one day and we were very perplexed as to why. The code was running just fine on the development server but on production we were receiving CS1647: An expression is too long or complex to compile.
After much digging as to why this might be, it was discovered that the .NET versions on the servers were different, but not dramatically so. The development server was running 4.6.2 while the production server was 4.6.1. A simple update to the .NET version and the error was resolved.
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Connecting to OSX VPN from Windows XP to 10
In an environment that is 95% MAC, we leverage OSX server for a lot of things as it is a simple server to deploy and manage. The most useful tool for us is the VPN which allows us to access the file shares and other services on the local network at the office when working remotely. Recently we have been introducing Windows PC’s back into the workflow and connecting natively from these to the OSX VPN posed a number of issues.
Our OSX server VPN sits behind the router that the office so NAT traversal needs to be taken into consideration. The following are the steps provided by both Apple and Microsoft for editing the registry to allow this.
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Using S3 with Kentico CMS
In order to improve the performance of a Kentico CMS install we decided to setup a content delivery network (CDN) using Amazon S3 and CloudFront. While Kentico is .NET and more easily deployed on Azure than AWS via their documents, making a resilient Kentico install on Amazon is achievable after working your way carefully through the setup process.
Setting up S3 in Kentico CMS was a less than pleasant experience thanks in part due to a small inconsistency in their documentation. After a call to their support, the recommendation was to use the Azure setup instructions for setting up a custom file system provider. Upon reading these instructions it became apparent WHY the instructions for the S3 setup was failing.
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Amazon Web Service’s NEW Reserved Instance Feature
At the start of this month Amazon released a new feature to their reserved instances called Instance Size Flexibility. You can read more about it here. This is quite a handy little update to how they handle reserved instances on a regional setting.
When they first came out, reserved instances were great for the huge savings but a real pita to manage in large environments spanning multiple regions or accounts. In order to take advantage of it you had to make sure you reserved the proper region and instance type for ALL of your individual instances. With few servers of only 1 or 2 types, not a big deal but scale out to hundreds of servers in multiple regions, zones and accounts and you had a recipe for a major accounting and administrative nightmare unless you looked into automation. That all changed in the last quarter of 2016 when Amazon released updates to how RI’s worked.
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Resize AWS EC2 EBS drives on the fly with zero downtime
Running out of hard drive space is a bane of every system administrator. Shutting down the server to add another drive then relaunching, or maybe you are lucky enough to have hot swappable hard drives making the process less painful. Well in the cloud on Amazon AWS you no longer need to shutdown or reimage your instance to expand your hard drives. If you are already using EBS backed instances, you now have the ability to modify your volumes on the fly.
This is how you resize your EBS drives on the fly on a EC2 instance. If you are using instance storage you cannot do this obviously, it only works on EBS backed instances.
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