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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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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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Amazon AWS costs have improved 55-100% since 2009
I previously wrote an article in 2009 about how much you might expect to pay for hosting your server/services using Amazon AWS EC2 and S3. The conclusion was that it would cost you approximately $920/year up to over $10K/year depending on the instance type you chose to run to host your server on Amazon.
Over the course of time the cost of hosting on Amazon Web Services has come down dramatically and their service offerings have increased 5 fold from what they had. Let’s take a look at what you will pay now versus 2009 for the comparable setups. For the sake of simplicity I am going to use current 4th generation on demand pricing but there are a few cases where it might be cheaper to use 3rd generation over 4th. There are very few good reasons to still be using first generation servers though. It should also be pointed out that Amazon also launched spot instances which are an even cheaper way to run an ec2 instance albeit not necessarily as reliable.
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