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WebsiteOne of the things that I've been wanting for WheelMUD is the ability to have automated source drops. I thought about this a bit, and here is the plan on how to tackle this. This is a 4 phase task. Phase 1 - Weekly source drops This will be done manually by me. I have the basic script for this task done already. Phase 2 - Custom DotNetNuke (DNN) module I want this module to search an Amazon S3 bucket for the last X files. This will help to keep the size of the website backups relatively small. I will be moving the weekly drops to this module, and will have the ability to automate the drop. I will use the same script from phase 1, and modify it to post to the Amazon S3 bucket. Phase 3 - Nightly source drops Will need to create a new bucket. Will use a copy of the script in phase 2 and change the drop path to the new bucket. Add functionality to the custom DNN module to integrate with Subversion; ie last revision number and check-in descriptions. Phase 4 - Continous source drops New Amazon S3 bucket for build script. Update the functionality of the DNN module. I actually started with the migration. I'm setting up the Dell Poweredge 1850 as Vulcan. I got the 10K RPM SCSI drives delivered yesterday, but I still needed the hard drive rails to actually use them. I got those today. I've temporarely installed Windows 2003 Server, until I can get Dell's latest version of OpenManage Server Administrator. This utility is a bootable ISO, which helps to prepare the hard drives for Windows. True server level hardware is quite different than desktop wanna-be server hardware. The current version of OpenManage Server Administrator only lets me install Windows 2003. The newer version lets me install Windows 2008 and 2008 R2. This is a ginormous download (1.3 gigs), so it's going to take a good portion of the night.
I still need the server trays, which look to be delivered either tomorrow or Thursday. I need those so that I can mount these 1u servers on the rack. Hopefully, I'll have Vulcan ready by tomorrow night. That should at least get the test MUD back up. I'm in the process of updating the wiki right now. I just added a wiki page for our T4 (Text Template Transformation Tookit) system to generate the Data Access Layer (DAL). This bit of code is very boring and repetitive, so I automated as much of it as I could. It currently still need to run 4 master templates separately, but I'm investigating how to create a true master template, which will be the only one that would been to run. What can I say... Laziness is the mother of invention.  Since I'm in the wiki, I would appreciate if everybody would point out specific things that need to be fleshed out. Please post your suggestions as comments to this blog entry! I will leave the fun coding parts for others, and I will get the boring documentation stuff going. 
I was finally able to put together my new system. Gotta love quad-core with 12gigs of RAM! I need a third hard drive to put all of my dev projects, but I ran out of money. Fortunately, there is an IDE 500gig drive that I can plug in, until I get a new SATA drive sometime in the next couple months. I will be installing this drive tonight. I upgraded my CMUD to CMUD Pro last night, and wanted to give it a spin. Went and tried it on StarMUD, my favorite MUD. It is sweet on my 28" monitors! I got a couple of them. It really help my old eyes. I'll see if I can get screenshots and pictures in the next few days. I downloaded Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and installed it into a new Windows 7 virtual image. WheelMUD compiled without errors right away. I had the zero size database issue, but a quick file copy fixed that. It just amazes me that we got WheelMUD to work this well out of the box. My health is a bag of mixed news. On one hand my headaches are getting worse, and have them every day. The Tinnitus keeps getting louder and louder. Fortunately, I found an Ear, Nose, Throat clinic that I feel comfortable with. I've scheduled an Endoscopic Sinus surgery for the 10th of December. I will be out aproximately one week. I'm hoping that this will deal with my isolation. Any strong smell makes me very sick, so I'm basically confined to my house and work. I can't go to malls, movies, and some restaurants, because I usually end up sick for a couple days afterward. I do know that my sinuses are swollen, and have been for several years. It just gotten much, much worse. I've eliminated a lot of posibilties, so that surgery is the last resort. The good news about this is that I'm both a good candidate, and that this endoscopic sinus surgery has had a LOT of sucess since it was implemented. I avoided getting the previous type of surgery, because it was basically just a roto-tiller up the sinuses. Anyways, I will be ramping up my activity over here soon. I've been following the guy that took over CruiseControl.net. His blog has been extremely helpful, as a lot of what he talks about relates to WheelMUD. It's been quite instructive. I would like people that read this website to go and subscribe to his blog. http://csut017.wordpress.com - Automated Coder's Blog We had the hard drive that has the user's home drive fail a while back (just before we moved to the new house). Thankfully, I was able to run CHKDSK on it and saved the files. To my dismay, I found that this drive is a Maxtor. Well, I'm sticking to only Seagate hard drives from now on. I really don't care how much cheaper Maxtor is, Seagate drives have only failed on me once. I had a stack of 6 Maxtor drives that had failed in the last 3 years. As you can imagine, I'm pissed off. I went an ordered a 500 gig SATA Seagate drive, and it was delivered to me on Wednesday. To my horror, I didn't realize that the server didn't have any SATA jacks on the motherboard. AAAARRRGGGGHHH! So, now I need to buy a SATA card. Thankfully, there are a few in town. I'll probably pick one up at OfficeMax on my way home from work. This hard drive is the one that contains everybody's Outlook PST file, so I can't get attachments until the new one is installed and the files transferred over from the old one. Well, I had a hair pulling session trying to recover the passwords on this site. Both my admin and host paswords got hosed, so I couldn't just login and fix them.
I first went Googling to find a winform app to help with this problem. Well, all the solutions were just modules to install on your DotNetNuke installation. Since I can't even login as host, this approach is just totally useless. Thankfully, DNN uses the ASP.NET 2.0 Membership Providers.
So, I started with Membership.Provider.RetrievePassword(). Oops, "Bad Data". Crap! I tried other account passwords with the same result. Double-Crap! I modified my little winform app, to now reset passwords. This time I used Membership.Provider.ResetPassword(). Got a new password for host, and I was able to login now. YES! I'm using .NET 2.0 for this winform app.
So if you want to get this working, here is what you need to do:
Make sure that you include the following sections from your DNN's website web.config file: - connectionStrings
- system.web
You only need the membership and machinekeys sections inside system.web.
Import System.Configuration and System.Web into your project. All of the needed API calls will be under Membership.Provider namespace. You'll find a lot of samples on how to use on Google. I got really tired of the DotNetNuke core Blog module, so I ripped it out and replaced it with this. It already bombed today, by not letting me edit and/or create new blog entries. I haven't had time to customize the look of the module, but I will in time. |
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