Mr. Ossou already alerted you to the upcoming Silicon Valley Code Camp (October 11th and 12th), but in the spirit of “more is more,” here’s my own personal announcement.
Maybe you’ve been to a code camp in your neighborhood. Los Angeles has three of them, and they’re all pretty sizable. But there’s sizable and then there’s huge, and Silicon Valley is huge. So multiply your local code camp by two or three times, then double that, and you’ll be pretty close to comprehending the crazy sea of humanity that attends Silicon Valley.
We just launched the latest sprint and we realized that we didn’t announce updates that were pushed out with the Windows Azure Pack update (though we did blog about how we did the WAP update). So here’s some of the enhancements that you’ll find now.
1. We’ve added the ability to bind different SSL certificates to your domain pointers and subdomains. Before this update you could only bind SSL certs for your primary domain. Now with this enhancement, you can bind SSL certs to your heart’s content. This applies to SNI SSL.
2. We’ve removed most restrictions from the DNS Manager to allow you more flexibility In managing your DNS. So now you can create multiple records with the same name, you can edit or delete the root domain A record, create CNAMEs with the root domain name, pretty much anything you might need.
The mother of all code camps is only weeks away.
Attendance for the Silicon Valley Code Camp is usually over 5,000 people and this year we are expecting even more. As long time supporters of code camps, user groups, and the ASP.NET community at large, I can tell you this is the big one.
SiteLock is a security service that provides malware detection and protection from malicious attacks against your website.
SiteLock’s default scanning features include Network, Malware, SQL Injection, and Application scanning to identify malicious files or scripts. SiteLock will also identify any potential weaknesses and exploits that your site may have.
Getting started with SiteLock may seem like a daunting task, but as with any new product, you will benefit from taking the time to get familiar with SiteLock. You can access the SiteLock dashboard from the Services section of the Everleap Control Panel.
So we went through our first Windows Azure Pack update and we also did the latest Windows update as well. The entire project was done in three phases. First, we updated our back end infrastructure, then updated Windows Azure Pack, and then we applied the latest Windows updates.
To update our back end infrastructure, we announced and scheduled a 10 minute outage mainly to update our databases to make way for the changes in the Windows Azure Pack update. While we never like taking an outage, in our testing in our dev environment a short outage was the cleanest way of getting the WAP update done without introducing a lot of other technical issues.
You may have assumed that the Everleap blog ran on Everleap servers, but until now, that hasn’t been the case.
Most businesses that provide public hosting services like we do also maintain separate “corporate” servers. Not necessarily for performance reasons, but for security, maintenance, legal, or any number of other reasons.
So this blog ran on a dedicated FreeBSD server. It uses WordPress, a php application, and most people still run those on linux or some other decidedly non-Windows server.
In a hosting environment such as ours, modifying the main php.ini file isn’t a viable option for changing default PHP settings. Don’t despair, however. In their infinite wisdom and incredible foresight, the developers of PHP built in a way for you to change certain directives locally using a file named .user.ini. Here, I’ll show you how to create your own.
Early last month, Michael Phillips wrote about our Git support. As you may know, you have a Git repository included for free with your Everleap account. So if you’re not using TFS for your site, I would urge you to at least use Git. If you’re not familiar with Git, take a look at this video to help you get started.
A while back I read an interesting blog post by the Product Manager for Microsoft TFS about their TFS Azure support. The thing that really caught my attention was this:
“I was having a conversation with my team about our need to have a better support path from our web site. We need a “contact us” capability that enables you to send an electronic message that will get attention…”
Sounds like he’s talking about, you know, a helpdesk.
In a DiscountASP.NET support ticket the other day someone said to me, “I don’t want to talk cloud. That is such a bogus term and concept.” I was telling him about Everleap, since it would have been a good solution for a problem he was having, but I understand why he reacted like that.
The term “cloud” has been misused and abused to the point where it has become meaningless to a lot of people. Often when we talk to people about the modern hosting platform we’re running here and say to them, “You might want to try our Everleap Cloud Servers,” they just roll their eyes and sigh.