October 8, 2003
@ 04:15 PM

I've had a blog on Kuro5hin for about two years but I decided a while ago that I wanted to host my own blog and hack features in that I wanted. After lots of talk I finally decided to go ahead and install dasBlog. Since I didn't want to lose my old posts I used Steve Burnap's K5 diary grabber in combination with some judicious use of HTML tidy and C# to get my old K5 posts to become a part of my new blog.

The first problem I had is that I've been using Apache for the past couple of months and had to re-enable IIS with all its annoyances. Thankfully, there is finally a version of Webalizer for Windows which was my biggest gripe when I first switched to Apache last year. After dealing with that I had to deal with HTTP 401 issues because although the dasBlog post-installation instructions do a good job of telling you that you have to give the IUSR{sitename}, IWAM{sitename} and {sitename}\ASPNET accounts read/write permissions over the content, siteconfig and logs directories it all still will give you a 401 (unauthorized) error unless you also give them similar access to the parent directory. Of course, this is obvious in hindsight and if I had placed the directory in the suggested location I suspect I wouldn't have had to do this. The one problem I still have which has nothing to do with dasBlog and everything to do with IIS & Windows XP is that I can't have more than 10 connections to my website at once. This was the second major reason I switched to Apache.

It looks like I'll have to upgrade to Win2K3


 

Wednesday, October 8, 2003 8:46:25 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Congrats with new blog home, Dare!
P.S. First post from RSS Bandito
Wednesday, October 8, 2003 10:45:41 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Congrats, Dare. A couple of notes:

1. In IE 6, moving the cursor quickly up and down causes a noticeable flicker. Something funny in your CSS, no doubt.

2. A suggestion: If you set the name/email/homepage edit boxes names to match other weblog tools, they'd auto-complete for people who post on your weblog for the first time.
Wednesday, October 8, 2003 11:19:33 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
You should really add a link on the originally k5 diaries to the diary: then the comments for them can at least be found (if k5 is up).

Rachael
R343L
Friday, October 10, 2003 3:26:22 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Dare, you don't need to migrate to Win2k3 (depending on your expected traffic ;))
Just disable IIS HTTP Keep-Alives and tweak IIS to increase the limit to 40 connections: http://www.gazitt.com/ohmblog/PermaLink.aspx/f850bebf-97b0-4ebb-99ce-072bdcb4422f
With both settings, it will handle far more users, I'm sure.

BTW, for the dynamic dns service, have you considered another one instead of Dns2Go? I didn't have a good experience with them, the interface doesn't allow you to configure more advanced DNS record settings, etc. I'm using EveryDns (www.everydns.net, free, $15 donation for premium), which works extremely well and offers a simple text-box based UI to configure directly every DNS record they hold. This gives you the additional benefit of getting rid of Dns2Go client, as the protocol to update the dynamic IP is well defined and you can choose the client application at will. I use NoelD's DynSite (http://noeld.com/dldynsite.htm), which is superb and update your IP with an incredible number of DynDNS servers.
Friday, October 10, 2003 3:53:46 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
I haven't disabled IIS Keep-Alives but I did use the metabase hack to up the limit to 40 connections which seems to be fine for the moment. If I start getting enough traffic to cause problems I'll disable keep-alives and reduce the time out value.

So far I've been OK with DNS2Go and just renewed for another year yesterday. If I had known about EveryDNS I probably would have switched though.
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