Strategy and Stuff : DirTeam CTO

DirTeam and Your Privacy

Sander Berkouwer — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 09:20:26 GMT

We believe strongly that people on the Internet are entitled to e-privacy. That is why we have removed all 3rd party cookies, 3rd party trackers ad 3rd party analytics solutions from the DirTeam.com / ActiveDir.org Weblogs.

As an added benefit, on Windows Server with Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration enabled (default) you will only receive one pop-up when you visit our website.

You’re welcome.

World IPv6 Launch Day

Sander Berkouwer — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 12:49:00 GMT

Today, major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world are uniting to redefine the global Internet and permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services.

We, at the Dirteam.com / ActiveDir.org Weblogs took notice of this launch event. As you might recall, we enabled IPv6 and configured the corresponding AAAA records on November 24, 2010.

Yes, that was over one and a half years ago…

SQL Server Madness

Sander Berkouwer — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:17:00 GMT

This morning, the database server hosting the DirTeam.com / ActiveDir.org weblogs was successfully upgraded from SQL Server 2000 Standard to SQL Server 2008 Standard.

This upgrade was tested extensively before we put it in production.

You might have noticed…

As a (frequent) visitor of our website, you may have encountered an “Oops, something went wrong” error this morning for about five minutes. This was caused by the inavailability of the database for that period when we switched from the old database server to the new server.

We kindly asked our current bloggers to refrain from creating new blogpost on the production server for the last couple of days to accommodate the server switch. This way, we prevented blogpost from appearing and disappearing. Of course, with the switch complete, we will return to our normal frequency of posting blogposts.

Our main plan was to migrate to SQL Server 2005 Standard, but this errored out every time due to a .Net Framework mismatch with the upgrade wizard and the Operating System.

What’s next?

In the coming days we will monitor the database server for anomalies.

With the Operating Systems, SQL Server and .Net Framework updated, the DirTeam.com / ActiveDir.org weblogs have entered a state where the CommunityServer installation is easily upgraded to a more recent version. In the background, we will continue to prepare for these upgrades.

Can you feel it…

If you feel the performance of the website has increased, please note it in the comments below.

It’s always nice to hear from you!

Special thanks goes out to Chris Petit.

Top 5 blogposts on the DirTeam.com / ActiveDir.org Weblogs in 2011

Sander Berkouwer — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 20:22:57 GMT

Calendar Year 2011 is coming to an end. Some people might want to forget about the past year as soon as possible, but here at the DirTeam.com / ActiveDir.org Weblogs we’re pretty proud of the last year.

Continuing our double digit growth rate in pageviews and visits, we’re now close to a million pageviews per year with this website. Quite a phenomenal performance of the bloggers here, since no new major Active Directory technology was released in the past twelve months. With a new version of Windows Server looming on the horizon, we’ll have plenty to blog about in the next months and the value we create for our readers will increase once more.

In 2011 eight of our bloggers posted a total of 100 new blogposts. DirTeam’s 2011 most prolific blogger was Jorge de Almeida Pinto with 35 blogposts. Unfortunately, Jorge left us in September to try it on his own.

The most popular new blogposts in 2011 were:

Centralized iPad Management with Profiles and Policies
Published on June 4, 2011 by Sander Berkouwer, 3392 pageviews
How to Install the Windows 8 Developer Preview (build 8012)
Published on September 14, 2011 by Sander Berkouwer, 2841 pageviews
When Will The Password Expire For An AD User Account And What Happens Then?
Published on February 13, 2011 by Jorge de Almeida Pinto, 1857 pageviews
How to Create an Active Directory User Provisioning System
Published on July 28, 2011 by Paul Bergson, 1813 pageviews
Getting your Active Directory ready for Windows 7, Part 1
Published on February 7, 2011 by Sander Berkouwer, 1591 pageviews

When looking at the overall blog posts on this website, the following list emerges:

Transitioning your Active Directory to Windows Server 2008
Published on March 02, 2008 by Sander Berkouwer, 52996 pageviews in 2011
Upgrading your Active Directory to Windows Server 2008
Published on April 08, 2008 by Sander Berkouwer, 42419 pageviews in 2011
Disabling IPv6 on Windows 2008
Published on March 20, 2009 by Paul Bergson, 17424 pageviews in 2011
Creating a taskpad and delegating several admin tasks
Published on January 05, 2006 by Jorge de Almeida Pinto, 14227 pageviews in 2011
Lingering Objects
Published on May 08, 2006 by Jorge de Almeida Pinto, 11067 pageviews in 2011

Thank you for massively reading our blogposts. We wish you a prolific 2012!

A round of improvements for everyone. Cheers!

Sander Berkouwer — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:15:00 GMT

When you see a server that is in pain, struggles to keep moving on and has little hope of ever being up to date, as a responsible admin, you need to step in.

Three weeks ago, I stepped in. We set out to boost up the morale of these boxes and end up with at least a manageable environment. To avoid any problems, we made clones of the servers and booted them up on another virtualization host. It turned out this host had more headroom than the server we were on previously, so throughout our further efforts we experienced a significant speed boost.

With a fresh copies of the Windows Server 2008 x86 DVD ISO in our hands, we upgraded the boxes running the DirTeam.com / ActiveDir.org weblogs away from the aging Windows Server 2003 legacy that was hunting us. These upgrades went without a hitch. After upgrading and running Windows Update for a while, the servers were running fine. Fine? Great, actually! With Windows Server 2008 on these boxes, the gains from the virtualization platform felt doubled.

Off course, upgrading Windows Server with several flavours of SQL Server, MySQL Server and .Net Framework on them, still felt like it might give some problems. We found one, with the IIS 7 request filtering module, but fixed it within minutes using the information from IIS.Net. From there on we switched the outside connection for the website from the old Windows Server 2003 boxes to the new boxes. We kept the old boxes running for the past three weeks, but this week I'll give the nod to delete them.

I hope you, the loyal visitor of our website, enjoy the new speed of the website!
(We'll be planning our next upgrade shortly)

The DirTeam Policy

Sander Berkouwer — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 00:55:00 GMT

Regularly, new bloggers join our team. In this blogpost I explain what we expect from them and what they might expect from us.

At blogs.dirteam.com we strive as a team to provide accurate and actionable information to our readers.
Membership will remain free.
Active team members can at all times request the assistance of the active administrators of blogs.dirteam.com through adblogs@dirteam.com.
The active administrators of blogs.dirteam.com will announce significant downtime and maintenance plans in advance to active team members when these affect the experience of these persons and our readers. These announcements will be placed on http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/cto at least one week in advance or mailed to the active bloggers at least one week in advance. If a change does not affect the experience, these changes will be posted on http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/cto in a reasonable timeframe.
If an active team member decides to stop participating:

blog ownership is automatically revoked after a period of six months after the last contribution. The active administrators of blogs.dirteam.com will become responsible for keeping the blog up and running. When, after this period, the member wants to actively contribute to the blog again, this access can be restored.
contributions from the past to the website remain intact and actively published to avoid links between team members getting broken and readers being served error pages. Unless the blogger has a valid and urgent reason to unpublish conttributions, these will remain active. The team member will contact the active administrators of blogs.dirteam.com in advance in this case.
team members can post one blogpost announcing the relocation of their blogging efforts. The member can also change the News section of their blog to reflect this change to their readers.

Accounts for members without contributions will be deleted from the database after twelve months of the last logged on visit, to protect members against account password leaks. Accounts for members with contributions will remain active without changes for a period of five years. After this period, the password for the member will be changed into a random password. At any time, members with contributions can regain access to their accounts by using the procedure to reset forgotten passwords. In this case a link will be sent to the email address associated with the account that enables the user to reset their password.
Ownership to all contributions to blogs.dirteam.com belongs to blogs.dirteam.com at all times. Before duplicating content that first appeared on blogs.dirteam.com, please contact the active administrators of blogs.dirteam.com.
The team makes no warranties, either express or implied. Information in these documents, including URL and other Internet Web site references, is subject to change without notice. The entire risk of the use or the results from the use of this document remains with the reader.

DirTeam Bloggers at the 2011 MVP Summit

Sander Berkouwer — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 23:04:00 GMT

Microsoft is hosting the 2011 MVP Summit this week. Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are invited over to Seattle, Bellevue and Redmon by Microsoft to enjoy a week of technical sessions (for certain MVP expertises) at the Microsoft Campus, stay at one of the Bellevue Hotels and of course party in Seattle.

Here, at the DirTeam.com / ActiveDir.org Weblogs, a couple of our bloggers have been awarded Microsoft MVPs. The following Microsoft MVPs are attending the MVP Summit this week:

Tomasz Onyszko
Enterprise Security MVP
Paul Bergson
Directory Services MVP
Jorge de Almeida Pinto
Directory Services MVP
Sander Berkouwer
Directory Services MVP

Also in Bellevue, Redmond or Seattle and want to hang out?

Join us! (leave a comment below)

The DirTeam.com/ActiveDir.org Weblogs are now available on IPv6

Sander Berkouwer — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 20:16:00 GMT

In the last couple of years, doomscenarios have crossed our pathes.
Stories about impending shortages of IP addresses and ISPs about to go bust.
These stories, of course, were all related to IPv6.

I've also heard these stories and decided to take action.

In my last post I mentioned the DirTeam.com/ActiveDir.org Weblogs were now hosted by my employer on a highly available virtual machine in a carbon neutral datacenter in Haarlem, near Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In this setup we've been working close with some networking dudes to get blogs.dirteam.com available as an IPv6-enabled website. This way, the DirTeam.com / ActiveDir.org Weblogs are ready for the future.

If you're still on IPv4 you should not notice any changes and can remain using the website and our blog(s) as you’re used to. If you're one of the lucky few with a pure IPv6 (with IPv4 tunnel) connection, you may find the website load a bit faster.

If you do notice anything failing, let me know.

The DirTeam.com/ActiveDir.org Weblogs have moved

Sander Berkouwer — Sat, 22 May 2010 18:37:00 GMT

After a couple of weeks of careful planning and testing, the Dirteam.com / ActiveDir.org Weblogs (blogs.dirteam.com) have moved.

For the past five years, the blogs.dirteam.com website was hosted on shared servers in a datacenter in Pasadena in the US.

As a courtesy of my employer, the blogs.dirteam.com website is now hosted on a highly available virtual machine in a carbon neutral datacenter in Haarlem, near Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The server is actively monitored,backed up every day and licensed through SPLA. It is behind a redundant firewall and connected to redundant 100Mb/s connections straight to the Amsterdam Internet Exchange.

You should not notice any changes and can remain using the website and our blog(s) as you’re used to.
If you do notice anything failing, let me know.

DirTeam Email: formerly a bug, now a feature

Sander Berkouwer — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:29:01 GMT

We’re not arrogant people. We’re busy persons, but we tend to make time when someone asks us a question, sends us feedback, posts a trackback, writes a comment or proposes to work together on some blogging, speaking or book effort. So isn’t it ironic we haven’t been responding to email messages you’ve been sending us?

It appears a while ago the website has lost its ability to send messages to the email addresses corresponding with the blogs. Actually nothing changed in the settings of the website, but something in the underlying plumbing changed. I’ve been investigating this issue for quite some while and got email messages to flow again.

Problem solved.

What this means for visitors

For visitors the changes are a more confronting, but actually make things easier.

Account activation now requires a valid email address
Visitors now need to provide a valid email address when they register. I’ve enabled the email activation for new accounts again, so when registering a new account a temporary password is emailed to the email address provided. While this slows down the registration process, it also prohibits malicious people and scripts to register accounts without providing a valid email address. Of course the DirTeam.com / ActiveDir.org Webloggers have no malicious intent, so leaving your address will not result in unwanted email. (if one does, contact me personally! )
Password recovery is now possible again
Registered visitors can now recover forgotten passwords. Although the button was always there it wasn’t actually getting messages through. Now it works again! Of course you’ll need to register with a valid email address in order for this functionality to work. When you use the button a link is sent to your email address. The link allows you to type in a new password.

Note:
The Community Server behind The DirTeam.com / ActiveDir.org Weblogs will not send your password in a message and will not ask for passwords in email messages.

Contacting bloggers is easier than ever!
You’re far more likely to receive a message when you use the contact functionality on the DirTeam.com / ActiveDir.org Weblogs. You’re also far more likely to receive an answer to questions asked in the comments of blogposts. You could actually call it a sort of community now

What this means for bloggers

Solving this issue means the Community Server behind the DirTeam.com / ActiveDir.org Weblogs sends an e-mailmessage to a blogger when someone leaves a comment or trackback to a blogpost. The e-mail address used for these messages is adblogs@dirteam.com.

Tip!
Please make sure you whitelist adblogs@dirteam.com when you want to receive a message when an event occurs. You can also make a rule in your favorite email client to perform a specific action when you receive a message from this address.

Tip!
As a DirTeam.com / ActiveDir.org Weblogs you can change the settings. You can change whether you want to receive messages for feedback in Default Post Settings (change the Send me email notifications stuff) and the address used to receive messages in My Email Settings (change the Blog contact email address). There are also some tidbits in your profile that you can change.

DirTeam at full strength at the MVP Summit

Sander Berkouwer — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 01:26:23 GMT

In the past year you may have come to enjoy the active blogs of two Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) on the DirTeam.com/ActiveDir.org Weblogs: Jorge de Almeida Pinto (Jorge 's Quest For Knowledge!) and Sander Berkouwer (The things that are better left unspoken).

Both of these bloggers are present at this years Microsoft MVP Global Summit at the Washington State Convention & Trade Center in Seattle and at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, from March 1 through 4.

DirTeam at Tech-Ed EMEA IT Pro

Sander Berkouwer — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:30:53 GMT

It's my pleasure and honor to announce the names of your favorite DirTeam bloggers and speakers attending Microsoft’s Tech∙Ed Europe Middle East & Africa (EMEA) conference for IT Professionals in Barcelona (Spain) from November 3rd, 2008 to November 7th, 2008:

Carlos Magalhaes (Carlos)
Dave Stork (Dave Stork’s IMHO)
Sander Berkouwer (The things better left unspoken)

We'll stand out from the crowd, since we'll be wearing specially designed ActiveDir.org/Dirteam.com Weblogs shirts!

These all white polo shirts have a small Active Directory logo on the front in the place where the right pocket would be located. (if the shirts had any pockets) This indicates our passion for Active Directory and Active Directory related technologies.

The back features the ActiveDir.org/Dirteam.com Weblogs logo and url across the shoulders, as depicted to the right.

See you in Barcelona!

DirTeam reaches 400 members

Sander Berkouwer — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:38:00 GMT

Today marks an important point in the website and community called the Dirteam.com/ActiveDir.org Blogs:

We today welcomed our 400th registered user!

i AabPeetaPevyFawlts was the 400th person to register.

Since the beginning of this month 15 people joined. This is a pretty spike, so I guess the benefits of registering are appealing:

You can comment on posts
You can send messages to authors
You can interact on the forums

Registering is easy and simple. You only have to supply a username and password (Specifying the correct time zone is optional) and you're set to go! If you want to you can stand out in the crowd and supply additional information, like the url of your website and even upload an avatar.

i Gmaciel was the 398th member to join and already posted a comment.

More interestingly registering might be your first step in blogging on DirTeam yourself. A couple of current DirTeam bloggers started out by registering and got a hold of a blog to vent their much appreciated opinion, share their amazement on Microsoft technology and continue to improve the DirTeam community.

If you haven't registered yet, why not do so today?

DirTeam CTO

Sander Berkouwer — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 01:09:49 GMT

As recently appointed Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of DirTeam I feel it's a good thing to inform the people committed to this website. Since a lot of our readers of our blogs also feel committed, this information is available to them as well. This is the first post in what I intend to be a regular update on the technical side of DirTeam.

New features

New look and feel

In the last three months we've made some drastic changes to the way DirTeam looks. We've implemented a hideous skin that now covers most of the radiant beauty of our CommunityServer 2.1 installation.

The result is a website with a recognizable appearance.

I've spent many hours changing stuff in the CommunityServer web folder to change master files, style sheets and graphics to get it the way it is now. I'm aware of a few minor glitches in the skin and will try to correct these when time is available. As a registered user you can report glitches in the forum thread dedicated to the new skin.

Affiliation Section

Another new feature we introduced the last few weeks was the Affiliation section on the DirTeam Welcome page. This section allows us to share traffic with other websites dedicated and/or related to the Active Directory Community. While I write this post we have two affiliates:

Statistics

Blogger statistics

In the last few months DirTeam has featured blogs written by the following groups of contributors:

Microsoft employees	3
Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVP's)	1
Microsoft enthusiasts	3

We see the diversity in blogging background results in content that is written from different perspectives, focusing on different areas and related to news from different parts of the world.

New bloggers

In the last period of time we also met with some new bloggers. Most notable is Natasha Mocke, who (encouraged by Carlos) wrote an interesting blogpost on practical best practices and some very enlightening posts on Hyper-V. (and Windows Server Virtualization as it was called back in those days) Check out her blog!

Traffic analysis

In the past three years traffic has been monitored using Google Analytics, but recently we started gathering traffic information using the raw header functionality of CommunityServer, which is the preferred method and will also generate more reliable traffic analysis. Below is a picture depicting the pageviews per day for DirTeam in the last three weeks:

Plans

We want to keep DirTeam an attractive website where everyone comes with joy to contribute to the Active Directory community and read great stuff. To further improve this experience we are planning to make a few changes in the next six months:

Make the affiliation section available on the aggregation list page
Attract two more more affiliation partners

On the longer term there are three main concepts that I will be working on:

Recognizability
To ensure people like to visit DirTeam I want to make the website recognizable. This not only means additional work will be done on the main pages and more affiliation deals will be made. I also have ideas to make the individual blogs more identifiable as DirTeam blogs. I want to make my fellow bloggers feel proud to blog on DirTeam!
Durability
In order to make DirTeam last for another few years I also need to generate income for the website. Right now we don't have any problems getting our website hosted, but as traffic increases this might change.
Easy
Blogging can be hard work, which is why most blogs only last a few posts. DirTeam has had blogs that only lasted a few posts too. Right now we have a team of prolific bloggers, that sometimes need a little help. One of my goals is to provide this help to make blogging on DirTeam as easy as possible.

Concluding

I'm open to suggestions, so just leave them behind.