I spent a couple of hours tonight, way too long in fact, trying to set up stuff that should've been easy, but wasn't. I'll say it again, I hate setting up and administering servers. That's why I won't outright buy one and prefer to rent. If a hard drive fails or something, I want that to be someone else's problem.
The difficulty was around getting the really ancient sites that I should just retire, like uberasp.net, to run in the new environment. The new server is Windows Server 2008 R2, which by default doesn't do anything unless you turn it on (the right thing to do). It also certainly doesn't have .NET v1.1 from 2003 by default, and it took some messing around to get it installed right. Then there's the issue that the whole SMTP server thing is there, but kind of half-assed supported. The old server had a complete mail package running still from the old days when I still hosted my own mail, but now that I use Gmail for that, it's going away. I eventually figured out how to get it installed and configured. Even the bigger sites like CoasterBuzz need to send mail.
Overall, I'm actually pretty blown away at how good 2008 R2 is in terms of ease of use. There's a lot more instrumentation, the firewall is way more simple than messing with IPsec, and of course there are many huge benefits to having IIS7 that I couldn't use before. I'm looking forward to experimenting with media services, and love having ASP.NET integrated in the pipeline. Good stuff.
No comments yet.