A few weeks ago I had just awoken from a Sunday afternoon nap when I was confronted with "Your password expires in 7 days. Would you like to change you password?" system message. It had been asking for several days, so I complied and hastily gave it a new, valid password. So far, so good. Well, some time passed while I was working on documenting some user procedure. The course of documenting eventually forced me to reboot my laptop to emulate what the user would see. I get to the login screen and type in what I thought was my new password - several times, and many, many variations there of. For the life of me, I could not remember what I had entered a couple hours earlier! Being that my Active Directory server sits 2 feet from my laptop, I think "no problem, I'll log into the server as Administrator and reset my user password"...

Well, it turns out that it had been quite a while since I had actually logged in as Administrator, my regular user account has admin rights on the whole domain, so I never had to. I had forgotten this password as well, and I will tell you - what a horrible, sinking feeling when you realize you are locked out of your primary server. As this machine serves as my ad/file/smtp/imap/http/svn/j2ee/mssql/etc server, this was a major blow. The machine was up and running, I just could not get in to administer most of the server's functionality or, more importantly, do any backups. So, what does one do?

This server, "Bessie", is like my extended brain. She is the aggregation of my computing knowledge from the last decade on a single machine. Most of the data lives in a separate, RAID 5 volume, which is backed up periodically, so that was fairly safe. It is the actual configuration I wanted to save. I built this machine from parts and it is a bit unique. I have spent countless hours configuring this (convoluted) system, and reinstalling Window simply was not an option, or at least not an option I wanted to consider. Bessie runs Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard x64 Edition installed on a RAID 1 volume. She is also a primary Active Directory domain controller. Both of these facts made her rescue a bit harrowing...

I spent a lot of time on Google searching for an answer. There were lots of options (even the free variety) had this been a regular desktop system (this is a good start). The fact that the operating system is installed on RAID 1 volume, and security was handled by Active Directory ruled out all but Elcomsoft System Recovery Pro. It was rather pricy ($600), and took forever to be delivered from Czechoslovakia, but ultimately did the trick.

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I set out two weeks ago to try and to find a blog engine I could host myself. I did not, at that point, realize what an endeavor it would be. Having never really used any blogging platform, I wasn't entirely sure what kind of features were available or even what I was looking for. I had a few constraints in that I wanted to leverage technology that I was already using on my server - that pretty much meant XQuery, .NET or Java. I wanted it to use XML as data-store. It needed to be mature and full-featured enough that I wasn't forced to tinker too much. Finally, it had to able to live happily on the server where I was deploying it. Here are some notes on what it took to deploy, and my general impressions of various blog engines...

Let's begin with the operating environment, which is a bit convoluted to say the least. The first wrinkle is that the server runs Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 Edition. Anybody who's ever run any 64-bit OS will understand that everything in 64-bit land is a bit more painful. The next hurdle is that I run Apache HTTP Server on port 80 and reverse-proxy to local instances of IIS and Tomcat. This means that the blog engine needed to be configurable to handle this proxy hop.

BlogEngine.NET:

http://dotnetblogengine.net

This was the first blog engine I tried, and perhaps my favorite, but ultimately did not meet all my needs. Overall it's a nice, full-featured, .NET based blog engine. If I was using only IIS, this is the one I'd go with. What I like most was it's integrated syndication tools, and the fact that it uses TinyMCE as its rich text editor. Not only does it generate the standard RSS & Atom feeds, but also generated links for Digg, Del.icio.us as well as a few other social networking sites. It came with several pre-loaded themes and it looks as if there is a community helping to create additional themes and plugins.

The downside was that it could not handle being behind the Apache reverse-proxy. URLs were being generated incorrectly, so it was of no use.

dasBlog:

http://www.dasblog.info/

I had been hearing about dasBlog as a good .NET based blog engine for a couple of years, so I thought this might be a good fit... I thought wrong! It was trouble out of the box and I never did get it running. The installation was easy enough - xcopy to an IIS web folder. The issue here was that it would not run in a x64 environment. One of it's dependencies is compiled for 32-bit Windows only. Apparently there is a work around that involves obtaining the 64-bit version of the component and recompiling dasBlog - I didn't get that far, remember I don't want to tinker.

ThinkJot:

http://code.google.com/p/thinkjot/

This is another option from the .NET side. Frankly, this project seems a bit immature. It ran well enough, but I could not figure out how to configure it.

Pebble:

http://pebble.sourceforge.net/

This the blog engine where I am writing this. Pebble is Java based, and was able to configure a proxy using mod_jk to talk to Tomcat.

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