The Virtue of Static IIS Machine Keys
Having non-static machine keys when hosting on IIS is just one of those things that’s just bound to cause trouble eventually. This holds true equally for single server hosting environments and load balanced web farm environments. Especially if your goal is to shield your users from any knowledge of IIS lifecycle activities (e.g. application pool recycles), the use of static machine keys is to be strongly recommended. The implications of static versus dynamic keys are enumerated for several different hosting situations below:
VisualSVN
I’ve been contemplating the move towards a self-hosted Subversion repository for quite a while. My earlier attempts worked but left me with a lot of inconvenient and sometimes quirky side effects. These experiences always led me back to hosting Subversion on Linux, which is really where it works most naturally. Recently, however, I decided to retry my luck with Subversion hosting on Windows and I made the call to go with a “package” instead of doing the Apache / Subversion integration myself.
VMware Fusion
I’ve been busy since returning from vacation on getting my new iMac up and running. Aside from the machine being a physical work of art, it’s also been performing very well and runs so silent that I’m hearing all kinds of new noises in my house that I wasn’t aware of before. This doesn’t mean that I’ve completely forsaken Windows. In fact, the move to the Mac has allowed me to finally move to Vista on my home machine and install Visual Studio 2008, which is killing my work laptop. For those of you remotely familiar with the Mac, running Windows side-by-side with OS X has been possible since the release of the Intel-based Macs. This started with Boot Camp and gained serious traction with the release of Parallels. Most recently, VMware jumped into this space with their Fusion product for the Mac. I went with Fusion due to reviews on both Apple’s site and Amazon.com that seemed to indicate that Fusion was more stable and that there were far more converts from Parallels to Fusion than in the opposite direction.