Renewing a self-signed certificate

I had to do this today for an Exchange 2003 server which was no longer permitting Outlook RPC over HTTP access.  OWA still worked, but remote clients were stuck in a "Connecting" state.  I found the following snippet at MSExchange.org:

To renew a certificate, goto Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager. Find your "Default Website", right-click on it, and select Properties.

Under the "Directory Security" tab, click the "Server Certificate" button, then click "Next" on the wizard welcome screen and select "Renew the current certificate"

Once I did that, clients immediately reconnected.

Publishing: the industry that was

Here's a thought-provoking piece on the changes cuerrently being wrought by the Internet on the publishing industry. It's incredibly relevant to these times, and to more media than print - all media is undergoing a revolution that just a decade ago was unthinkable.

Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Blogger/Google Reader integration

Google Reader integrates nicely with Blogger, which (considering they're both Google properties these days) is probably to be expected. Still, it's nice to see and certainly makes it easy to share links.

Blogging from my BlackBerry

So far Blogger seems to be a good blog hosting platform. Decent perks such as posting via email, free custom domains, easy setup...

Too bad about that navigation bar above the blog, but at least I can change the colour somewhat.

The only confusion arose when I discovered that a "Google Apps" account is *not* the same thing as a regular Google account - for example, Blogger requires a Google account and won't work with a Google Apps account.

Once I realized that, things got a little less confusing!

HOWTO Update EasyDNS with wget

I use hstart.exe and wget.exe in a scheduled task on a Windows server to update my EasyDNS Dynamic DNS records. The command line (all on one line; it's probably split across several lines here) is as follows:

hstart.exe /NOCONSOLE /SILENT /IDLE "wget.exe ""https://MYUSERNAME:MYPASSWORD@members.easydns.com/dyn/dyndns.php?hostname=MYHOST.MYDOMAIN.COM&myip=1.1.1.1"" -q -O c:\temp\easydns.txt"

Replace MYUSERNAME, MYPASSWORD, MYHOST, and MYDOMAIN.COM with your username, password, hostname, and domain name.

myip=1.1.1.1 tells EasyDNS to detect the IP address from which the query is being executed, and use that as the new IP address for the DNS record(s). (There are more optional parameters for "dyndns.php" that let you set MX records for email, and a variety of other items. You may be able to find some documentation about those elsewhere on the web. Google is your friend.)

-q tells wget to reduce it's output verbosity and -O c:\temp\easydns.txt captures the results of the operation into a text file.

From the Hstart web page: "Hidden Start (or Hstart) is a small startup manager that allows console applications to be started without any windows in the background and much more."

From the official wget homepage: "GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc."

I set this up in a scheduled task configured to run hourly: