When I was envisioning what this blog was going to be, I wanted to focus on Healthcare IT. It wanted to use it as a way to learn more about Healthcare IT. And as way to get involved in the planning/discussion about how the Healthcare stimulus money was going to be spent (I was, and still am, worried that all money is going to go to “Consultants” and nothing is actually going to get done).

However, in the past few months I have had one project after another focusing on Datacenter Operations. These have run the gambit from building the infrastructure and operational processes for a customers new product offering to moving a small ASP to Amazon Web Services (which turned out to be a bad fit for the ASP and we are now looking for a more traditional hosting company).

So for the short term, this blog is going to be focusing on Datacenter Operations.

One of my customers is an ASP.  The ASP code and infrastructure were built way back in the dot-boom years.   Active development on the software has stopped long ago. But the software and infrastructure was good enough to keep its existing customers and attract new one for many, many years (9+ years).

Flash forward to 2010 and the customer is migrating to a new semi-managed datacenter provider.   As I was working the with the existing infrastructure, I noticed this

Notice the Uptime number in the upper right corner.   <span style=”font-weight: bold;”>Yes, that says 869 days. </span>

This is one of two F5 BigIPs that were purchased in 1999.  These two load balancers have been in production use for > 10years.  In fact, when this load balancer was booted up last, it was the passive node in an active-passive configuration.   About 200 days ago, the active node failed and this load balancer has been chugging along since.

Stability in network appliances is a good thing.

When using Windows XP SP2 or greater or Windows 2003 (SP?) or greater, if you download a file from the internet or even copy files from another server (ie via UNC path), then files are marked as having been downloaded from the internet. The operating system marks these files by creating a new NTFS Stream, specifically with a Zone.Identifier record.

If you look at the properties of the file, you will see message which says:

This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer.

In addition, there is an Unblock button you can push that is supposed to remove the Zone.Identifier.

When the Zone.Identifier Stream exists, the operating system will not execute the file without a human to interactively say yes. This means if you copy over, say, files for a ASP.Net application, then the ASP.Net web site will fail to start as it cannot execute the files necessary. This can easily be fixed by using the Streams application from SysInternals.

To check if a file has Zone.Identifier record in it's NTFS Stream, from the command line execute:

stream filename

To fix(ie remove the NTFS Stream) an individual file, execute

streams -d filename

To recursively fix(ie remove the NTFS Stream) all files/subfolders in a directory, execute

streams -s -d dirname 

NOTE: If you have downloaded a zip file which is marked as coming from the internet, then all the unzipped files will also be marked.