Category: Software

I have an ASP.NET web application that uses SSL.

The other day it stopped working on my development machine (Win XP Pro SP2). Whenever I tried to navigate to the SSL page my browser said it couldn’t find the page.

I spent hours trying to google an answer to this problem.

The thing that finally fixed it was…. (drum roll)… a reboot.

Now here’s the proof that I’ve taken leave of my senses. My colleague had the same problem a few days ago. I helped him resolve it, and even suggested the reboot solution. It worked for him. But today when this problem happened to me, I forgot all about that episode, and wasted time until I came up with the same solution. Again.

I must be getting old.

Incidentally, if you need an SSL certificate for testing purposes, try Microsofts SelfSSL utility. It creates the certificate and installs it for you.

It’s available at https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=56FC92EE-A71A-4C73-B628-ADE629C89499&displaylang=en or search for “Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 Resource Kit Tools”.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Microsoft’s SelfSSL utility will cause MSDE to stop working. It tries to install certificates in the SQL Server which makes it impossible to connect to.

I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated with the amount of CPU time consumed by MS-Outlook 2003 on my laptop.

When Autoarchive runs every morning at 9am, the system grinds to a halt. There’s no way in Outlook you can change the TIME at which this process runs. So my solution to the problem is to disable Autoarchive, wait till midnight, enable it, and tell it to run every day. That way I won’t be around while it’s archiving. How stupid that I have to stay up till midnight because MS products don’t work properly. Does anyone know any better solutions to this?

The other contributing factor is my archive folders. I have them visible in the folder window that appears on the left hand side of outlook – so I can see “Mailbox – Me”, “Personal Folders”, “Archives” etc down the left hand side. I thought this might be slowing things down a bit, so I right-clicked on the Archove and Personal Folders, selected “Close”, and the folder disappeared from view. After I did this, Outlook seemed to consume less CPU time, so I think I’ve solved this problem.

One final thing that might be adding to the overall slowness is the fact that my main outlook mail folder connects through a VPN to my exchange server (i.e. its not local to me). I think the combination of VPN and Exchange might be using up a lot of CPU.

Surely there must be something better?

There are a lot of useful articles in the Microsoft Knowledgebase to help you resolve the problem where sharepoint won’t send out email alerts. Some of them are really complex.

BUT!!!! Before you spend hours (like I did) trying all the complex solutions to make it work, try the simplest solution first:

Make sure your mail server allows relays from itself. In exchange, go into the SMTP server properties (Start / Programs / Microsoft Exchange / System Manager / Servers / My Server / Protocols / Smtp / Default Server / Access / Relay / “Only the list below” – Granted to 127.0.0.1.