So I finally bit the bullet a few months back and bought a computer w/ Vista when the old home server running XP pro died.
First priority was to install itunes and get everything moved over. That took a bit of fiddling as I tried over and over to convince Vista that I wanted to be able to have access to all the CDs we worked so had to rip. Eventually i got the library moved over, and then I had to figure out how to keep the playlists, and evenutally I had that done as well. Some xml files I had to copy over or something like that.
At which point we just used it as DVD player and itunes server for a while. Everyone knows you can’t use vista for anything, so trying to use it as a computer seemed unrealistic.
Finally I really bit the bullet this week and dove in. Since Vista Premium isn’t premium enough to let me use remote desktop, I had to figure out how get VNC setup. TightVNC seemed to have trouble refreshing (wouldn’t show me the start menu when I opened it, for example), so I ended up with ultraVNC, which does everything you’d expect. And I don’t have to give M$ more money, that’s a nice thing.
Next was setting up all the shares I used to have set up on the XP box. That actually turned out to be super easy. I’d actually had the easiest printer setup ever a couple months back, when I’d just plugged it in and been able to use it. So maybe Vista isn’t evil?
Then today it was time to edit an old ASP site. Did IIS still exist? Did it still support ASP? As it turns out, IIS is still part of Windowsland, and it appears that my old ASP pages will eventually work. I’m not sure I’ve actually used active server pages this century, but interesting to see that its all still there. Key things I had to figure out:
- I don’t like using inetpub, so had to set up permissions for IIS to use one of my document directories as root. Both IIS_IUSRS and IUSR needed to have read access to my site
- Once a local browser could access the site, I had to open a hole in the Vista firewall on port 80. Didn’t seem to be pre-defined, so I had to create a custom firewall rule that I decided to call “Port 80”
Makes me wonder if there’s some button somewhere I could have pushed to enable anonymous web access to this directory? But mostly it makes me wonder if I really want to mess with old crufty ASP pages. I already know how to edit Apache conf files. I don’t want to learn how to use a whole new interface.
Thinking about it, the thing that really gets me is that I don’t much care for learning new operating systems. I’m comfortable with XP (I use an XP laptop at work). I can get Linux to run all the web servers I need. And none of that seems to be much help with Vista, where whenever I need to do something new I find myself using google to find answers to newbie questions.
