can't disable some services in msconfig of windows server 2003 - windows-services

I found services tab in msconfig. i have tried to disable the services (eg. rpc) in msconfig. but cannot disable the services. it says it is an essential. i also found one field in the same services tab as "essential". where this essential information is stored in registry?

If a service is essential you should not disable it as it can lead to boot fail and some features of windows not working which could slow your computer down. Only do this if you are sure you know what your are doing. Follow this tutorial http://www.wikihow.com/Access-the-System-Configuration-Utility.

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How to configure Prometheus in a multi-location scenario?

I love using Prometheus for monitoring and alerting. Until now, all my targets (nodes and containers) lived on the same network as the monitoring server.
But now I'm facing a scenario, where we will deploy our application stack (as a bunch of Docker containers) to several client machines in thier networks. Nearly all of the clients networks are behind a firewall or NAT. So scraping becomes quite difficult.
As we're still accountable for our stack, I'd like to have a central montioring server, altering and dashboards.
I was wondering what could be the best architecture if want to implement it with Prometheus, but I couldn't find any convincing approaches. My ideas so far:
Use a Pushgateway on our side and push all data out of the client networks. As the docs state, it's not intended that way: https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/pushing/
Use a federation setup (https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/federation/): Place a Prometheus server in every client network behind a reverse proxy (to enable SSL and authentication) and aggregate relevant metricts there. Open/forward just a single port for federation scraping.
Other more experimental setups, such as SSH Tunneling (e.g. here https://miek.nl/2016/february/24/monitoring-with-ssh-and-prometheus/) or VPN!?
Thank you in advance for your help!
Nobody posted an answer so I will try to give my opinion on the second choice because that's what I think I would do in your situation.
The second setup seems the most flexible, you have access to the datas and only need to open one port on for the federating server, so it should still be secure.
One other bonus of this type of setup is that even if the firewall stop working for a reason or another, you will still have a prometheus scraping, you will have an alert because you won't be able to access the server(s) but when the connexion comes again you will have all the datas. You won't have a hole in the grafana dashboards because there was no datas, apart during the incident.
The issue with this setup is the fact that you need to maintain a number of server equivalent to the number of networks. A solution for this would be to have a packer image or maybe an ansible playbook to deploy.

Amazon Windows Services for VPS, please advise

I need the VPS services for hosting my ASP.NET project.
However, it's not just asp.net hosting, I also need SQL Server, RabbitMq and either my running conrole app or my windows service.
So I read the suggestions to use Amazon Web Services as they provide first year for free.
However when I registered I found that I don't have a clue of where I am:
I don't see the option of creating a virtual machine with Windows
I don't see the option of setting up SQL Server on such the machine
and so on.
So I was wondering whether I'm in the right place?
Please advise if AWS can provide me with what I need or I came to the wrong place?
AWS can provide all that you listed, but you'll need to do some learning on your end.
Basically you create an EC2 instance, and then use RDP to remote into it, and you can install software and configure it to your hearts content - just like it was any other physical server.
If you want to use SQL Server, you'll have the choice of installing it directly on the instance using your own license, or using their 'hosted' version of SQL Server call RDS. You'll need to read about it and decide which option is better for your project - there is no single right way.
Lastly, I will point out that although the 'free-tier' is nice, except for a really small application (i.e. small db on a low traffic website), you may find out the 'free-tier' does not quite give you all the power you need to run a busy application. I would not base your decision on wether or not you should use AWS on how much 'free' stuff you can get. The free-tier is nice for learning, but plan on spending some money for a truly robust solution.

Struggling with the issue of "Cold" code in Standard Azure Websites

I am using MVC3, ASP.NET4.5, EF5, SQL Azure.
I currently use external auto ping services (pingdom and uptime robot) pinging specific urls, not all, to try to keep the site warm. I have noticed that certain parts, perhaps which have not be used since a refresh, particularly to do with DB updates, run slowly to start with.
I understand "Always On" could be a big help, but I am unsure whether it is better than external auto ping services like pingdom? Is it more pervasive within the application?
Many thanks.
In addition to Zain's answer, one more thing "Always On" does is that it keeps all of your instances (VMs) for the website alive and this is something an external pinger will not do as it will ping and get only one of the instances of your website each time.
Yes, "Always On" does exactly what the name sounds like. It keeps the site constantly warm and running, which is exactly what you're trying to do with an external auto ping service. Note that this only is available for Basic and Standard sites.
More details on "Always On" here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/21841469/21539

Writing Minecraft panel in Ruby on Rails

I'm planning on writing a control panel for Minecraft in Rails but I don't have much experience with Java at all, Minecraft seems to have some standard remote connection and query tools, but most conventional panels don't seem to use them. For example with McMyAdmin, I have disabled remote connectiona and the query, but it still seems to be able to communicate with the server after restarting it after I've edited the server configs to disable the settings.
What I'm asking is if anyone knows how McMyAdmin communicates with the Minecraft server, it comes with a plugin, but I've deleted that as well and it still seems to be able to communicate with the server, I know McMyAdmin is written in .NET and I believe it uses Mono as it's server, as it's cross platform.
If anybody could shed some light on this I'd be ever so greatful, just trying to get my head around the communication.
McMyAdmin uses the plugin to open a socket that it can interact with(Not sure which features are provided using this plugin). The rest of the features are just from the Process instance that it creates. It also just edits the config files for a few things as well or runs commands using the input stream of the process.

Emulate terminal services

I am a seasoned Delphi developer and would like to create something like seamless terminal services where an application is executed on a server but appears on the the desktop of the client.
To someone working on the server I don't want them to see the remote application running (except if they looked in at the list of running processes).
I'm lost as to how to go about this, where to start, how to get an application to render to a surface other than the servers desktop.
Starting from 2008 Terminal Services (which has been rebranded to Remote Desktop Services) offers RemoteApps which do exactly what you describe. Citrix (XenApp) can do this on all windows (server) versions. So you might want to look at those products before deciding to recreate them yourself.
If you do decide to go on, this link might be interesting, it's a sample project called "Extending Microsoft's Terminal Services Client To Provide Seamless Windows"
From what you are describing, I'd say you should be looking at writing a windows service (not terminal services) and using a inter-process-communications (IPC) system to get status information to a "client" application that can be run by the appropriate user, either on the same machine or another over the network.
Myself, I do exactly this using the RemObjects SDK which makes my client application look like it is just making function calls, but actually they go to the server which implements them. The server can then get on with its job in one (or more) thread, and all the user interface is done in the client which finds out what to display using the IPC channel.

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