(UPDATE 9/1/2008) : I'm still in the process of getting all the 'networking' side of things in order, but i reformatted everything and have this blog up and running on a VM right now.  Once I get the networking side of things working 100%, i'll begin the process of moving all my blog entries over to SharePoint.  Which brings up a good point, I should probably make a tool for the conversion process and post it out on codeplex.  I'm sure I'm not the only one that wants or has been meaning to move everything over to SharePoint, i might as well make my time worthwhile.

Since it is a nice long weekend I figured it was about time that I redo my server since it desperately needs it.  If you've noticed, roughly every week and a half or so my server locks up, stops server pages and needs to be rebooted.  The server is still running windows server 2000 and hasn't really been reformated since I got it, roughly 4 years ago.  I figured it's finally time to get up to speed and put windows server 2003 R2 on it (yes, I know, windows server 2008 is out but I'm just not that daring yet)

My goal is to reformat the whole server, have the base OS clean and secure as can be and run everything off virtuals.  The server use to have all sorts of crap that I installed on it for testing purposes so by using the virtuals I can keep the base OS clean and then just delete the testing virtual.  Hopefully in the end of all of this I won't have to restart my server every week and a half.

In addition, I plan on moving this blog finally over to sharepoint.  Its about time that I put my sharepoint blog on a sharepoint server and practice what i preach.  I am all about using the best tools for the job and blogengine and dasBlog have done me well over the years but moving my blog to sharepoint will also help me learn new things about sharepoint. 

If all goes as planned, my blog should be back up by the end of the day.  If something goes horribly wrong, you won't see my blog for awhile and you'll know why.

I ran across this link and thought I would share it with everyone.  I recall a ways back when I was just coming up to speed with SharePoint 2007, I really couldn't figure out which is the "best practice", .dwp web part files or .webpart files.  If you look in the web part gallery, you'll see a mix of both which made it even more difficult to figure it out.  Over at DotNetMafia, Corey Roth was nice enough to write a post telling you what each one does, and how .webpart is the latest version and is the one you should be using. 

Check out the post here