Trying Ruby

I want to create a web page for monitoring the health of our production server. The page would gather data from different places and display them in a dashboard kinda format. I didn't really want to use Java for this and instead decided to give Ruby on Rails a try.

Getting Ruby On Rails running on Windows in a Microsoft shop isn't trivial. Ruby (RubyGems) is really not designed for a Windows based corporate environment. I immediately ran into the firewall problem: we are running a MS firewall that uses NTLM authentication and Ruby doesn't support that out of the box.

I spent a few hours browsing around, reading blogs and articles, trying various things. Finally ran across a post pointing to a gem that interfaces with the native NTLM library: rubysspi-1.0.4-i386-mswin32.gem. After mocking about with it for a little while and finally RTFMing, I managed to get it to work and got RoR downloaded and installed.