hosterposter : Tips and Tricks

Hosting ASP.NET for .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 in Medium or Partial Trust

Hoster Poster — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 18:26:00 GMT

If you're hosting the .NET Framework 3.5 (Beta 2) or planning on it, keep in mind there is some additional work required for the Beta 2 bits. The attached document describes two issues (and their corresponding workarounds) when hosting ASP.NET websites using .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 under Medium or partial trust. The issues and workarounds apply only to .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2, and will be addressed in the final version of the product. The first issue is for developers and this section explains what they need to change so they can create partial trust applications in Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. The second issue covers what a hoster needs to enable in Code Access Security on the server in order to host an ASP.NET application in partial trust...(read more)

ASP.NET applications running out of memory?

Hoster Poster — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 19:40:00 GMT

One thing you can do to help save memory usage is to enable the WorkstationGC. The GC, or garbage collector, manages the memory for appDomains. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911716...(read more)

Using WMI to change the local administrator password for all servers in an OU or Container

Hoster Poster — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 20:31:00 GMT

Just sharing a nice little script to query all the computers in an OU and change the local Administrator password for each one. One thing to note, if your computers happen to be in the default Computers container, you need to change the LDAP query from "OU=Finance" to "CN=Computers" (CN indicates container). http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/resources/qanda/oct04/hey1015.mspx...(read more)

Getting 64-bit or 32-bit applications working on IIS 6.0 x64

Hoster Poster — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 18:28:00 GMT

When running on x64 hardware, you have two options. First, to run in native 64-bit mode. This means all the applications running need to be 64-bit. The second is to run worker processes in 32-bit mode, which means all applications need to be 32-bit. This gives you good compatibility and performance is really good too. Here's how to install the 32-bit or 64-bit versions of ASP.NET, as well as the option you need to run for IIS to get them working. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894435...(read more)

SharePoint (WSS v3) Guidance for Shared Hosting

Hoster Poster — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 02:59:00 GMT

SharePoint v3 offers a lot of great features and functionality for hosters and this whitepaper talks about how to use these features to create a shared hosting solution. The whitepaper is built upon lessons learned from a dozen or so hosting partners conducted over the past several months. The guide includes things like ways to deploy SharePoint, how to use forms authentication with SharePoint, how to provision SharePoint sites, migration from WSS v2 to v3 and even a section about deployment issues in hosting scenarios. Download it here: http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?AssetID=AM102157711033 The SharePoint team also has a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint ....(read more)

Hosting IIS with UNC content - Network BIOS commands and other errors

Hoster Poster — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 11:03:00 GMT

IIS and UNC - everyone wants to know more. The ASP.NET 2.0 Deployment Guide already talks about configuring ASP.NET over UNC. So now, let's explore SMB work contexts and how they are a huge factor for IIS/UNC configurations. Between two Windows server, one SMB connection is opened. Within that connection there are a number of work items or contexts that are used. These registry keys control the number of work contexts permitted within that connection. Translation: A web site has a remote file share as the home directory path. IIS receives file change notifications so that if a file changes, IIS is aware of it and could un-cache and re-read the files, for instance. This consumes a work context. Now let's say there are hundreds or thousands...(read more)

Programmatically manage R2 quotas using cmd-line tools

Hoster Poster — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:16:00 GMT

Most folks are aware that Windows Server 2003 R2 offers directory-based quotas, a great new feature that is better for some hosters than the volume/user based quotas in Windows 2003 Server RTM and SP1. To get quota going in R2, generally you can just add a quota template that gives 150MB to each directory. This is a global template that applies to all folders on your E: drive, for example. But let's say you'd like to customize quotas for each customer's directory, if they pay for more disk space for example. Many times you would like to be able to do this programmatically from another machine. To achieve this goal, you can use the command-line tools available (dirquota, filescrn or storrept) and run them remotely. Here is an overview...(read more)

SQL Server Management Studio - Limiting views on shared servers

Hoster Poster — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 15:35:00 GMT

Shared servers usually have many databases belonging to different customers, and MS SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) will display all those databases when used by a valid login to connect to SQL Server 2005. If you seek to change that default behavior, you can do so with a SQL Server 2005 configuration change. Here's how to make the change. Simply revoke View any database from public, on your SQL 2005 servers, and customers of a shared server, will only see their database, provided you've made the customer the owner of the database. An easy way to do this is with the stored procedure sp_changedbowner (Alter Database can be used too) Here's simplistic sample T-SQL that illustrates the procedure to affect the change on SQL 2005...(read more)

SQL Server Management Studio - Limiting views on shared servers

Hoster Poster — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 11:35:00 GMT

Enabling WebPermission in Medium Trust

Hoster Poster — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 18:11:00 GMT

The goal of Code Access Security (CAS) is to reduce the attack surface by enabling applications to run with minimum required permissions to function. In ASP.NET 1.1 there were some limitations in enabling oleDB access in a partial trust setting based on medium trust, this limitation has been resolved in ASP.NET 2.0. For more general information about using CAS with ASP.net 2.0 see http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnnetsec/html/THCMCh19.asp . We recommend that hosters run in Medium trust because most applications will function correctly and provide a good level of protection to your server and other applications on your server by restricting certain functionality. However, we know that some common functionality...(read more)