rakkimk : IIS7

IIS7 – To be noted while using Expression Encoder to upload large files to IIS server

rakkimk — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:09:36 GMT

Internet is full of videos, and you have a power packed set of tools for IIS to make media streaming top-notch experience. You have IIS Media Pack enabling intelligent progressive downloads, smooth streaming, throttling, etc. You have tools from Microsoft such as Expression Encoder……..

Read the full post at http://blogs.msdn.com/rakkimk/archive/2009/07/30/iis7-to-be-noted-while-using-expression-encoder-to-upload-large-files-to-iis-server.aspx

IIS7 – Improving ASP.NET performance (concurrent requests) while on Integrated Mode

rakkimk — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:58:55 GMT

If you were a ASP.NET 1.1 developer, and faced some performance problems, I’m sure you would have come across the KB 821268 which talks about tweaking maxWorkerThreads, maxIoThreads in the <processModel>, minFreeThreads, minLocalRequestFreeThreads in <httpRuntime>, maxconnection in the <connectionManagement> section. But for ASP.NET 2.0, we have <processModel autoConfig=”true” /> where these settings are tweaked in the runtime……

…………………………………

Read the rest of the blog post here.

http://blogs.msdn.com/rakkimk/archive/2009/07/08/iis7-improving-asp-net-performance-concurrent-requests-while-on-integrated-mode.aspx

IIS7 – Configuring iisClientCertificateMappingAuthentication using appcmd

rakkimk — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:07:38 GMT

As you know there is no UI to configure iisClientCertificateMappingAuthentication in IIS7, it takes a little more time to configure the site for the same. Here is an article in the iis.net site which explains the steps one by one……………

Read the rest of the post here

http://blogs.msdn.com/rakkimk/archive/2009/07/08/iis7-configuring-iisclientcertificatemappingauthentication.aspx

IIS7 – (my) Improved Backup Restore Tool, and a UI Module

rakkimk — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:28:15 GMT

NOTE : Before you even read about this module, I want to mention that I do not work for IIS product team at Microsoft, but in Product Support for IIS and ASP.NET. This module/application is purely out of my interest, and this is not an official release by Microsoft and hence NOT supported by Microsoft Services.

When I wrote my BackupRestore module UI module a while back, many people asked for few modifications, with the ability to take a complete backup of all the IIS configurations – because some of the IIS configurations can now lie within the individual web.configs of the applications…

Read the rest of the post here - http://blogs.msdn.com/rakkimk/archive/2009/06/08/iis7-improved-backup-restore-tool-and-a-ui-module.aspx

IIS7 - Getting HTTP 500.19 while accessing the website

rakkimk — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:07:23 GMT

I recently worked with one of my customer who was getting “HTTP 500.19” error while browsing the website.

Server Error in Application "application name"
HTTP Error 500.19 – Internal Server Error
HRESULT: 0x8007000d
Description of HRESULT
The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid.

Err tool showed “STIERR_INVALID_HW_TYPE” for 0x8007000d error code.

With further troubleshooting found that he had a virtual directory configured for a UNC share, and had a wrong password mentioned. Entered the proper credentials, and the problem went away.

This error message is a generic error message which would occur when the site configuration data present in the applicationHost.config has a malformed entry, or not a valid data (in our case it was the wrong password for the UNC connection, and the IIS cannot read its web.config file to check if there is any system.webserver setting mentioned)

IIS7 Tweet #2: Modifying an existing binding for the website

rakkimk — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:21:58 GMT

appcmd.exe set config -section:system.applicationHost/sites /[name='Default Web Site'].bindings.[protocol='http',bindingInformation='*:80:'].bindingInformation:"*:80:www.test.com" /commit:apphost

IIS7 Tweet #1 : Setting UploadReadAheadSize

rakkimk — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:18:00 GMT

appcmd.exe set config -section:system.webServer/serverRuntime /uploadReadAheadSize:"49152" /commit:apphost

Configuring IIS to advise the browser render on different IE modes

rakkimk — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:11:00 GMT

You would have already read IIS support team’s blog about configuring IIS to send an additional header to the client which would make IE to run under EmulateIE7 mode. I would also suggest you to read this MSDN article which talks about the various IE8 display modes available, and their corresponding functionality.

Here are the possible display modes and their corresponding value to be set for the “X-UA-Compatible” meta element (or for the same custom HTTP Header)

Emulate IE8 mode           -->   IE=EmulateIE8
Emulate IE7 mode           -->   IE=EmulateIE7
IE5 mode                         --> IE=5
IE7 mode                         --> IE=7.5
IE8 mode                         --> IE=8
Edge mode                      --> IE=Edge

Check this blog to know the syntax to add to your IIS6/IIS7 web servers. Make sure you read this MSDN article to understand the differences between the EmulateIE7 and IE7 mode – they are not just the same. There is an additional <!DOCTYPE> which will come to decide which mode to display when you use EmulateIE7 mode. This understanding is more important before you go ahead and make the changes to your web servers. So, make sure you know what you are doing!

Hope this helps!

IIS7 and Twitter – a love story

rakkimk — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 16:55:13 GMT

It is a while that I wrote something as crazy as this one is. This is basically a windows service running in your web server which would tweet often about the heart beat of the web server and posts its status messages. For example, v1.0 of this application will tweet the below (you can configure the time interval on the config file):

Total number of requests executing per application pool
Each Application pool Private bytes, and Virtual bytes memory usage
Server’s available Physical memory, and Virtual memory
Momentary Ping to a configured URL (example – http://localhost) (it will tweet only if it fails – for the moment I’m just checking if the HttpWebResponse.StatusCode != HttpStatusCode.OK. If time permits, I’ll try to add more granular control for the error codes)
If a request takes more than specified time limit to get served

There is a configuration file in which you can specify the Twitter Username, and password, time interval for each set of tweets, the URLs you want to monitor, and option to turn off the tweets.

For example, if a request is taking more than the configured time limit, it will tweet “Alert > /Default.aspx is being processed for 79s spending 79s IsapiModule | AppPool : Default Web Site” which will just say the URL, the time taken, which Module currently processes it, and the application pool serving the request.

Get IIS7TweetService to your server

Download the Service EXE, and a sample config.xml which are inside the IIS7TweetService.zip file.
Extract the contents to C:\IIS7TweetService (this location cannot be changed as I’ve hard coded the config file path. I’ll be allowing you to place it in some other folder in the future versions)
Install the IIS7TweetService.exe as a Windows Service (from your Visual Studio Command Prompt run “installutil /i C:\IIS7TweetService\IIS7TweetService.exe”

Feel free to leave your comments in this blog, and your feature requests for the future versions if you like this one.

PS : I’ve only done a very limited testing on Vista and Windows Server 2008, so use it with caution. If I find time, I’ll try doing more testing and improve its efficiency. In case if you find a problem using this, please let me know. Your comments, and suggestions are most welcome.

ASP.NET 2.0 x64 – You may get HTTP 400 Bad Request or Error as mentioned in KB 932552 or 826437

rakkimk — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 02:24:32 GMT

I’m sure you already know about this fix for ASP.NET which fixes an issue of “not a valid path” exception, and this fix for ASP.NET 1.1 for the same reason. If you receive this error now on your application, you might not need to apply the hotfix because your ASP.NET version might be higher than the one available with this hotfix, so verify the DLL versions before even requesting the hotfix from Microsoft.

So, after installing the hotfix, you should do the below registry changes (not sure if the hotfix does this automatically – I haven’t tested this):

DWORD HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ASP.NET\VerificationCompatibility = 1

as mentioned in the KB article 932552. But, you might see that this doesn’t work if you run the application pool under 32-bit mode on a x64 Windows Server 2003 or 2008. That’s just because, the ASP.NET reads this key from a different location as below:

DWORD HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\ASP.NET\VerificationCompatibility = 1

I’m sure you doesn’t want me to explain why ASP.NET reads from this location instead of above. If you want, please drop a note.

In IIS 7.0, you would get the below error message while running under Integrated mode:

“HTTP Error 400.0 - Bad Request
ASP.NET detected invalid characters in the URL”

Hope this helps!

.rm

IIS7 – Enabling Custom Error Pages

rakkimk — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:36:08 GMT

As the title sounds, here I’m going to discuss a very simple feature of IIS7 which has one additional step to keep in mind compared to that you do in the previous versions of IIS (5, 5.1, 6). Let’s take an example of configuring a redirect for a page to HTTPS if it is browsed on HTTP. There are a lot of ways doing this HTTP to HTTPS redirection, where using custom error pages is one of them.

If you force HTTPS to be used in your website, error 403.4 would be returned to the browser. By default detailed error message (403.4) won’t be sent to the browser, but just 403. However, you can enable detailed error messages. Now, we need to configure our error page so that it redirects the requests to HTTPS. You can do it by following this KB article which was written for IIS 5, and 6, but holds good for IIS 7.0 as well.

Just adding an entry would enable this rule functioning, but if you try to test from your local server itself which most of the people would do after configuring this, you would see it doesn’t redirect you to the URL mentioned, and it gives you the same 403.4 error page.

That’s because of IIS 7.0 by default doesn’t send the custom error pages to a local request, but the detailed errors. So, you need to configure IIS to do a custom error message even if it is browsed from the server. But, you can ignore following below if you doesn’t care if the site redirects from the server (which is true for any customer facing website). Click on “Edit Feature Settings, and then choose “Custom error pages”, and click on OK.

So, take away from this post is “don’t try to test the custom error pages from the server itself after configuring it, since they are by default disabled for any local request”.

.rm

IIS7 - Writing your first custom UI module with all winform controls

rakkimk — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:04:00 GMT

You should follow this article on IIS.net to create your first “simple” IIS7 UI extension which would just display a message box when loaded.

In this blog, I’m going to explain you how you could design a UI module where you can add any UI control that you might add to a WinForm.

Basically, the UI which appears in the middle pane is just an extension of Windows Form, and you can easily design that using Visual Studio. For example, the below “SSL settings” page has few checkboxes, radio buttons, and Apply/Cancel on the Actions pane.

All your controls should be placed or added into a class within your assembly which should derive from Microsoft.Web.Management.Client.Win32.ModulePage.

Before we start adding a class deriving from ModulePage, please make sure you have completed your Module and ModuleProvider classes by following this article, and also make sure your assembly would be put in GAC. Your project should look like below with DemoKey.snk, and also the proper references to the Microsoft.Web.Management, and Microsoft.Web.Administration:

Adding a ModulePage

Add a new class to the existing project, and name it as MyPage.cs. Derive the class from Microsoft.Web.Management.Client.Win32.ModulePage. Now, let’s try to add some code which runs when this ModulePage runs – let’s put a MessageBox on the constructor.

Below is how my code looks now:

Code Snippet displaying a simple message box

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using Microsoft.Web.Management.Client.Win32;

namespace MyIIS7UIExtensions
{
    internal class MyPage : ModulePage
    {
        public MyPage()
        {
            MessageBox.Show("Testing this!!!!");
        }
    }
}

You should build the assembly, and put it in the assembly (dll) in the GAC, and add the below to your administrationHost.config:

<moduleProviders>

<add name="MyIIS7UIExtensions" type="MyIIS7UIExtensions.MyModuleProvider, MyIIS7UIExtensions, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=db9daa3d2ea5f6fd" />

........

</moduleProviders>

<modules>

<add name="MyIIS7UIExtensions" />

.........

</module>

You should see the below in your IIS manager.

If you double click on the “MyIIS7UIExtensions”, you should see the below message box, and if you click OK, then you would see the whole UI, but no controls. Just because you haven’t added them still J

If you get to this stage, then you are almost there in making your real IIS7 UI extension, rest of the steps are really easy if you are a windows forms programmer.

Adding Winform controls to our UI Extension

Let’s say you want to have a combo box listing all the application pools that are available. How to design that? First, you have to add the combo box inside your ModulePage.

        public MyPage()
        {
            this.Controls.Add(new ComboBox());
        }

The above code will add a new combo box. But, you want to really specify how it should appear, and its co-ordinates, don’t you?

Modified constructor to specify the co-ordinates for the combo box

       public MyPage()
        {
            ComboBox comboBox1;
            comboBox1 = new System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox();
            comboBox1.Location = new System.Drawing.Point(20, 20);
            comboBox1.Name = "comboBox1";
            comboBox1.Size = new System.Drawing.Size(121, 21);
            comboBox1.TabIndex = 0;
            this.Controls.Add(this.comboBox1);
        }

Now, imagine if you want to add TextBoxes, Buttons, et al, and define the event handlers such as to handle button click, how much time you would invest in designing this manually? Don’t you love dragging and dropping controls to create your ModulePage as a so-called Windows Form?

Don’t worry! I’ve an easy way to overcome this difficulty. Read this earlier blog of mine where I explain this little VS trick to minimize your development time to design this UI extension. But come back to this blog after visiting that, I’m going to further discuss how to display the available application pools on the combo box, and going to provide a button to say the selected application pool to recycle.

And, my IIS UI extension looks like below now:

If you do not see the below after you’ve designed using Visual Studio using the above method, you might also want to verify is the InitializeComponent() method is called in the constructor – that’s the function where all your stuffs get added to the form (ModulePage).

Now, let’s write a method which would fill the combo box with all the application pools that are available by reading the IIS configuration store using Microsoft.Web.Adminsitration. Let’s name our function as LoadAppPoolInfo(), and call that from our constructor after calling InitializeComponent() method.

Your code should look like below:

Added a ServerManager, and modified the constructor to call LoadAppPoolInfo() and defined that as well

        Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager manager = new Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager();
        public MyPage()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            LoadAppPoolInfo();
        }

        private void LoadAppPoolInfo()
        {
            foreach (Microsoft.Web.Administration.WorkerProcess a in manager.WorkerProcesses)
                comboBox2.Items.Add(a.AppPoolName);
        }

And, your UI extension should now display the available application pools in the combo box. Go ahead and add a button click event handler for the button which you’ve already put inside our ModulePage like below:

        private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            manager.ApplicationPools[comboBox2.SelectedItem.ToString()].Recycle();
        }

Now, go ahead and play with all the classes in Microsoft.Web.Administration to make your own modules to do a lot more than what’s provided in the default IIS7 manager UI.

You can download my sample project here:

Please do post your questions if you have any.

IIS7 – Prevent the server sending its private IP address for a request made by HTTP/1.0 clients with no host header

rakkimk — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:35:17 GMT

Do you remember this problem earlier with IIS sending the server’s private address for a request made for a non host-header site in its headers? You were setting UseHostName or SetHostName property in the metabase to stop the server sending the private IP address. This KB article had the hotfix details, and you need to follow the more information section to be able to stop the server sending.

So, what now in IIS7? No metabase right? There is no equivalent to UseHostName, but system.webServer/serverRuntime/alternateHostName is the equivalent to the SetHostName. Below is the appcmd syntax to set this:

appcmd.exe set config  -section:system.webServer/serverRuntime /alternateHostName:"YourServerName"  /commit:apphost

I did use the IIS7 Configuration Editor’s “Generate Script” option to generate the above, isn’t that really handy?

How to configure IIS 7.0 for ODBC logging?

rakkimk — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:54:46 GMT

If you select Log File format as “Custom” in the IIS manager, it doesn’t give you options to configure ODBC logging in the UI. Instead, it just gives you an alert saying it cannot be configured through IIS manager which you already know.

But, in the previous versions of IIS, you would see the below:

So, in this post I will explain how to configure IIS7.0 site for ODBC logging. You still want to check out this KB for the database, table related information which needs to be created prior to this IIS configuration change.

Changing LogFile Format and the customLogPluginClsid

To configure ODBC, you might need to know the log plugin ID for the ODBC logging. In IIS 6.0, it was LogModuleId, and if you do a search for “ODBC logging” in your Metabase.XML file, you might find this property with value “{FF16065B-DE82-11CF-BC0A-00AA006111E0}”. We are going to use the same in IIS 7.0, but in the ApplicationHost.config file as customLogPluginClsid.

You need to find the <logFile> node in ApplicationHost.config, and that should look like below:

<logFile customLogPluginClsid="{FF16065B-DE82-11CF-BC0A-00AA006111E0}" logFormat="Custom" />

Below are the AppCmds to do this:

appcmd set site /site.name:"Default Web Site" /logFile.customLogPluginClsid:"{FF16065B-DE82-11CF-BC0A-00AA006111E0}"
appcmd site set /site.name:"Default Web Site" /logFile.logFormat:"Custom"

Now, we have just configured IIS to use ODBC logging for our default website. We still need to configure the required DSN name, table-name, username and password to do the ODBC logging.

Configuring ODBC logging parameters in ApplicationHost.config

After you’ve followed this KB article to create database, table, and DSN, you need to make sure you configure ApplicationHost.config to contain the information. You need to configure those settings in <odbcLogging> node under <system.webServer>. Below is my sample configuration:

<location path="Default Web Site">
<system.webServer>
<odbcLogging dataSource="ODBCLogging" tableName="HTTPLog" userName="Username" password="mypassword” />"
</system.webServer>
</location>

Below are the AppCmds to configure the above attributes for the site:

appcmd set config "Default Web Site" /section:odbcLogging /dataSource:"ODBCLogging" /commit:appHost
appcmd set config "Default Web Site" /section:odbcLogging /tableName:"ODBCLogTable" /commit:appHost
appcmd set config "Default Web Site" /section:odbcLogging /userName:"Username" /commit:appHost
appcmd set config "Default Web Site" /section:odbcLogging /password: "mypassword" /commit:appHost

Also, we do not support configuring ODBC logging feature in IIS using the SQL Native Client ODBC driver. You must use the SQL Server ODBC driver. You might want to take a look at this KB article on this.

Hope this helps! Do post a comment if you have any questions on this.

IIS7 - Administration Pack - technical preview released

rakkimk — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 03:05:00 GMT

Here are the links to download the new IIS7 admin pack - technical preview version:

Administration Pack for IIS 7.0 (x86)

Administration Pack for IIS 7.0 (x64)

This comes with a lot of features which would make life simpler for the web administrators. Below are few of them:

Configuration Editor

This gives you an UI way of directly editing any of your configuration present in your applicationHost.config file; and this is available for administrators only, and you know why!

IIS Reports

It was an UI extension released a while ago, and now a part of the admin pack. An awesome tool which uses LogParser to create charts, diagrams, reports about various data stored in the log files. You need to have LogParser installed to use this one. You can download LogParser from here.

Database Manager

This gives you an UI to manage the existing database connections inside the IIS7 manager itself. you can edit tables, query, et al. The database connections are pulled from those are added through "Connection Strings" UI module under ASP.NET in IIS7 manager.

Request Filtering UI Module

Here comes my most awaited UI module with this admin pack. In fact I started writing one, but stopped after knowing that this one is coming. Pretty easy way to add Request Filtering rules.

FastCGI settings UI Module

Another UI module to change the FastCGI settings.

.NET Error Pages

The UI module which can be used to add .NET error pages directly into the configuration file.

.NET Authorization Rules

Finally one for the ASP.NET Authorization rules.

I'm sure these modules will make the life of an administrator much easier, especially the "Request Filtering" one. It would have been difficult to use all the available features of this feature without this UI module since you need to know the schema of the <requestFiltering> section to know what are the configurations available, and what are the different attributes.

Here are some learning documents on this tool.

Overview of Functionality

IIS Reports Available

Using IIS Reports Remotely

Install the Administration Pack

Basics of Database Manager

Using Config Editor: Generate Scripts

Editing Collections with Configuration Editor

Editing Collections using Configuration Editor: Complex Sections

Kudos to the development team!