Rick Barber's Blog

April IIS Community Newsletter

2013-04-29T18:07:10Z

For the latest news and happenings in the IIS community, be sure to check out the April edition of the IIS Community Newsletter! http://www.iisnewsletter.com/archive/april2013.html If you’re not a subscriber, don’t miss out and have it delivered directly to your inbox. You can subscribe at the link below: http://www.iisnewsletter.com/Subscribe.aspx Enjoy!...(read more)

Getting Started With URL Rewrite

2013-04-10T16:03:38Z

As a server administrator, primarily focused on IIS, I like spending time in the IIS forums . I frequently see questions related to URL Rewrite rules so I wanted to make a guide for the plethora of information that is available on the Internet. The most obvious place to start is on www.iis.net itself. Section 5 of the site is dedicated to the URL rewrite module containing dozens of individual articles devoted to URL Rewrite. You can start here and find all kinds of helpful articles. If you want to...(read more)

Installing SQL Server Native Client 10.0

2013-04-05T17:01:08Z

I came across an issue today where a website had a dependency on the SQL Server Native Client 10.0, which is part of SQL Server 2008. A recent upgrade to SQL Server 2012 caused SQL Server Native Client 11.0 to be installed and version 10.0 to be uninstalled. Different versions of the Native Client can be installed side-by-side, and fortunately there is also a redistributable installation. The documentation shows the redistributable located at %CD%\Setup\ on the installation disk. That is great if...(read more)

CPU Throttling in IIS 8

2013-03-25T21:50:39Z

From time to time I encounter a website that is maxing out the server’s CPU. In previous versions of IIS, there were two basic options. One, you could do nothing. Or two, you could kill the worker process for a specified number of minutes. Neither is a good option for a production website, ultimately causing administrators to scramble for a sandbox solution for the site (especially if there are other sites running on this same server) and developers to drop everything to help track down the offending...(read more)

February IIS Community Newsletter

2013-02-28T19:45:14Z

For the latest news and happenings in the IIS community over the past month, be sure to check out the February edition of the IIS Community Newsletter! http://www.iisnewsletter.com/archive/february2013.html Make sure you don’t miss an edition and get it delivered directly to your inbox. You can subscribe at the link below: http://www.iisnewsletter.com/Subscribe.aspx Enjoy!...(read more)

Working past 500–Internal server error

2013-02-18T20:56:33Z

So you’ve written a new ASP.Net website, tested it locally in your development environment and you deploy it to your IIS server. Now you’re getting the dreaded 500 – Internal server error. What are you to do? As you may know, a HTTP 500 error is a generic error message returned by a web server when it knows something has gone wrong but it is unable to be more specific about the error. That’s not necessarily helpful, though, when you are trying to figure out what is causing the error so you can fix...(read more)

Restricting web site traffic in IIS 7 and IIS 8

2013-02-02T22:07:54Z

Sometimes you need to restrict traffic to your web site or reduce the impact from a rogue bot that is hitting it. Often, the first thought is to restrict that traffic at the perimeter firewall. While that is a good choice, the structure of your organization may prevent that from happening in a timely manner. Or maybe you are frequently making changes to the restrictions making that a cumbersome chore. That’s where the IP Address and Domain Restrictions feature of IIS 7 and IIS 8 comes in handy. If...(read more)

Completely uninstall MySQL from Windows

2013-01-30T18:06:07Z

Some time ago I was running a few tests in my lab environment against a current version of MySQL. A few months later I needed to access it again but I forgot my root password so I wanted to start from scratch. Easy enough, right? Just go to Add/Remove programs in the Control Panel and uninstall MySQL. Not so quick. That didn’t work as expected. While it uninstalled MySQL, it wouldn’t let me reinstall MySQL because the root password was not correct. After doing some research I found that...(read more)

Monitor MS SMTP queue from ASP.Net

2013-01-11T20:44:56Z

I came across a situation today where I needed to monitor the number of files in the Microsoft SMTP queue from a web page. While there are numerous ways I considered approaching this, I wanted it to be simple, portable, and easy to maintain. I decided to fire up Visual Studio 2010 and come up with a quick solution. While I usually choose to use VB.Net, this was a good opportunity to practice up on a little C#. After creating a new C# project, I added a new page, smtpqueue.aspx. In keeping with simplicity...(read more)

Serving files from a remote server in IIS 7

2013-01-08T17:16:29Z

There is a question that I have been seeing more of in recent weeks. While it comes in different varieties, the essence of it has to do with having your files located on a server or device other than the IIS web server. One variety of the question has to do with connecting to the files through a mapped drive. This configuration is not supported although I tried to get this to work through extensive testing without success. Your mileage may vary. The recommended way to load remote files in IIS is...(read more)

How to manage a Windows cloud server

2012-12-21T14:56:04Z

Managing a Windows cloud server can be a relatively easy task; especially if you know the basics. Check out the post I put together with the initial information that you need to know to get the most out of your Windows cloud server. http://www.orcsweb.com/blog/rick/how-to-manage-your-windows-cloud-server/...(read more)

Keeping Multiple IIS 7 Servers in Sync with Shared Configuration

2012-12-05T17:54:38Z

If you have multiple front-end web servers serving up your content for your Internet Application, you will want to keep both the content and the Internet Information Services (IIS) settings synchronized between all the servers. That is where IIS Shared Configuration comes into play. Prior to IIS 7 it was a major headache keeping IIS settings in sync between servers. Fortunately a new feature was introduced in IIS 7 called Shared Configuration. This feature is available at the server level. On your...(read more)

Where is my IIS change going to be applied?

2012-11-30T16:10:07Z

When you make a change to a website in Internet Information Services (IIS) 6, it is straightforward where your change was going to be applied. All information is stored in the Metabase. Starting with IIS 7, information is stored in a variety of places. Sometimes the site or server change that you make is stored in a web.config file at the server level. Other times the change is stored in the main IIS configuration file, aplicationHost.config. To complicate it further, sometimes the change is stored...(read more)

Easy Web Development With IIS Express

2012-11-29T19:49:27Z

Triggered by a question in the forums the other day, I had started working on a blog post about IIS Express and how it works compared to Visual Studio Development web server, also known as Cassini. During my research I came across this well written and comprehensive post that covers everything that I was going to write about and more. Because of the quality of the information in this post, I wanted to have a quick reference to it in my blog and share it with you. http://www.codeproject.com/Articles...(read more)

Send an email when an event is logged

2012-10-26T19:00:19Z

As a systems administrator you may find yourself spending a significant amount of time in Event Viewer looking for specific events. You will be happy to know that there is a new feature that shipped with Windows 2008 and all versions of Windows Server since then that allows you to attach events to a log file so that you can configure a specific action to occur. There is a way to do this in previous versions of Windows Server that is covered below. Perhaps you want to run disk space cleanup when a...(read more)