Robert McMurray

FTP Clients - Part 2: Explicit FTPS versus Implicit FTPS

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:46:00 GMT

In part 2 of my series on FTP clients, I thought it would be best to have a discussion about the differences between Implicit FTPS and Explicit FTPS . In my recent " FTP Clients - Part 1: Web Browser Support " blog post, I referenced Implicit and Explicit FTPS with a link to my Using FTP Over SSL walkthrough. But it occurred to me that some people may not understand the difference between the two, and my upcoming blog posts are going to build upon that knowledge, so I thought that a quick discussion of these two technologies would be prudent. FTP over SSL (FTPS) One of the many limitations of the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a general lack of security; e.g. user names and passwords are transmitted in clear text, data is transferred with no...(read more)

Using Visual Studio 2008 on a 64-bit Computer to edit ApplicationHost.config

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:49:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2008 as an XML Editor Everyone seems to have their own favorite XML editor these days, and there are no shortages of XML editors in the marketplace. The being said, I tend to use Visual Studio 2008 for several reasons, and if you're using Windows notepad or some other editor, here are some of my reasons why you might consider switching: I've already bought a copy of Visual Studio for application development, so I don't need to purchase another utility. I'm already familiar with the Visual Studio interface and features, so I don't need to learn another user interface. Syntactical highlighting - Visual Studio makes it easy to see your XML in a user-friendly set of colors. If you already use Visual Studio for application development...(read more)

AppCmd 80070057 errors when configuring site-level settings

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:20:00 GMT

I had an interesting question from a coworker who was trying to use AppCmd to set the site-level SSL options for an FTP site. This should have been straightforward, and the syntax that he gave me looked correct: appcmd.exe set config -section:system.applicationHost/sites -[name='Default FTP Site'].ftpServer.security.ssl.controlChannelPolicy:SslAllow /commit:apphost That being said, whenever he or I ran the command we received the following cryptic error from AppCmd: Failed to process input: The parameter 'Site'].ftpServer.security.ssl.controlChannelPolicy='SslAllow'' must begin with a / or - (HRESULT=80070057). The HRESULT=80070057 code can mean either "One or more arguments are invalid" or "The parameter is incorrect", which seemed wrong to...(read more)

'Category does not exist' error when viewing IIS Worker Processes in IIS Manager

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:45:00 GMT

I ran into an interesting problem recently when using the new Worker Processes feature in the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager for IIS 7.0. The Worker Processes feature is a great addition to IIS, and it's used to view practical information about the worker processes that are currently in use on your system; for example: the names of application pools that are associated with worker processes, worker process PIDs, CPU and byte usage statistics, etc. So it's understandable that I was a little taken aback when I double-clicked the feature recently and I was greeted with an error dialog that stated " There was an error while performing this operation. Details: Category does not exist. " The last time that I saw that error dialog was...(read more)

FTP Clients - Part 1: Web Browser Support

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 02:16:00 GMT

Since we've been testing a lot of FTP clients with our new FTP server for IIS 7 , I thought that it would be a good idea to discuss some of the highlights and pitfalls that we have run into when testing various clients. I thought that I'd begin this series with an examination of several web browsers, which are really not the best FTP clients around - web browsers are mostly just "putting a pretty face" on an FTP site rather than functioning as an FTP client. In any event, here's a summary table of different features that I tested with a few web browsers: Client Name Directory Browsing Explicit FTPS Implicit FTPS Virtual Hosts True HOSTs FireFox 3.0.2 (Mozilla) Rich N N Y N Google Chrome 0.2.149 (Beta) Basic N N Y N Internet Explorer 7.0 Basic...(read more)

URL Rewrite Module and Digest Authentication

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 23:37:00 GMT

With the Go Live release for the URL Rewrite Module having just been shipped, I thought that I'd address a problem that you might run into if you're using Digest Authentication . RFC 2069 states that a client sends the server a checksum of the username, password, nonce value, HTTP method, and the requested URI. Unfortunately, when rewriting the URL, the client and server have separate ideas of what the actual URL is, so Digest Authentication will fail when authenticating against a rewritten URL. Here's a practicle example: Let's say that you have an ASP application that retrieves items from a catalog. The URL for the catalog page is "/catalog.aspx" and clients pass the catalog number on the query string as "ID=[some number]". This yields an...(read more)

Data Mining UrlScan 3.0 Logs using LogParser 2.2

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:04:00 GMT

We released a new version of UrlScan recently, and one of the great new features in this version is log files that conform to the W3C Extended Log File Format . What this means to administrators is that they can now parse their UrlScan activity using almost any common log utilities, including Microsoft's LogParser 2.2 utility. For anyone that hasn't heard of LogParser, this is a freeware utility from Microsoft that allows you to write SQL-style queries to extract useful information. Eventually I'd like for the following information to show up on the http://learn.iis.net/ web site, but for now I'd like everyone to at least have access to the information. Getting Started Downloading and Installing UrlScan and LogParser The download locations for...(read more)

FTP and ETW Tracing

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 22:44:00 GMT

My good friend Suditi Lahiri has written a terrific blog entry about one of the great new features in the FTP 7 service - which is Event tracing for Windows, or ETW for short. You can read her post at the following URL: http://blogs.iis.net/sudt/archive/2008/08/28/collecting-etw-traces-for-ftp-sessions.aspx Here's where this feature pays off - ETW tracing allows you to see some of the events that are going on inside the FTP service while its running without trying to attach a debugger to the service host. Another good friend of mine is Jaroslav Dunajsky , and he wrote a batch file that we use internally when testing the FTP server that automates some of the tasks that Suditi discussed in her blog. I created an abridged version of Jaroslav's...(read more)

Life after FPSE (Part 4)

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 02:14:00 GMT

In continuation from my previous blog posts on on the subject of migrating from FPSE to WebDAV, today's blog post will address a combination of issues that I've run into and some implementation ideas. Listing content in virtual directories One different that I ran into rather quickly after I migrated a couple of web sites from FPSE to WebDAV was that suddenly my virtual directories were visible in my web authoring tool, which is Microsoft Expression Web. By default, virtual directories didn't show up when using FPSE - you had to explicitly "install" FPSE on individual virtual directories in order to use them from FrontPage or Visual Studio over the FPSE protocol. For one web site this was somewhat alarming, because I had a web site...(read more)

Life after FPSE (Part 3)

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:09:51 GMT

In continuation from on my blog posts on April 17th and April 23rd , today's blog post will continue to examine moving from the FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE) to WebDAV, and today I'm going to address a combination of issues that I've run into and questions that I've received from customers. WebDAV Authoring Rules versus FPSE Roles FPSE had a variety of built-in roles defined that have no replacement in a WebDAV world, but in all actuality most of those roles have no meaning in a WebDAV world. FPSE Roles were built around a set of User Rights, with several predefined roles like Administrator, Author, Contributor, and Browser. Each of these predefined roles contained various User Rights, and you could create your own roles from scratch by...(read more)

Life after FPSE (Part 2)

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:56:57 GMT

Following up on my last blog post , today's blog post will discuss some of the highlights and pitfalls that I have seen while transitioning from using the FrontPage Server Extensions to publish web sites to WebDAV. It should be noted, of course, that FTP still works everywhere - e.g. Expression Web, FrontPage, Visual Studio, etc. As the Program Manager for both WebDAV and FTP in IIS I can honestly say that I love both technologies, but I'm understandably biased. <grin> That said, I'm quite partial to publishing over HTTP whenever possible, and Windows makes it easy to do because Windows ships with a built-in WebDAV redirector that enables you to map a drive to a web site that is using WebDAV. To set the mood for today's blog, let's have...(read more)

Life after FPSE (Part 1)

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:59:00 GMT

Today's blog post will be the first in a series of blog posts that I intend to write about my experiences with putting together a Windows Server 2008 machine without using the FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE) for any web publishing. The main goal of this series is to describe some of the highlights and pitfalls that I have run into while transitioning away from FPSE. Over the years I've seen the users of FPSE broken down into two groups: those that love FPSE and those that hate FPSE. So before anyone thinks that I fall into the category of people that hate FPSE, in this first part of the series I will explain a brief bit of my history with FPSE. My Personal Background with FPSE In late 1995, Microsoft bought a little-known Massachusetts-based...(read more)

WebDAV Extension for Windows Server 2008 RTM is released!

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:45:00 GMT

Earlier today the Microsoft released the RTM version of the new Microsoft WebDAV Extension for IIS 7.0 for Windows Server 2008! Listed below are the links for the download pages for each of the individual installation packages: 32-bit Installation Package : WebDAV (x86) Extension Module for IIS 7.0 64-bit Installation Package : WebDAV (x64) Extension Module for IIS 7.0 We've loaded this version with many great new features such as: Integration with IIS 7.0 : The new WebDAV extension module is fully integrated with the new IIS 7.0 administration interface and configuration store. Per-site Configuration : WebDAV can be enabled and configured at the site-level on IIS 7.0, which differed from IIS 6.0 where WebDAV was enabled at the server-level...(read more)

FREB: LOG_FILE_MAX_SIZE_TRUNCATE

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 22:36:00 GMT

OK - I have to admit that one of my favorite features for IIS 7 is " Failed Request Tracing ", otherwise known as " FREB ". I've taught breakout sessions about FREB at Microsoft TechEd , and IT administrators love it. (By the way - FREB was originally called " Failed Request Event Buffering ", in case you're wondering why the acronym doesn't match. ;-] ) Anyway, FREB is designed as "no repro" tracing, where you can set up tracing rules for specific conditions and IIS will generate log files if those rules are triggered. I like to refer to this as " set it and forget it " logic, because you enable your tracing conditions and then check for log files later. I enabled FREB tracing for HTTP 500 errors on a new server recently, and I enabled it at...(read more)

Automating IIS 7 Backups

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 21:40:00 GMT

Many years ago I wrote the following KB article: How To Schedule Metabase Backups Using WSH Truth be told, I wrote the script in that article to help me manage several servers that I controlled. Once I finished the script, I found myself routinely giving it out to customers in order for them to automate their backups, so I decided to turn it into a KB. When IIS 6 came out, Microsoft shipped the IIsBack.vbs script to help customers automate backups. One of the great things in IIS 7 is the deprecation of the metabase, which has been replaced by applicationHost.config, but the need for backing up your configuration settings is still there. With this in mind, I wrote a small batch file that I schedule to create backups of my configuration settings...(read more)