Joe Stagner's Blog

My blog is hosted at MaximumASP.

For a year or so my blog has been hosted in a VM. (A Virtuozzo Instance).

Virtual accounts are awesome because it's way cheaper than a dedicated server but you have full control over the server.  

Virtuozzo has been ok but I've had some issues with it (I don't know if my problems are the software or the implementation.)

Recently MaximumASP launched MAXV. A new virtualization offering based on Microsoft Hyper-V - IT ROCKS.

(Full post on my MaxV / Hyper-V experience coming soon !)

So I took advantage of MaximumASP's new offering to migrate my Virtual Server running Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6 to MAXV running Windows Server 2008 32-Bit and IIS-7 (but you can choose 64 bit or 2003)

IIS7 ROCKS! Especially if you you're running multiple sites or applications.

So I did a complete backup of MisfitGeek.com, migrated my domain name and restored my blog content.

My blog runs on the DasBlog engine.

After I migrated my blog, the home page was fine but ALL the post links failed with 404 errors.

The problem? IIS 7 has enhanced it's innate security in a number of ways that include enhanced url filtering.

My DasBlog version replaced spaces with "+" and IIS 7 filters them.

A friend on Twitter let me know that I could add a setting to the  <system.webServer> section of my configuration.

<security>

<requestFiltering allowDoubleEscaping="true" />

</security>

This didn't seem like a good idea to me since I didn't write the code for DasBlog and didn't know if Double Escaping would create any application security issues. (I've had no security issues with DasBlog)

Luckily the latest version of DasBlog has an update that solves the problem.

I uploaded the new version, (I had already backed up my blog), restored by updated theme, merged my web.config, my site configuration, and my security settings.

And the world was fine again.

Here is some more detailed information about IIS 7 and the Plus Sign !

http://blogs.iis.net/thomad/archive/2007/12/17/iis7-rejecting-urls-containing.aspx

http://zajon.blogspot.com/2008/11/plus-sign-in-iis-7-url.html

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