Archives

Archives / 2009

  • Urlscan to RequestFiltering migration using MSDeploy

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    In addition to FastCGI migration provider, MSDeploy 1.0 RTW shipped with a URLScan to request filtering migration provider to ease migration of UrlScan.ini settings to system.webServer/security/requestFiltering section. Even though URLScan 3.1 is supported on Win2K8 and you are not required to move to request filtering module, there are few advantages in using request filtering module. One advantage is that all your configuration can stay together in applicationHost.config and web.config and you are not required to maintain a separate configuration file. Another advantage is that you can take advantages of new configuration system features like distributed configuration, shared configuration, locking, ability to use appcmd, UI, configuration editor etc which cannot be used if you use UrlScan and your configuration is in UrlScan.ini. Read more ...

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  • Feature additions and bug fixes coming up in WinCache

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    We are seeing huge momentum behind adoption of WinCache. In the month of September, WinCache v1 Beta was downloaded more than 13,000 times making it one of the most downloaded IIS extensions in the first month following its release. Many happy customers chose to run it on their production servers despite its beta tag. We got very encouraging feedback from the beta release and we are pushing hard for our next release. Our next release date is approaching fast and I wanted to give an update on new features and bug fixes. If your favorite feature was missing in the beta and is also not in the list below, please email me or post on the forums so that we can consider it for future releases of WinCache. Read more ...

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  • Migrating FastCGI configuration from IIS 5.1/6.0 to IIS 7.0/7.5

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    Problem
    As you know FastCGI functionality on IIS 5.1 and IIS 6.0 is provided by FastCGI ISAPI extension which is available as an independent download. On IIS 7.0 and beyond, FastCGI functionality is provided by IIS FastCGI module which comes with the operating system. These components use different configuration stores to store the settings that affect their behavior. FastCGI ISAPI uses an INI file named fcgiext.ini as its configuration store whereas FastCGI module keeps configuration in applicationHost.config in xml format with rest of IIS configuration. Before, migrating from IIS6 to IIS7 involved migrating fcgiext.ini configuration to FastCGI module manually as there was no automated way to do that. MSDeploy only had functionality to migrate metabase configuration but because FastCGI ISAPI configuration is kept separately in an INI file, that wasn’t possible. Read more ...

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  • How WinCache make PHP run faster

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    Why WinCache?
    Use of PHP accelerators is very common to make PHP run faster. Most of the existing PHP accelerators which are in use today are designed keeping *nix architecture in mind and mostly doesn’t work well on Windows. For example, APC which is very commonly used on *nix doesn’t work on Windows. Xcache does work in ISAPI mode but crashes when PHP is running in FastCGI mode with multiple php processes alive. Absence of a stable PHP accelerator on Windows made people complain about PHP performance on Windows all the time. Another complaint which we heard consistently from customers running PHP on windows was that file operations on Windows were slower than on *nix. Reason being Windows’s CreateFile system call which is much more expensive than a fopen call on *nix as CreateFile goes through a much more complex security check involving ACLs. Read more ...

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  • FastCGI ISAPI 1.5 Beta for WinXP and Win2K3

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    IIS team today released FastCGI ISAPI 1.5 Beta for WinXP and Win2K3 which has some very nice additions to existing FastCGI ISAPI functionality. Following additions have been made to FastCGI ISAPI 1.0.

    1. Few features we added to FastCGI module in IIS 7.5 have been added to FastCGI ISAPI 1.5 as well. These include MonitorChangesTo, StderrMode and Real-time tuning. Read more about these here.

    2.         Few customers complained about IIS terminating the FastCGI processes abruptly (on running into IdleTimeout, InstanceMax etc) without giving them a chance to run cleanup code in the FastCGI application.  Read more ...

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  • Using advanced logging to log custom module data

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    Advanced logging module which media team released few days ago uses IIS tracing subsystem and allow module developers to log custom data in W3C compatible format using familiar IHttpTraceContext interface. If you are a module developer and want to generate W3C style logs for requests with custom data, doing it with advanced logging module is very easy. All you need to do is call IHttpTraceContext::RaiseTraceEvent passing data you want to publish. Your module installer can then configure advanced logging module to make it dump this data in a log file and you have complete logging solution without ever have to deal with log files yourself. Let’s see what it takes to make use of this functionality. Read more ...

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  • Implementing IAppHostPathMapper in C

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    Few days ago I was required to implement IAppHostPathMapper interface in native C to map configuration path MACHINE/WEBROOT/APPHOST to DefaultAppPool.config and struggled with finding good documentation. With help of some incomplete, hard to find documentation and some head banging here is what worked for me. Hopefully this will be useful for few others J. Read more ...

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  • New features in configuration system and appcmd in IIS 7.5

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    Following new features have been added to IIS configuration system and appcmd command line tool in IIS 7.5.

    Configuration System

    1.       Configuration system tracing and logging
    In IIS 7.5, IIS native configuration system can generate trace events capturing all IIS configuration activity. Because all IIS administrative tools (WMI, appcmd, MWA, UI, Powershell etc) call into native configuration system, events are generated irrespective of which administrative tool is used to read/write IIS configuration. Tracing is not enabled by default. You can go to “Application and Service Logs->Microsoft->Windows->IIS-Configuration” in event viewer and enable tracing. IIS generates 4 kinds of events. These are administrative, operational, analytic and debug. Right click on areas in event viewer and select “enable log” for categories you want to enable tracing. Read more ...

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  • IIS 7.5 updates to custom errors and compression

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    Looking at number of people reaching my first blog post while searching for information on IIS 7.5, I figured I should do few more posts on changes which are coming in IIS 7.5. In this blog post I am covering new features which have been added to compression and custom errors modules in IIS 7.5.

    Changes to custom errors

    1.       system.webServer/httpErrors section is made delegation safe.
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  • Improvements to FastCGI in IIS 7.5

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    Following improvements have been made to FastCGI module in Win7 (and Win2K8 R2).

    1.       Monitor changes to a file

    We have added ability to monitor changes to a file for each FastCGI process pool. Module will recycle FastCGI processes for the process pool if a change to the file is detected. Users can specify file path to monitor using system.webServer/fastCgi/application@monitorChangesTo property. Value can be absolute path to the file or path relative to the folder containing FastCGI executable. In case of php, if fullPath property is set to “c:\php\php-cgi.exe”, monitorChangesTo property can be set to “php.ini” or “c:\php\php.ini”. If file to monitor is not found, status code 500 is returned on each request. Default value of this property is blank which means no file monitoring. Read more ...

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  • Generating trace information in native modules

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    IIS7 has really nice tracing capabilities which are available to all module developers. If you want to make it easy for you and your customers to debug problems in your modules, you should definitely be using them. You can use IHttpTraceContext::RaiseTraceEvent or IHttpTraceContext::QuickTrace in your IIS7 native modules to generate trace information. Once you have your module generating trace information, you or your customers can set trace rules to collect trace data for particular requests. Read more ...

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