Archives
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Accepting Questions for Web Pro Series Q&A
If you’ve been following my 52-week series you most likely noticed that we’re nearing the end. This evening, for example, I’m recording week 47.
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IIS FTP Basics–Week 44
You can find this week’s video here.
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IIS 7.x Classic and Integrated Pipeline Modes-Week 43
You can find this week’s video here.
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Setting an aspnet.config File per Application Pool
The aspnet.config file is a little known config file which is supported by ASP.NET 2.0 and greater. Generally it lives in the root of the framework folder, for example:
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Change Password vs. Reset Password-Week 42
You can find this week’s video here.
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URL Rewrite city.domain.com to domain.com/city
An IIS 7.x URL Rewrite question that comes up often is how to redirect something.domain.com to domain.com/city.
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Line Numbering in Notepad-Week 41
You can find this week’s video here.
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Resolving Blocked Ports Through Windows Firewall-Week 40
You can find this week’s video here.
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Introduction to Log Parser-Week 39
You can find this week’s video here.
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High Availability for ARR-Week 38
You can find this week’s video here.
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ARR Tricks to Share with Web Server-Week 37
You can find this week’s video here.
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ARR Binding Trick-Week 36
You can find this week’s video here.
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Three ARR Back End Binding Options–Week 35
You can find this week’s video here.
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ARR Health Checks–Week 34
You can find this week’s video here.
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ARR Helper-Week 33
You can find this week’s video here.
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Bindings and Rules for ARR-Week 32
You can find this week’s video here.
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Introduction to Application Request Routing-Week 31
I’m finally catching up on the series. Sorry to those who have asked about the delay. I had completed the videos, but a delay with the article submission kept week 31 from going live. Since it is a fundamental week, I didn’t blog about the other weeks until this week was ready. Now we’re back in business!
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IIS Shared Config–Staggered Install-Week 30
You can find this week’s video here.
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IIS 7.x Shared Configuration–Advanced Tips and Tricks-Week 29
You can find this week’s video here.
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IIS 7 Shared Configuration–Week 28
You can find this week’s video here.
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DFS-R for Web Server Replication-Week 27
You can find this week’s video here.
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How to Setup an Active Directory Domain-Week 26
Today's lesson covers how to create an Active Directory domain and join a member server to it. This week's topic takes a slightly different turn from the normally IIS related topics, but this is key video to help setup either a test or production environment that requires Active Directory.
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Using IP Restrictions with URL Rewrite-Week 25
URL Rewrite offers tremendous flexibility for customizing rules to your environment. One area of functionality that is often desired for URL Rewrite is to allow a large list of approved or denied IP addresses and subnet ranges.
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Why You Shouldn’t Use Web Gardens in IIS-Week 24
IIS’s Web Gardens are a highly misunderstood feature in IIS ever since they were first introduced in IIS 6.0. This week’s lesson discusses why it’s rarely worth using Web Gardens and why using them is often detrimental to your server’s performance. This lesson is a type of anti-pattern on what to avoid, while also covering good theory and pointers to better practices that can be used instead.
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Securing IIS. Thwarting the Hacker-Week 23
This week's video covers the users used by IIS and how to lock down your web server.
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IIS’s ApplicationPoolIdentity Made Easy-Week 22
Managing Windows users for IIS security can sometimes be a pain and, if not handled correctly, can leave your server vulnerable. In this week’s video I introduce the new ApplicationPoolIdentity account that was introduced in IIS 7.0 and improved in IIS 7.5. This “virtual account” offers a lot of power and is easy to use once you understand the basics.. Since it’s the default account for application pools, understanding it is important for any web administrator.
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IIS 7.0/7.5’s Hidden Tool. Run-time page request performance data-Week 21
Black box troubleshooting is very difficult. What I mean by that, is that if you can’t see what’s happening, it’s extra difficult to troubleshoot. For us administrators, or developers needing to troubleshooting something on a live server, it’s so valuable to see what’s happening behind the scenes.
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Process Monitor Made Easy-Week 20
Every trade has their favorite tool, whether it be a hammer, calculator, or stethoscope. For me, one of my top tools is Process Monitor. I use it like a handy man uses duct tape. With it I can easily troubleshoot access denied errors, files not found, strange path redirection, and many other unexpected behavior situations.
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Mastering IIS - Understanding the Schema-Week 19
IIS is a powerful web platform, and since version 7.0 everything, absolutely everything, is backed by a schema. This defines the settings, defaults and value ranges that IIS uses.
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Hacking IIS’s AppHost Directly-Week 18
Last week I covered IIS 7(.5)’s distributed and delegated configuration system. This week I’ll take it a step further and look specifically at editing applicationHost.config in a text editor (e.g. notepad) to make more advanced configuration changes.
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New Configuration System in IIS 7.0/7.5-Week 17
IIS 7.0 introduced a completely new delegated and distributed configuration system. This offers a number of benefits, which are welcome changes for us web administrators, but there are some gotchas.
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IIS’s Overlapping App Pools-Week 16
Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) web platform is extremely robust, and one of the neat features is overlapping application pools.
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Virtual Directory vs. Applications–4 IIS Folders-Week 15
Virtual Directories and applications are useful special folder types in IIS. Yet it’s easy to be confused between them.
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URL Rewrite Outbound Rules–and ServerNameVariable-Part 14 of 52
As you may be guessing already, I’m a big fan of URL Rewrite for IIS. Today I cover Outbound rules, providing demos on changing the content in-flight and adding Server Variables (HTTP headers) for the browser.
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URLRewrite ServerNameVariable Provider
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SiteServerDetails–Obtaining information about a server node in a web farm—Part 13 of 52
This week I cover a couple ways to obtain information about a specific server in a web farm. How can you tell which node handled your page request? Often it’s valuable to know which node is currently being served for troubleshooting the load balancer or individual pages.
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SiteServerDetails–Details for Web Farm Nodes
Often times if you administer a web farm, or develop for a web farm, you want to know which node you’re currently on. This is useful is you want to know if your load balancers are balancing with the algorithm that you expect, or if you want to troubleshoot why a website fails just some of the time.
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ASP.NET AppDomain–What it is and why it’s important–Part 12 of 52 part series
AppDomains are a silent mysterious part of ASP.NET and IIS. It’s important for the web administrator to be aware of this building block of ASP.NET so that we can be aware of how changes to the system can affect production sites.
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Understanding Regular Expressions (focus on URL Rewrite)–Part 11 (Sub-Part 2 of 2)
This 2nd part (out of 2) on Regular Expressions covers the remaining tips necessary to get up to speed on a topic that at first seems daunting, but really isn’t that bad.
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Understanding Regular Expressions (focus on URL Rewrite)–Part 10 (Sub-Part 1 of 2)
Regular Expressions can seem difficult to understand. In today’s lesson I attempt to bring this down to earth and make it understandable and useful for the web administrator.
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URL Rewrite, ServerVariables, URL Parts, HTTP to HTTPS Redirect. Week 9
Last week I gave an intro to URL Rewrite; covering the basics and giving a real world example. This week I dive in deeper and cover ServerVariables, the parts that make up the URL and another real world example of redirecting HTTP to HTTPS.
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An Intro to IIS URL Rewrite–plus redirecting URLs to www-Web Pro Week 8 of 52
Today’s video post is an intro to URL Rewrite and the start of a few lessons on this powerful tool. Additionally I cover how to rewrite URLs to add the www to the domain name for the sake of search engine optimization (SEO).
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Setting Host Headers for SSL Sites in IIS–Week 7 of 52
At first glance, the Host Header field is grayed out when applying host headers to SSL (HTTPS) sites in IIS 7.
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The SSL Bindings Issue–Web Pro Week 6 of 52
We have a chicken before the egg issue with HTTPS bindings. This video—week 6 of a 52 week series for the web administrator—covers why HTTPS bindings don’t support host headers the same as HTTP bindings do. In this video I show the issue and use Wireshark to see it in action.
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Understanding IIS Bindings
Internet Information Services (IIS) uses 4 decision points for the site bindings. They are the protocol, port, IP and host header. This video lesson walks through the bindings and shows how each one is used.