Archives
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Managing IIS Logs with GZipStream
Depending on how many sites your Windows web server is hosting maintaining IIS logs can be a challenge. IIS logs provide valuable insight into the traffic your sites are experiencing as well as detailed SEO metrics and performance data. A typical web server will have just enough free disk space for future growth needs but ultimately will be limited by the capacity of drives in the server. If left unmonitored IIS logs can quickly fill any remaining disk space on the server. There are a few 3rd party tools that are good at compressing log files when they are under one parent folder but when the log files are in different locations such as on a WebsitePanel server I support an alternative solution is needed. In this walkthrough I will demonstrate how I solved this challenge using asp.net and GZipStream.
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3 Steps to Securing FTP on IIS 8
The FTP protocol is some 43 years old now. Yet it continues to be one of the most widely used file transfer technologies available. Over the years it has been shown to be vulnerable to brute force attacks, packet capture, and other attack vectors. Fortunately with IIS 8 on Windows Server 2012 your FTP server doesn’t have to be vulnerable. It goes without saying that FTP Authentication and Authorization are the most fundamental methods to secure your server. Here are three additional things you can do to increase the security of your server’s FTP service and minimize its attack footprint.
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Preventing Automated Attacks with IIS Dynamic IP Restrictions
Another one of the great built-in features of IIS 8 is Dynamic IP Restrictions (DIPR). With a few simple configuration steps you can quickly set limits for blocking IP addresses based on the number of concurrent requests or frequency of requests over a period time. With these parameters in place IIS will take over blocking requests unattended thereby making your server more secure.
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Solving SQL Server High CPU with IIS Request Filtering
The other day I was troubleshooting 100% CPU utilization on a SQL Server 2008 database server. The server had 100 or so databases of varying sizes however none were larger than a few hundred MB and each database had a corresponding web site on a separate web server. Since the server hosted quite a few databases the high CPU needed to be resolved quickly because it was causing issues for everyone. High CPU on a database server can often be symptomatic of a issues occurring outside the server. In this case the real issue was in fact being caused by a SQL Injection attack on a web server.
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Scaling SSL With IIS 8 Server Name Indication (SNI)
One of the many great new features with IIS 8 on Windows Server 2012 is Server Name Indication (SNI). SNI is a TLS extension that includes the hostname or virtual domain name during SSL negotiation. The reasoning behind this was to improve SSL scalability and minimize the need for dedicated IP addresses due to IPv4 scarcity. This means that you can now host multiple SSL certificates on a web server only 1 IP address. With previous versions of IIS you were forced to bind SSL certificates with unique IP addresses and the only workaround available for hosting multiple SSL certificates with 1 IP address was to use a wild card certificate. In this walkthrough I will show how to leverage hosting multiple certificates using SNI.
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Installing WordPress, PHP, and MySQL on Windows Server 2012 R2
Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer (Web PI) makes installing applications a breeze. In a recent blog post I covered just how easy installing IIS has become using Web PI. In this walkthrough I’m going to cover installing WordPress, PHP, and MySQL using Web PI. I remember the days when installing these applications was a manual process. Depending on your level of expertise it was quite a challenge to get everything working properly. If you’ve ever tried to uninstall and then reinstall MySQL you know what I mean. Now thanks to Web PI with just a few clicks of your mouse you can have WordPress, PHP, and MySQL installed on Windows Server 2012 R2 in a few short minutes.