Archives
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Storing IIS 7.5 WebDAV Properties in NTFS Alternate Data Streams
Two months ago Microsoft published an update for the WebDAV module that shipped with IIS 7.5 in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and this update is documented in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article ID 2593591:
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Changing the Identity of the FTP 7 Extensibility Process
Many IIS 7 FTP developers may not have noticed, but all custom FTP 7 extensibility providers execute through COM+ in a DLLHOST.exe process, which runs as NETWORK SERVICE by default. That being said, NETWORK SERVICE does not always have the right permissions to access some of the areas on your system where you may be attempting to implement custom functionality. What this means is, some of the custom features that you try to implement may not work as expected.
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Changing the Identity of the FTP 7 Extensibility Process
Many IIS 7 FTP developers may not have noticed, but all custom FTP 7 extensibility providers execute through COM+ in a DLLHOST.exe process, which runs as NETWORK SERVICE by default. That being said, NETWORK SERVICE does not always have the right permissions to access some of the areas on your system where you may be attempt to implement custom functionality. What this means is, some of the custom features that you try to implement may not work as expected.
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FTP Clients - Recap
Having written 10 blog posts in my series about FTP clients, I decided that it might be a good idea to recap some of the information that I have presented thus far. With that in mind, here is a quick recap of the entire series to date:
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How to use Managed Code (C#) to create an FTP Home Directory Provider that is based on the Remote Client IP Address
I recently had an interesting scenario that was presented to me by a customer: they had a business requirement where they needed to give the same username and password to a group of people, but they didn't want any two people to be able to see anyone else's files. This seemed like an unusual business requirement to me; the whole point of keeping users separate is one of the reasons why we added user isolation to the FTP service.
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FTP Clients - Part 10: FTP Voyager
For this installment in my series about FTP Clients, I'd like to take a look at FTP Voyager from Rhino Software. For this blog I used FTP Voyager 15.2.0.17, and it is available from the following URL:
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Sending WebDAV Requests in .NET Revisited
I recently spoke with a great customer in India, and he was experimenting with the code from my Sending WebDAV Requests in .NET blog post. He had a need to send the WebDAV LOCK/UNLOCK commands, so I wrote a quick addition to the code in my original blog post to send those commands, and I thought that I'd share that code in an updated blog post.
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How to create an HTML Application to configure your WebDAV Redirector settings
I've mentioned in previous blog posts that I use the Windows WebDAV Redirector a lot. (And believe me, I use it a lot.) Having said that, there are a lot of registry settings that control how the Windows WebDAV Redirector operates, and I tend to tweak those settings fairly often.
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How to determine if FTP clients are using FTPS
One of my colleagues here at Microsoft, Emmanuel Boersma, just reminded me of an email thread that we had several weeks ago, where a customer had asked him how they could tell if FTPS was being used on their FTP server. He had pointed out that when he looks at his FTP log files, the port number was always 21, so it wasn't as easy as looking at a website's log files and looking for port 80 for HTTP versus port 443 for HTTPS. I had sent him the following notes, and I thought that they might make a good blog. ;-)
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How to Use Managed Code (C#) to Create an FTP Home Directory Provider for the Days of the Week
I had a question from someone that had an interesting scenario: they had a series of reports that their manufacturing company generates on a daily basis, and they wanted to automate uploading those files over FTP from their factory to their headquarters. Their existing automation created report files with names like Widgets.log, Sprockets.log, Gadgets.log, etc.
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FTP and LDAP - Part 2: How to Set Up an Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) Server
This blog is designed as a complement to my FTP and LDAP - Part 1: How to Use Managed Code (C#) to Create an FTP Authentication Provider that uses an LDAP Server blog post. In this second blog, I'll walk you through the steps to set up an Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) server, which you can use with the custom FTP LDAP Authentication provider that I discussed in my last blog.
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FTP and LDAP - Part 1: How to Use Managed Code (C#) to Create an FTP Authentication Provider that uses an LDAP Server
Over the past few years I've created a series of authentication providers for the FTP 7.5 service that ships with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, and is available for download for Windows Server 2008. Some of these authentication providers are available on the http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/590/developing-for-ftp-75/ website, while others have been in my blog posts.
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IIS 6: Setting up SSL - Appendix C: Processing a Certificate Request using Windows 2003 Certificate Services
In this last appendix for my blog series about using SSL with IIS 6, I'll discuss processing a certificate request by using Windows 2003 Certificate Services. When you are running a certificate server for your network environment, you will need to physically issue the certificates that clients will request from your certificate server. There is a way that you can configure certificate services to automatically issue certificates, but I'd advise against that, unless you are only issuing certificates for testing purposes. If so, then you should read the Set the default action upon receipt of a certificate request topic on Microsoft's TechNet website.
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IIS 6: Setting up SSL - Appendix B: Obtaining a Root Certificate from Windows Server 2003 Certificate Services
In this second appendix for my blog series about using SSL with IIS 6, I'm going to discuss obtaining the root certificate from Windows Server 2003 Certificate Services. By way of explanation, obtaining a root certificate is one of the most important steps for servers or clients that will use certificates that you issue. While this step is not necessary on the server where you installed Certificate Services, it is absolutely essential on your other servers or clients, because this step will allow those computers to trust your certificate server as a Certificate Authority (CA). Without that trust in place, you will either receive error messages or SSL simply won't work.
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IIS 6: Setting up SSL - Appendix A: Installing Windows Server 2003 Certificate Services
I needed to take a short break from my blog series about using SSL with IIS 6 in order to work on some other projects, but I wanted to finish the series by giving you a few appendices that give you some additional details that you might want to know if you are using SSL with IIS 6.
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How to Create an Authentication Provider for FTP 7.5 using BlogEngine.NET's XML Membership Files
I ran into an interesting situation recently with BlogEngine.NET that I thought would make a good blog post.
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How to add <clear/> or <remove/> Elements through Scripting
I had a question recently where someone was trying to add
<clear />or<remove />elements to a collection in their IIS 7 configuration settings. With that in mind, for today's blog I thought that I would discuss a couple of ways to add<clear />and<remove />elements by using two specific scripting methods: AppCmd and VBScript. -
My SharePoint 2007 Custom Membership Provider Adventure
Sometime last year I wanted to set up a SharePoint 2007 website for my family members to exchange information. That being said, I was using a custom membership provider, and I ran into a few issues while I was setting things up. I had kept detailed notes while I was configuring my server and troubleshooting the problems that I encountered, and with that in mind, I thought that I would share my experiences.
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Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Color Negatizing Script
I ran into an interesting situation recently - I host a website for a friend of mine, and he was shopping around for a new website template. He found one that he liked, but he didn't like the colors. In fact, he wanted the exact opposite of the colors in the website template, so he asked what I could do about it.
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Bad Characters to Use in Web-based Filenames
My good friend Wade Hilmo recently posted an excellent blog titled "How IIS blocks characters in URLs" that discusses some of the internal workings for how IIS deals with several characters in file names that do not work well in URLs. Wade’s blog does a great job explaining all of the internal IIS URL parsing logic in detail, and his post reminded me of some related notes that I had published on an internal website at Microsoft. As a complement to Wade’s outstanding blog post, I’m reposting my notes in this blog.
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Credential Caching in FTP 7.0 and FTP 7.5
I've seen a few situations where people that are using the FTP 7.0 and FTP 7.5 service have noticed that it takes a while for their password changes to be reflected by the FTP service. To put this another way, here are the typical symptoms that people describe to me:
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IIS 6: Setting up SSL - Part 3: Installing the Certificate
In part three of my series on setting up SSL on IIS 6, I'll describe the steps that are necessary to install an SSL certificate. Simply out of convenience I broke this process into two sections:
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IIS 6: Setting up SSL - Part 2: Submitting a Certificate Request and Obtaining a Certificate
In part two of my series on setting up SSL on IIS 6, I'll describe the steps that are necessary to obtain an SSL certificate. Typically you would submit your certificate request to any one of several Certificate Authorities (CA); and there are several that are available. Here are just a few:
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IIS 6: Setting up SSL - Part 1: Making a Request
In part one of my series on setting up SSL on IIS 6, I'll describe all of the steps that are necessary to request an SSL certificate for a website. Once you have completed your certificate request, you would send that to a Certificate Authority (CA) for approval. In subsequent blog posts I'll discuss submitting a certificate to a CA - specifically Certificate Services on Windows Server 2003 - and then I'll discuss obtaining a certificate and installing it on your IIS server. But for now, let's get started with a creating certificate request. To do so, use the following steps.
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Manually Localizing FPSE 2002 for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista
The FrontPage Server Extensions from Ready-to-Run Software, Inc. (RTR), are available and supported only in the English language. But that being said, the localized language files for FPSE 2002 are available for download from Microsoft, and if you're willing to do a little work, you can configure the FPSE 2002 administration pages for your website to be displayed in sixteen different languages. (The specific list of languages is provided later in this blog.)
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Life after FPSE (Part 6)
In this latest installment on my series about configuring your server for hosting without the FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE), I'd like to discuss a couple of WebDAV best practices that I like to use.
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IIS 6: Setting up SSL - Overview
Many years ago I wrote a series of instructions that used dozens of screenshots in order to show my coworkers how to set up and enable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) communications in IIS 5, which I eventually turned into a blog series on one of my personal blog sites. A few years later I wrote a sequel to that series of instructions for my coworkers, and I wanted to turn that into a series of walkthroughs in the IIS.net website. Sometime ago I proposed the idea to Pete Harris, who was in charge of IIS.net at the time, but then I changed jobs and we scrapped the idea. We followed up on the idea a short time ago, but we just couldn't find a place where it made sense to host it on IIS.net, so Pete suggested that I turn it into another blog series. With that in mind, over a series of several blog entries I will show how to configure SSL on IIS 6.