Scott Forsyth's Blog

IIS, Windows Authentication and the Double Hop issue

Scott Forsyth's Blog — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:33:00 GMT

In IIS, you run into an interesting situation when you need to access another resource off of the IIS server and certain fairly common situations occur. When using Integrated Security, anonymous access is disabled, and impersonation is turned on, a security measure kicks in and doesn't allow your site to access resources on any network servers. This includes access to a UNC path directly from IIS or SQL Server using Windows authentication. The reason is because of a 'double hop' that authentication is doing. When you authenticate to the IIS server using Integrated Authentication, that uses up your first 'hop'. When IIS tries to access a network device, that would be the double or second hop which is not allowed. IIS cannot in turn pass on those...(read more)

Application Pool Recycles from IIS 7 Setting Changes

Scott Forsyth's Blog — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:37:00 GMT

I've written a couple times about what configuration changes cause AppDomain recycles. Most recently how the ASP.NET tab causes a server-wide AppDomain recycle , and previously about changes in ASP.NET 2.0 . Here I'm going to cover things that, when done in IIS 7, will cause a full application pool recycle. I obtained the following list from the Microsoft.com folk at Microsoft. They worked with the IIS team during IIS 7 development to get a complete list of all settings which cause full app pool recycles. What this means is that if you make changes to applicationHost.config that touches anything in the following list, the applicable application pool will be recycled. If you change other settings to applicationHost.config, the app pools on the...(read more)

ASP.NET tab in IIS, more dangerous than it first appears!

Scott Forsyth's Blog — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:49:00 GMT

This blog post was a long time coming and fortunately doesn't apply to IIS7, but I thought I would finally take a few minutes and cover this shortcoming with the ASPNET tab that ASP.NET 2.0 introduced into IIS 6 and IIS 5. As I've covered in a previous post , only 1 version of ASP.NET can run at a time in each IIS Application Pool. When you want to target a newer or older version of the ASP.NET framework for a particular site or application, you must update that website or application. When ASP.NET 1.1 was released When ASP.NET 1.1 was released, the common way to do this was to use aspnet_regiis.exe from the command line. There was a serious shortcoming with that method though, as I detailed back in December of '03. (That article and attached...(read more)

Breaking changing in IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET

Scott Forsyth's Blog — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:32:00 GMT

This quick post is for my own sake so I can find it again later. :-) I refer to the following link often. Mike Volodarsky has put together a detailed list of breaking changes in IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET. For the most part IIS 7 has great compatibility with IIS 6 apps. The httpModules and httpHandlers section are two important web.config sections that need to be migrated from system.web to system.webServer in Integrated mode, but most other things will work without changes. There are exceptions though, which his blog post details well: http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/12/08/IIS-7.0-Breaking-Changes-ASP.NET-2.0-applications-Integrated-mode.aspx...(read more)

Graffiti CMS - VDirs - ISAPI Rewrite and Partial Trust

Scott Forsyth's WebLog — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:10:00 GMT

I thought I would spend a few minutes today testing out Graffiti from Telligent . Graffiti is a fairly new blogging and content management system (CMS) which is meant to be very easy to install and setup. True to its word, it is impressively easy to get up and going. There are a few things that I found that are worth noting. I wanted to install this in a VDir on a shared server here at ORCS Web and use ISAPI Rewrite to make it appear to run in the root folder with its own domain name. In brief terms the install involved the following: Download Graffiti (it's less than 3MB for the limited non-commercial version that I downloaded.) Extract and save to disk FTP the web folder to the vdir on the server Mark the vdir as an application (assuming IIS...(read more)

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Scott Forsyth's WebLog — Tue, 06 May 2008 03:47:00 GMT

There are some exciting events coming up around the Charlotte area which I'll be speaking at. Next weekend is the Charlotte Code Camp Spring 2008. I'll be speaking on what is currently fresh on my mind, and what I believe is very applicable to developers today. The session is titled "What every developer needs to know about IIS 7". Here's the Code Camp agenda: http://www.developersguild.org/Default.aspx?tabid=248 For anyone in the area, I encourage you to register before it fills. IIS 7 has many new changes that affect the developer this time around. With IIS 6, mostly just the server administrator benefited. But, with IIS 7, there are many changes that apply to the developer. There are deployment changes, web.config configuration changes, the...(read more)

Enabling XP and Windows Server 2003 to Search All Files Types

Scott Forsyth's WebLog — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:34:00 GMT

Searching for file content on your computer or server is a common task and one where you would expect accurate results. You, like so many of us, may have assumed that but found different results. Within Windows 2000 Server, if you entered something in the windows search dialog and clicked "Find", it would find it. But, with Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP, there are a lot of searches that would come up empty, even if you were sure that you had files with the words in them that you were searching for. The reason that the results are different in Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP is because Microsoft decided to only include certain types of files in the search to speed up the search. Even if you set the file type as "All Files and Folders",...(read more)

tsadmin command change in Windows Server 2008

Scott Forsyth's WebLog — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:18:00 GMT

I use Remote Desktop all the time to manage servers remotely, and often I join other people's sessions to troubleshoot something with them, or walk through something or other. In Windows Server 2003 (and Windows 2000 Server), the easy way to start up Terminal Services Manager is Start -> Run -> 'tsadmin' -> [Enter]. This calls us Terminal Services Manager where I can right-click on a user and click 'Remote Control', and if they approve, I can join their session. This doesn't work in Windows Server 2008 anymore. The change is ever so slight. In Windows Server 2003 the tool was tsadmin.exe, so typing 'tsadmin' was all that was required to start the tool. Now, in Windows Server 2008, this has been moved to a MMC snap-in and is called tsadmin.msc...(read more)

IIS7 blocks viewing access to files in bin and other asp.net folders

Scott Forsyth's WebLog — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:31:00 GMT

I was just asked to help someone troubleshoot a site that worked fine on Windows Server 2003 / IIS6 but didn't work on Windows Server 2008 / IIS7. A file was in a folder under the bin folder on the site and displayed an error when trying to view the page. The path looked something like this: http://www.sitename.com/subfolder/bin/debug/file.xml The subfolder wasn't marked as an application, although that doesn't really matter. The point is that since /bin/ was in the path somewhere, IIS7 wouldn't allow the file.xml to be displayed. It served up a 404.2 error saying file or directory not found. 404 - File or directory not found. The resource you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Since...(read more)

Professional IIS 7 - Best IIS 7.0 book

Scott Forsyth's WebLog — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:41:00 GMT

The title is a bit biased since I co-authored the book, but Professional IIS 7 will be out in print within a couple weeks and I highly recommend picking up a copy! I've had my head buried in this book for months — spending more time that I realized possible, but learning IIS 7 inside out and ultimately enjoying it. (Although I have to admit that sometimes at 4:00 in the morning, trying to hit deadlines, I'm not sure that I realized that I was enjoying it. :)) The book will be in bookstores and shipping online during the 2nd week of March 2008. You can order it directly from Wrox: http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/productCd-0470097825.html or from Amazon.com . We had a great team of authors on this book, each writing in areas that they knew...(read more)

Application vs. AppDomain

Scott Forsyth's WebLog — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 14:21:00 GMT

A question was asked on a forum that I frequent which I thought was worth writting a blog about. Q: What is the difference between an application and an Appdomain? I understand from my research so far that an Appdomain is a container within which ASPX runs and that Apppool is a process that starts the w3wp.exe worker process within which ASP applications run. A: That's a good question. Here are some key differences: An application is an IIS term, but it's one that ASP.NET utilizes. Essentially it creates a sandbox, or a set of boundaries to separate different sites, or parts of sites, from the others. An AppDomain is a .NET term. (In IIS7, AppDomains play a larger role within IIS, but for the most part it's an ASP.NET term) An AppDomain contains...(read more)

VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta 2 released

Scott Forsyth's WebLog — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 21:42:00 GMT

Beta 2 of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 which was just released a few minutes ago and is available for download. I know I've been really quiet on my blog for a while. I'm still around, just haven't freed up my time enough to do the blogging that I know I should. I figured I would break my silence and mention this release. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/07/26/vs-2008-and-net-3-5-beta-2-released.aspx Scott Guthrie's blog post is a must read. Some key features in VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 are: - LINQ - JavaScript IntelliSense and Debugging - AJAX integrated - Great CSS support - Development can target different versions of the framework - much more...(read more)

Registry change for perfmon and PID data

Scott Forsyth's WebLog — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 02:34:00 GMT

Perfmon is a great tool for mining performance data on a server and has a slew of objects and counters to expose most any type of data. As nice as it is, there is one thing that can be difficult to do, and that is to view data for temporary objects. For example IIS worker processes only live until the next recycle or restart. If there are many worker processes on the server, the default view doesn't allow you to tell which is which. Notice in the screenshot that there are three w3wp.exe worker processes on this server in the section on the right, but you can't tell from this view which belongs to which worker process. A co-worker of mind pointed me to this great registry setting today that takes care of this. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281884...(read more)

1000MB is not 1GB

Scott Forsyth's WebLog — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 14:12:00 GMT

I had an interesting situation come up yesterday that I thought would be worth writing about. As a web host here at www.orcsweb.com , we offer disk space, but obviously need to set some type of limits. One of our clients had an allotment of 1,140 MB. (That is an odd number, but that's what it worked out to.) While working with him a couple of weeks ago, I checked his disk usage by right-clicking on the folder in windows explorer and clicking on properties. The space that it told me was 1.14GB, which I relayed on to the client. So far so good, it seemed that he was right at his limit. Yesterday, an automated process checked the disk usage on his site, calculated his usage at 1,170MB and sent him an email asking for him to address the disk...(read more)

PowerShell Cheat Sheet

Scott Forsyth's WebLog — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 21:50:00 GMT

Here's a must-have cheat sheet for PowerShell. Jeffrey Snover has put together an excellent doc that is well worth printing off and keeping handy for anyone working with PowerShell: http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2007/01/24/powershell-cheat-sheet.aspx...(read more)