Whether you host in-house or with a managed Windows hosting provider, if you self-administer a web server it is good to know that by default IIS7 sets application pools to “time-out” after 20 minutes of inactivity. So if you don’t have any visitors to your site within 20 minutes, the application pool will shut down […]
Cloud Server Flexibility
I’ve been in the industry for a long time, so I understand why the big cloud players want to lock users into predefined configurations of compute, memory, and storage. It helps balance and maximize resources, which optimizes their platform density, and of course brings them higher margins. But this isn’t best for customers. If I […]
cloud, Hosting, IIS, OrcsWeb, SherWebLinking spam sent through shared IIS SMTP server to a user
Microsoft’s IIS SMTP service won’t log usernames even when SMTP-AUTH is enabled and clients are all authenticating. So, what happens if someone starts abusing the SMTP service (or you perhaps have a runaway process performing the abuse)? Well, it takes a little effort but it is possible to track down the username being used to […]
cytanium, Hosting, IIS, OrcsWeb, System Administration, tipPUT/POST/DELETE Verb Errors On Site
A client was getting errors when using PUT/POST/DELETE verbs on their web application recently. The errors he was seeing were: After some troubleshooting the error was isolated to the fact that WebDav was installed on the server and was intercepting those requests for its own service use. Rather than removing WebDav from the server, we […]
ASP.NET, cytanium, Development/Coding, Hosting, IIS, OrcsWeb, System AdministrationPerforming Offline installations with WPI Command line tool
Performing application installs on a server that does not have internet connectivity used to be a difficult thing to do. You had to locate and download not only the main application, but any dependencies that would be needed to complete the install. Without an easy way to determine these dependencies, you could be stuck in […]
IIS, OrcsWeb, System Administration, tip, WindowsSetting up SSL in IIS7
Obtaining an SSL certificate for your website is a task that every IIS administrator will have to perform at some point in time. This can be a confusing process the first time you have to do this. IIS7 has changed the way that certificates are requested. In the IIS6 days, you requested a certificate from […]
Hosting, IIS, OrcsWeb, Windows, windows serverImplementing Application Initialization on IIS 7.5
Another great post by Terri over at OrcsWeb that I think you’ll find beneficial. Here’s a brief intro and a link to the full post… Microsoft has released a new module for IIS 7.5 which provides the ability to ‘warm-up’ an application and provide a ‘pretty’ page to the end-user until the application is fully […]
ASP.NET, Hosting, IIS, OrcsWeb, SQL/Databases, System Administration, tip, WindowsOrchard Memory Usage and Performance
A guest post by Rick Barber – a senior technical lead over at managed Windows host OrcsWeb: At OrcsWeb we recently came across an issue where a user was having performance issues with a bare-bones Orchard installation on a shared server. We tried to reproduce the issue and sure enough, any time the site was […]
ASP.NET, Hosting, IIS, OrcsWebMagically Sync Machine Key for All Nodes in a Web Farm
Okay, well, it isn’t really magic – not even the Apple type – but it is pretty cool. Below is a post by OrcsWeb’s Jeff Graves providing a VERY handy script that can be used to instantly synchronize the machine key values for all ASP.NET versions on multiple Windows Server nodes in a web farm. […]
ASP.NET, Hosting, IIS, OrcsWeb, System Administration, web farm, WindowsSQL Server restore failure and resolution
A friend on mine had a recent issue where the restore of a SQL Server backup file – taken on one server and being restored to a different one – wouldn’t complete. It would continually throw an error of: Server was unable to process request. —> File ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10_50.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\TheDatabase_log.ldf’ is claimed by ‘YAF_log'(2) […]
cytanium, Hosting, OrcsWeb, SQL/Databases, System Administration, Troubleshooting