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 […]
Stopping All Sites on a Windows Server Without Stopping IIS
I had a need recently to stop all the sites running on a Windows server, but I didn’t want to stop IIS. This specific server has hundreds of sites running on it, so stopping each one at a time would have taken an excessive amount of time. So with a little Google-fu I stumbled across […]
Hosting, IIS, System AdministrationConvert a Folder to an Application on a Remote IIS Host
The topic recently came up of the best way to convert a folder to an application on remote shared hosting server. Some hosts may have this built-in to their control panel. I know many (like Cytanium) have options in the control panel to create Virtual Directories, but sometimes an application specifically needs its folder to […]
cytanium, Hosting, IIS, System AdministrationBasic IIS Performance Statistics
There are some neat counters available in Windows Performance Monitor for showing some IIS (Internet Information Server) statistics. My three favorites are: Current Anonymous Users: This counter shows the number of current anonymous HTTP connections. Since most web sites serve content to anonymous users, it’s the one that seems to make the most sense to […]
Hosting, IIS, performance, System Administration, WindowsTurn Off IE Enhanced Security Configuration
The Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration (IE ESC) that is turned on by default on Windows Server drives me crazy. Being unable to download files, and constantly being prompted to add URLs to be viewed, is super-annoying. So, my SOP now is to disable that setting for Administrative users on servers (note: these are generally […]
System Administration, tip, WindowsExtend Your Linux Disk Space
I was pondering an interesting, and likely fairly common, situation last night so this morning I was up early getting my geek on (aka, playing, testing, and troubleshooting). If someone has a Linux VM (cloud server or whatever) with a set size but then need to add more space to their system and make it […]
centos, Hosting, Linux, System AdministrationUsing LogParser to Check Visitor IPs to a Certain Page
Today I noticed we were getting an increasing amount of spam on one of our form pages. I was curious to see if all of the user IP addresses were the same (in which case I’d just add them to the IIS7 IP Restrictions list). To quickly and easily figure this out I decided to […]
IIS, logparser, System AdministrationLinking 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, tipCreating AD users in bulk with PowerShell
Terri, a support specialist at OrcsWeb who guest posts here on my site, and who has the 2nd most popular post here, wrote up a nice little post about creating Active Directory (AD) users in bulk easily via PowerShell. If you’re interested in user management or PowerShell in general, go check it out: http://terrid.me/creating-ad-users-in-bulk-with-powershell/ Happy […]
Hosting, PowerShell, System AdministrationUpdate Your WordPress Database Connection String
I recently decided to create a test/development instance of a WordPress site that I run. In part of doing this I had to deal with how to backup one MySQL database and restore it to another database. After that was done, and I copied over the content files, I had to tell WordPress where to […]
cytanium, Hosting, MySQL, System Administration, Wordpress