David Wang

For the next several entries, I am focusing on this frequently asked topic: How do I rewrite / redirect / forward / mask requests from one URL to another with IIS? Common questions that fall into this topic include: Redirect requests from...

Variations of this question are asked of IIS 6 all the time. However, the answer is no different than for any other version of IIS other than the fact that IIS 6 gives you a distinct error code to troubleshoot. What is not clear to me is why users think...

Problems statements similar to the following questions pop up all the time on various IIS newsgroups, and the user usually claims that they have either seen (or not seen) many posts that look like theirs, and never any concrete solutions. I am going to...

Sample tool in VBScript to manipulate (insert/replace/remove) individual LIST items....

Recently, I have seen a bunch of questions asking: "IIS6 runs fine for X amount of time [where X varies from days to weeks] and then all of a sudden, it stops accepting all connections. If I restart/reboot the server, then it is fine again... until X...

One of the most common questions asked about IIS on the newsgroups as well as Microsoft Product Support is "why am I getting 401 Access Denied"? There are many, many possible causes and variations, but from the IIS perspective, the top-level, logical...

A powerful but often under-utilized and misunderstood feature of IIS is its programmatic configuration APIs. On the one hand, all IIS administrative APIs allow programmatic, automated, and unattend configuration of IIS. On the other hand, it can be hard...

HOWTO: Diagnose and Fix Common ISAPI Filter Installation Failures...

Invariably, when you run IIS servers that are load-balanced or forwarded requests behind some other network device, you will find that IIS logs the IP of the network device and not the original client that made the request. Technically, there is no...

Why you still get access denied to IIS even if you are an administrator or enabled anonymous access....

Question: Hi all, I have trouble to configure PHP 5 (CGI mode) in IIS 7 on Vista 5308... What I did: - Download and unpack PHP - set user permission to PHP folder AND script folder (IIS_IUSRS and Internet Guest Account) - in IIS Manager: Added...

Question: I'm considering building a realtime ASP.NET application on IIS6, that'll need to support about 3,000 simultaneous users on a server, each with a keep-alive HTTP connection for "server push." The HTTP connection will need to stay open for...

A common, mysterious behavior encountered by ASP applications on IIS6 is the loss of session state. It seems to disappear more often and Session.Timeout seem to be ineffective. Why? Question: I have session.timout set to all day(1440 minutes). ...

A couple of months ago, I wrote a quick and dirty entry on how to install PHP on IIS7. The main purpose of that entry was to explain the details of what was going on as well as cookie-cutter instructions of one way to successfully install PHP on IIS7...

I finally have enough blog entries about various portions of IIS6 request processing that I can stitch together this meta-blog-entry explaining how it all works together and then apply it towards an issue. You probably want to keep a link to this loaded...

Lately, I have received quite a few comments concerning a crash in WebEngine.dll when you recycle an application pool running ASP.Net 2.0. The sheer number of independent users reporting this makes be believe that it is real. If it was individual users...

I recently sat down and thought a little about the typical user experience when troubleshooting IIS6, assuming s/he had little/no IIS context that long-time users have... and the picture did not look so good. Now, I know that IIS7 will make huge improvements...

Question: I am running IIS 6.0. We are currently trying to incorporate our application pools to recycle every 2 hours. The problem is everytime the the pool is recycled and the process is killed everyone connected to that webpage loses all connectivity...

I have been getting a bunch of private requests from many people asking me variations of the following questions: "I want to use Sharepoint, but I want user authentication to be done with CustomAuth [or their own Wildcard Application Mapping ISAPI...

Motivation One of the bigger buzz-word features of IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003 is the "HTTP.SYS Kernel Mode Response Cache". When you do a search against "HTTP.SYS Kernel Response Cache IIS 6", you will inevitably find a large body of literature...

I was recently introduced to this nifty little feature of Remote Desktop of Windows XP - bringing remote audio to the local machine. I have to say that I just LOVE this creature comfort feature... Now, I never knew nor thought about it earlier because...

Since I get this following question on how to compile/use my ISAPI code examples quite a bit, I wager I should just have a blog post that answers it once and for all. But, come on you guys... I already did the hard part in providing the full compiling...

I recently got this question about encountering a 503 Service Unavailable error on 64bit Windows. The author chose to uninstall .NET Framework 1.1 as the resolution, but I think there are some better alternatives... Question: I was delighted to...

I seem to have forgotten to describe how the following aspect of IIS functions in the prior post because I was concentrated on clarifying something else (that your Windows logon is NOT the same as logon via IIS). Thus, I got the following followup: ...

There was a recent question about how to reject requests (based on the HTTP Referer header in this case) in SF_NOTIFY_PREPROC_HEADERS. Question: Hello everyone, I'm trying to solve a problem of referer spam: People will fake requests to the web...