The machineKey element of the ASP.NET web.config specifies the algorithm and keys that ASP.NET will use for encryption. By default the validationKey and the decryptionKey keys are set to AutoGenerate which means the runtime will generate a random key...

SMTP service running on IIS 6.0 provides you options to restrict IP addresses of computers that can relay mail messages through this server. The value(list of IP addresses) is stored in the RelayIpList metabase property as an octet string. I was...

When ever you create a new application pool IIS only asks you for four things 1. Name, 2. .NET Framework version, 3. Managed pipeline mode and 4. Weather to start the application pool immediately What about the remaining advanced settings like the identity...

IIS 7.0 has a nice feature of creating self-signed certificates … very handy for creating test certificates. I was recently asked if there is a way to modify the validity period of the certificate it creates. Unfortunately No! The module that...

IIS 7.0 manager has a nice feature of generating self-signed certificates that you can use for running tests. At the global level select Server Certificates and in the Actions Pane on the right you get the option to Create Self-Signed Certificate…...

When a client accesses a web site on anonymous authentication IIS uses a pre configured account to access the corresponding files on disk. In IIS 5.0 / 6.0 we used a local account called the IUSR_machinename for anonymous authentication. With IIS 7.0...

Process Monitor and Process Explorer are great tools for troubleshooting issues on Windows machines. Process Explorer can be used to investigate a running process from handles to dlls loaded. Process Monitor is my favourate and it can be used to monitor...

Instead of returning the “Service Unavailable” message to the client you can terminate the TCP connection. This can be helpful in environments where you have a Load Balancer which ’understands’ a TCP reset instead of “Service Unavailable”. In IIS 7.0...

Metabase.xml is the central store where IIS 6.0 stores most of its configuration information. Its a plain text file and stores all the information in a simple XML format. The XML format naturally raised a notion of being able to XCOPY the config file...

Rapid-Fail Protection disables application pools if they crash multiple times within in a specified time period. This prevents the failing application pool from getting into a continuous loop of crashing and restarting. This protects other application...

Tucked away in the IIS manager is an UI screen to configure the Events that get logged when an application pool is recycled. When you right click on the application pool and choose Recycling you get to the screen where you configure the Recycling Conditions...

IIS 6.0 does not load the user profile of the application pool identity. But with IIS 7.0 you now have a choice to load the profile if needed. This feature is disabled by default on Windows 2008. < applicationPools > < add name = " DefaultAppPool...

On a 64 bit Windows 2003 machine IIS 6.0 could either be run in 32 bit mode or 64 bit mode. You toggled the Enable32bitAppOnWin64 metabase key and all the worker process would run in a particular bitness mode. With IIS 7.0 the Enable32bitAppOnWin64...

Often during troubleshooting we need to figure out the locations of all the web.config files that could potentially affect a web application. With IIS 7.0 the configuration is now decentralized and settings could be spread out over a bunch of config files...

IIS 6.0 introduced a lot of features to increase reliability and security. As an architectural change the worker process w3wp.exe was introduced. To increase security IIS 6.0 by default launched the worker process using the NTAuthority\Network Service...

System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) has a nice functionality of displaying report data as charts. When deployed on a 64 bit IIS 6.0 machine these chart displays may stop working and you will start getting the following error message. This...

If you implement custom health monitoring events in ASP.NET chances are that you should have worked with WebBaseEvent or WebErrorEvent classes and used the WebBaseEvent.Raise() method to fire those events. Recently an interesting issue related to this...

Metabase auditing is a very useful feature which allows us to track changes that are made to the IIS metabase. It was introduced with SP1 on Windows 2003 (IIS 6.0). When enabled information such as time and user account that made the change to the metabase...

I was recently working on a reporting web application that uses the Report Viewer ( ReportViewer ) control that ships with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). The Report Viewer control was rendering perfectly when I was developing using Visual Studio...

On IIS 6.0 if your web application ran under a custom user account you would have to setup Service Principal Names (SPNs) for that account. This detail is something that most users miss and as a result the authentication falls back to NTLM. The need for...

Recently while installing a SSL certificate on IIS 7.0 I got this error message CertEnroll::Cx509Enrollment::p_InstallResponse: ASN1 bad tag value met. 0x8009310b I could not complete the certificate request via IIS manager. But strangely after...

On Windows 2003 the HTTPSSL service (the service that implements SSL) runs in the lsass.exe process. If you ever are interested in running the HTTPSSL service in a svchost.exe process instead of the default lsass.exe here is how you do it. To configure...

A couple of days ago I enrolled to the Live Mesh Tech Preview and ever since have fallen in love with it. For folks who don’t know much about the Live Mesh service…. in simple terms it is a synchronization service which can sync your data files between...

Using the System.Drawing namespace is strongly discouraged in ASP.NET as it leads to a lot of performance/runtime problems. Recently one of our customers reported an issue where we were getting GDI+ errors in a normal ASP.NET application. Exception...

Passive FTP uses a range of ports to transfer data. This can be a problem because the port range that IIS uses has to be opened up at the Firewall. Many administrators would like to limit the port range between specific values so that they can have a...