Tag: IIS | Page 5

How to Manage IIS Servers Remotely

Managing several IIS servers can be overwhelming if you have to RDP to each server to perform your tasks. Unfortunately, there are many IT professionals still doing it the hard way by not taking advantage of this capability to manage IIS servers from their workstations.

Using IIS Manager for Remote Administration, you can manage remote IIS with the same experience as if you’re logged into the remote server since it has the same user interface.

As this setup is done on the client side where it will be used to manage the IIS servers from, make sure the remote server has its remote connections enabled under IIS Management Service (WMSVC).

After the remote server is properly configured, here are the steps to enable your workstation to manage remote IIS servers:

Steps

Download IIS Manager for Remote Administration.
For a 64-bit OS, use the inetmgr_amd64_en-US.msi. The word ‘amd’ on amd64 has nothing to do with whether you are using Intel or AMD processor.

The first time you run it, you may see a dialog box with the following error:

The IIS Management Console is not installed, but it is required for managing remote IIS Servers. Please install the IIS Management Console before installing the remote management support by opening the 'Control Panel-&amp;gt;Programs-&amp;gt;Turn Windows Features On or Off' and selecting the IIS Management Console in the Inet... [OK]

IIS Remote Administration Error

If that’s the case, just click OK and install the IIS Management Console first before you continue.

Run the inetmgr_amd64_en-US.msi (substitute this with the file you downloaded if different) and just follow the instructions until the end.
You can find the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager under Control Panel and Administrative Tools.
If you did not install IIS Remote Administration, IIS Manager can only be used to manage the IIS on your local PC. Remote Administration gives you an additional ability to connect to a different server (Connect to a Server…) as shown below:

The IIS Manager for Remote Administration 1.2 (inetmgr_amd64_en-US.msi) works on the 64-bit version of Windows 10, although it’s not mentioned in its System Requirements.

Downloads

IIS Manager for Remote Administration 1.2
IIS Manager for Remote Administration 1.2 Direct Download

How to Install IIS Management Console on Windows

Here are the steps to install IIS Management Console as a prerequisite to manage IIS servers remotely. The examples are shown using Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-bit.

Steps

Make sure you don’t have any RDP sessions opened during installation otherwise you will see an error.
Right-click the Windows Start Button, and click on Control Panel.
Click on Programs.
Click on Turn Windows features on or off.
Find and expand Internet Information Services, then Web Management Tools and check on IIS Management Console.
Click OK and Close when completed.
Now go back to Control Panel and change the View by Category to Small icons. And click on Administrative Tools.
You should see Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager shortcut now.
Or you can click on Windows Start Button and click on All apps and find Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager under Windows Administrative Tools

That’s it. Keep in mind that completing these steps only enables IIS Manager Console manage your local IIS. To also manage IIS servers remotely using this same interface, you still need to install IIS Manager for Remote Administration on your PC.

How to Cache Specific Static Files and Directories on IIS

As part of IIS performance tuning to improve a web page load speed, in general you want to enable browser caching by double-clicking on HTTP Response Headers in IIS Manager, click on Set Common Headers and check the Expire Web content:, then set the After: with an x number of days.

Often times though, you may want to be more granular in IIS static content caching for different type of files or all static files under certain folders. In the same way that you can disable browser caching for specific files on IIS, you can also configure the web.config to setup browser caching for specific files or directories with different lengths of time.

<configuration>
...
  <location path="favicon.ico">
    <system.webServer>
      <staticContent>
        <clientCache cacheControlCustom="public" cacheControlMode="UseMaxAge" cacheControlMaxAge="365.00:00:00" />
      </staticContent>
    </system.webServer>
  </location>
  <location path="js">
    <system.webServer>
      <staticContent>
        <clientCache cacheControlCustom="public" cacheControlMode="UseMaxAge" cacheControlMaxAge="60.00:00:00" />
      </staticContent>
    </system.webServer>
  </location>
  <location path="images">
    <system.webServer>
      <staticContent>
        <clientCache cacheControlCustom="public" cacheControlMode="UseMaxAge" cacheControlMaxAge="30.00:00:00" />
      </staticContent>
    </system.webServer>
  </location>
</configuration>

In this example we can see the caching for a specific file favicon.ico is set to 1 year (365 days) and two folders js and images are set to 60 and 30 days respectively (In a format of days.hours:minutes:seconds). This means, all static files under js folder will be cached for 60 days, similarly for images folder, although for less duration since the contents change more frequently.

By caching as many static files as possible on the browser, you can tremendously improve IIS performance, which translates to better users experience in loading your site faster on their subsequent visits.

How to Fix Invalid SendUsing Configuration using CDO

When you use CDOsys to send email from a classic ASP, you might see an error message below and if you look at the line error, it’s always on the message.Send:

The page cannot be displayed

There is a problem with the page you are trying to reach and it cannot be displayed.

Please try the following:

Contact the Web site administrator to let them know that this error has occurred for this URL address.

HTTP 500.100 - Internal server error: ASP error.

Internet Information Services

Technical Information (for support personnel)

Error Type:

CDO.Message.1 '80040220'

The "SendUsing" configuration value is invalid.

/path/filename.asp, line 100

Browser Type:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2490.71 Safari/537.36

Page:
POST 279 bytes to /path/filename.asp
POST Data:
category=...

Time:
Monday, October 26, 2015, 10:12:55 PM

More information:

Click on Microsoft Support for a links to articles about this error.

Go to Microsoft Product Support Services and perform a title search for the words HTTP and 500.

Open IIS Help, which is accessible in IIS Manager (inetmgr), and search for topics titled Web Site Administration, and About Custom Error Messages.

In the IIS Software Development Kit (SDK) or at the MSDN Online Library, search for topics titled Debugging ASP Scripts, Debugging Components, and Debugging ISAPI Extensions and Filters.

Several posts would suggest that you put the SMTP server in the code. But when you already have an SMTP server setup on IIS 6.0, here’s a couple things you might want to check as well:

Check if the Application Pool is at least running under version 2.0.
Give user MACHINE\IIS_IUSRS modify permission on C:\inetpub\mailroot directory (or if you moved the SMTP folders somewhere else, give that permission to the new directory instead).

Also check the links under Further Reading below for the common solutions pertaining to this error.

How to Fix Could Not Create a Disk Cache Sub-Directory for the Application Pool on IIS

During one of the upgrade projects from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 32-bit, the following error occurs:

Source : Active Server Pages

Error: The Template Persistent Cache initialization failed for Application Pool 'AppPoolName' because of the following error: Could not create a Disk Cache Sub-directory for the Application Pool. The data may have additional error codes..

This happened soon after the Windows Server 2003 was in-place upgraded to Windows Server 2008.

One the problems here is after the upgrade, the default ASP Compiled Templates folder got moved but the application config is still pointing to the old path. The second issue is typically the new folder does not have permissions setup properly.

As a background information, the Application Pool for this classic ASP application is run under .NET Framework v2.0 with Managed Pipeline Mode Classic and Identity set to NetworkService.

So here are the steps to fix the issue.

Give Permissions to ASP Compiled Templates Folder

Open Windows Explorer and go to %SystemDrive%\inetpub\temp and you should see a folder called ASP Compiled Templates.
Right-click on the folder and select Properties and click on the Security tab.
If this is the first time you access it, you may see the prompt as shown below. Just click the Continue button and you’ll see the Advanced Security Settings for ASP Compiled Templates screen.
On the Change owner to: box, select either your group or your NTID and check Replace owner on subcontainers and objects and click OK and Yes when prompted by Windows Security box (All permissions will be replaced if you press Yes).
As instructed, you should close all dialog boxes and go back to the folder’s Properties and click on the Security tab again. This time, you should be able to add a user.
Click on the Add… button and type in Network Service and click OK.
Highlight NETWORK SERVICE and check Full control on the Permissions for NETWORK SERVICE box.
Click OK two times to close all dialog boxes

Now we have set the permission, we also need to modify the value of the new path in applicationHost.config file.

Fix Application Config File

Open Windows Explorer and go to %Windir%\System32\inetsrv\config and look for a file applicationHost.config.
Backup applicationHost.config file.
Open applicationHost.config either using a Notepad or any text editor.
Search for “ASP Compiled Templates” and you should find the diskTEmplateCacheDirectory value for the old path.

Change the old path to the new one. In this example, the new path is %SystemDrive%\inetpub\temp\ASP Compiled Templates.

<cache diskTemplateCacheDirectory="%SystemDrive%\inetpub\temp\ASP Compiled Templates" maxDiskTemplateCacheFiles="2000" scriptFileCacheSize="250" scriptEngineCacheMax="125" enableTypelibCache="true" />

Save the change and close Notepad.

Along with this error, another error HostableWebCore (Event ID 5053) also occurred, but that was easily fixed by following the steps from this Microsoft Technet article.

Steps

Downloads

Further Reading

Steps

Further Reading

Further Reading

Further Reading

Give Permissions to ASP Compiled Templates Folder

Fix Application Config File

Further Reading

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