HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS) response header is used to tell browsers that the particular website should only be accessed solely over HTTPS. This is a powerful feature that is easy to implement to mitigate the risks for the communication to be intercepted by hackers and keep your website visitors safe. Enabling HTTP Strict Transport Security on IIS See the steps below to enable HSTS on … [Read more...]
How to Enable TLS 1.2 as the Default Security Protocol on Windows Servers
Transport Layer Security (TLS) are cryptographic protocols designed to provide communications security over a computer network, typically between a website and a browser. TLS 1.0 and its deprecated predecessor, SSL are vulnerable to some well-known security issues such as POODLE and BEAST attacks. According to NIST, these vulnerabilities cannot be fixed or patched, therefore all companies, … [Read more...]
How to Fix SMTP 550 5.7.1 Unable to Relay Error on Windows Server 2012 R2
Here is one way of fixing an SMTP error on Windows Server 2012 when you see an error message similar to the one below: Error Message Steps to Add Localhost to the SMTP Relay Launch IIS 6.0 Manager. Right-click on the STMP Server (on this example it's named default, but it could be named something else) and select Properties. Click on the Access tab and at the very bottom … [Read more...]
How to Troubleshoot Response Buffer Limit Exceeded Error in Classic ASP
How do you troubleshoot a classic ASP website when it crashes with the following error message? Turn Off Page Buffering By default, page buffering in ASP is set to On so one way to do it is just to turn off the page buffering. At the top of your ASP page, add the following line after the VBScript declaration (Line 2 - highlighted): In general though, you do want to pose a limit … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]