We have IIS 7 released for quite some time now and we haven’t seen any best practices document released by Microsoft IIS 7 team. IIS 6 have good document in place and even though IIS 7 is secure by default, we need some document to keep us in-check. Here are few I prepared for myself: Installing IIS 7 / 7.5 Install IIS 7 / 7.5 with minimum required components. If a feature is not required e.g. Basic Authentication or Directory Browsing, do not install it. If you are using scripts to... [More]

Let me quote from Wikipedia straight away… <snip> An ETag, or entity tag, is part of HTTP, the protocol for the World Wide Web. It is one of several mechanisms that HTTP provides for cache validation, and which allows a client to make conditional requests. This allows caches to be more efficient, and saves bandwidth, as a web server does not need to send a full response if the content has not changed….. An ETag is an opaque identifier assigned by a web server to a specific version of a... [More]

Many a times you will find people delete the “Default Web Site” and then they install some application which require “Default Web Site”. Now, once you have deleted the Web Site how can you recreate or undelete the Web Site. Not possible unless you have a backup. Fortunately, there are workarounds in IIS 6 / 7 / 7.5 through which you can recreate the deleted “Default Web Site”. Does that mean you accidentally deleted a working Web Site and you can recreate it, the answer is “NO”. You can only re... [More]

Sometime back I came across a very good question on ServerFault and I thought of doing some research to understand how IIS handles Custom Errors setting when all requests are passed through aspnet_isapi.dll. Here is a brief background: Scenario 1: We have a Wildcard mapping configured for aspnet_isapi.dll with “Verify that file exists” unchecked. We also have Custom Errors configured for 404. We have configured it as a URL and the path is /404/. Remember the path 404 does not exists in ww... [More]

In the last couple of posts you’ve seen collection and manual analysis of Performance data. In this post let’s automate the analysis using one of the really fantastic tools called PAL – Performance Analysis of Logs. Download it from CodePlex. Ensure that you have installed all the pre-requisites… 1. Log Parser 2.2 Log parser is a powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Win... [More]

In my previous post, I have shown the configuration of perfmon counters. Let’s talk about how to analyze it now. Before you do anything else, read the following articles… IIS 6 Performance Counters Suggested Performance Counters to Watch (IIS 6.0) ASP.NET Performance Counters I know it is a lot of stuff to go through, but then to master drawing, you must learn about the brushes! To manually monitor some counters, you must add the .blg file that got created earlier when you stopped... [More]

I was testing a simple WCF application deployed on my IIS 7.5 machine. This was working fine on my development Windows 7 IIS 7.5 client machine but as soon as I deployed it on my Windows Server 2008 R2 IIS 7.5 machine the application threw the following error: HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid. Here’s what we need to keep in mind. Check the error code 0x80070032. You wi... [More]

I borrowed a VHD recently with Windows 2003 SP 2 installed. Since I had to rename the name of the machine before I make a networked farm, I thought of writing this post to show how you can take care of renaming of an IIS Server. Yeah, looks and sounds simple but I have a few tips up my sleeve so you may prefer to read on. To rename a machine is not difficult. Right Click on My Computer –> Properties –> Computer Name –> Change and give a name. Yes, that simple. It will ask for a reboot,... [More]