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Archive for the iis tag

• Managing IIS configuration in a web farm

  We’re now running 4 web servers and it’s starting to feel like we should consider centralising the IIS configuration. It’s now enough manual work that I can see a situation where one server in the farm ends up configured very slightly differently.

  We still need to manage a migration to Windows Server 2008 / IIS7, and it looks like it might be best to complete this first then look at shared configuration management in IIS7. The good news is that we now have enough capacity that it shouldn’t be a problem to take a single server out of the load balancer, get it rebuilt to IIS7, then added back in.

  It looks like any centralisation of either the metabase or content files is based on serving from a network share. I’d be interested to know to what degree this impacts performance, and the best way to do this while avoiding a single point of failure.

  I think I’ll probably worry about getting everything on to IIS7 then look at the best way to achieve this.

  Posted:

  June 22, 2010 @ 9:12

  Categories:

  Infrastructure

  Tags:

  iis, web farm

  Comments:

  No comments so far

• Configuring a virtual application within an ASP.NET MVC site

  I recently had to look into how to get requests to /TestApp within an ASP.NET MVC site resolving to another application, instead of picking up the default routing rule and trying to find the Index action on a TestApp controller class. A scenario where this may occur would be setting up a wiki application to run on /wiki off your main domain name.

  First off, we need to ensure that the routing module doesn’t kick in and attempt to handle the request. This can be achieved by making the following change in global.asax of the MVC app…

  routes.IgnoreRoute("{*path}", new { path = @"TestApp\/(.*)" });

  You can then create a new virtual directory in IIS under the main site, and convert it into an application to ensure it’s running in a seperate AppPool etc.

  The final step is to ensure that web application settings in the parent application don’t cascade and get applied to the child application. This is achieved by wrapping all of the main configuration in a location block, and setting inheritInChildApplications to false like so…

  <location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">
     <system.web>Blah</system.web>
     <system.webServer>Blah</system.webServer>
  </location>

  The most useful reading on this I could find was this forum post.

  Posted:

  June 1, 2009 @ 16:40

  Categories:

  Development

  Tags:

  .NET, asp.net, iis, mvc

  Comments:

  No comments so far

• Scripted Configuration of IIS7 on Vista with MSBuild

  I have an application that has an automated build script using msbuild which carries out all steps necessary to get the application configured and running on a local machine. Part of this process relates to configuration of IIS.

  I’ve just installed Vista, and initially ran into a few problems getting the build script to run sucessfully. IIS7 isn’t installed by default in Vista, so you need to go to Programs and Features manually and choose to install. When you do this, make sure you expand the IIS node in the treeview and check all of the features you require. By default the web server will install with a very limited range of features. The important one here is under II6 Management Compatability > IIS Metabase and II6 configuration compatibility.

  If you’re using the SBF task library for msbuild, the tasks for configuration of IIS use the WMI interface for configuring the webserver. This will continue to work so long as the previous configuration is checked when installing IIS7.

  The next problem you’ll face is to do with elevated permissions. When you carry out IIS configuration via the user interface, you’ll be prompted to elevate to admin permissions (the annoying dialog that pops up frequently). If you’re running a scripted build, this doesn’t occur so you’ll get an Access Denied exception when msbuild calls the IIS configuration tasks. Set up a shortcut for the command prompt (or use the VS.NET command prompt shortcut), right click on it, and choose “Run as Administrator”. This means that tasks which require administrative priveleges (but can’t ask for them via the UI) will complete successfully.

  IIS7 comes with a command line utility which allows you to do things like create websites or virtual directories. Long term it may be simpler if the msbuild tasks shell out to this utility rather than using WMI, but for the time being they would need to be able to configure IIS6 and 7, so WMI is the best approach.

  Posted:

  December 9, 2006 @ 14:18

  Categories:

  Development

  Tags:

  automation, build, iis, msbuild, vista

  Comments:

  No comments so far