May 2011 - Posts
Managing Windows users for IIS security can sometimes be a pain and, if not handled correctly, can leave your server vulnerable. In this week’s video I introduce the new ApplicationPoolIdentity account that was introduced in IIS 7.0 and improved in IIS 7.5. This “virtual account” offers a lot of power and is easy to use once you understand the basics.. Since it’s the default account for application pools, understanding it is important for any web administrator.
This video demystifies this special account and covers information useful to the web pro.
You can find the video at its new home on DotNetSlackers.
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/IIS-ApplicationPoolIdentity-Made-Easy.aspx
This is week 22 of a 52 week Web Pro series on various web administration related tasks. Past and future videos can be found here.
Black box troubleshooting is very difficult. What I mean by that, is that if you can’t see what’s happening, it’s extra difficult to troubleshoot. For us administrators, or developers needing to troubleshooting something on a live server, it’s so valuable to see what’s happening behind the scenes.
IIS 7 and 7.5 have new access to real-time run-time information which makes troubleshooting so much easier and more powerful.
This week’s video uncovers a hidden tool in IIS 7(.5) in regards to Run-time Status Control API (RSCA) data.
With that, I have an announcement. This 52 week series has found a new home. DotNetSlackers is now housing this series, starting this week. I’m excited to be able to publish under the DotNetSlackers’ umbrella. This will give added exposure and also allow this series to live alongside other similar types of articles and series.
I’ll still write a weekly blog and point to the DotNetSlacker article and video.
You can find this week’s video here.
Every trade has their favorite tool, whether it be a hammer, calculator, or stethoscope. For me, one of my top tools is Process Monitor. I use it like a handy man uses duct tape. With it I can easily troubleshoot access denied errors, files not found, strange path redirection, and many other unexpected behavior situations.
Talking about duct tape, I just noticed that it can even be used to cure warts! But I digress.
In this week’s video I show off how easy Process Monitor is to troubleshoot various disk and registry related issues. Within the first 4 minutes of the video I cover a complete end to end troubleshooting situation. Then I dig in deeper on many of the other features.
Process Monitor is a free, tiny, fast, stable, powerful, and easy tool that every Windows administrator should become familiar with.
This is week 20 of a 52 week Web Pro series on various web administration related tasks. Past and future videos can be found here.
Having problems viewing on your mobile device? Click here instead.
IIS is a powerful web platform, and since version 7.0 everything, absolutely everything, is backed by a schema. This defines the settings, defaults and value ranges that IIS uses.
This means that tools can use it to ensure that they are 100% complete in the IIS settings and that they can perform validation that doesn’t get out of date over time. And administrators can use the schema as a treasure chest of information to understand IIS better.
This week I show the schema and walk through a few settings to introduce you to this core aspect of IIS.
This is week 19 of a 52 week Web Pro series on various web administration related tasks. Past and future videos can be found here.
Having problems viewing on your mobile device? Click here instead.
Last week I covered IIS 7(.5)’s distributed and delegated configuration system. This week I’ll take it a step further and look specifically at editing applicationHost.config in a text editor (e.g. notepad) to make more advanced configuration changes.
While it’s not ‘hacking’ per se since it’s fully supported, this topic covers ways to get under the covers to make more advanced configuration changes. This week’s video shows how easy—yet powerful—it is to understand and utilize IIS’s configuration system directly.
This is week 18 of a 52 week Web Pro series on various web administration related tasks. Past and future videos can be found here.
Having problems viewing on your mobile device? Click here instead.
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