IIS has ever increasing amounts of security, you can’t publish a basic ASP.NET MVC website anymore and expect IIS 8 to host it without some additional work. The default config settings that the MVC uses are locked down in IIS, so it issues an error when you try to navigate to your fresh site.

Initially you may get a screen that says something bland and non-descriptive, like “Internal Server Error” with no further information. To get the more detailed error messages modify your web application’s web.config file and add the following line to the system.webServer section:

<httpErrors errorMode="Detailed" />

Now, you’ll get a more detailed error message. It will look something like this:

The key to the message is: This configuration section cannot be used at this path. This happens when the section is locked at a parent level. Locking is either by default (overrideModeDefault="Deny"), or set explicitly by a location tag with overrideMode="Deny" or the legacy allowOverride="false".

The “Config Source” section of the error message will highlight in red the part that is denied.

In order to allow the web.config to modify the the identified configuration element you need to find and modify the ApplicationHost.config file. It is located in C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config. You’ll need to be running as an Administrator level user in order to modify the file.

Find the section group the setting belongs to, e.g.

<sectionGroup name="system.webServer">

Then the section itself:

<section name="handlers" overrideModeDefault="Deny" />

And update overrideModeDefault to "Allow" in order to allow the web.config to override it.

When you refresh the page for the website the error will be gone (or replaced with an error for the next section that you are not permitted to override)

There's a J2EE app running on the Tomcat with ISAPI redirector on IIS 8 of Windows Server 2012. Recently the customer got the error related to an AJAX request. At the point when debugging the issue, I figured out that the IIS returns HTTP 400 Bad Request error instead of passing along the url for the Tomcat to handle it.In the IIS log record, there's no record for this appeal nor lapse log not one or the other.

Go to the IIS admin:
Website > Advanced Settings > Limits > Maximum URL Segments: 32
Request Filtering module > Edit Feature Settings:
Maximum URL Length: 4096
Maximum query string: 2048

All is well. The url that makes blunder meets those design since it has recently few segments and the length is around 380 characters - a long ways behind the utmost settings. At that point I attempted to shorten the url a little bit and then a little bit.. and then finally it worked. It seems there's a limit around 300 characters.

Google around to to enable the error log and I found How to troubleshoot HTTP 400 errors. At that point go to  Error logging in HTTP APIs. Download the Enable HTTP API lapse logging  Microsoft Fix it 50634 to introduce it, yet it said the current OS is not matched! In spite of the fact that the direction applies for Windows Server 2012 Standard as the application is running on.
So have to go to regedit and configure the Http.sys registry settings with following parameters:
EnableErrorLogging: Decimal 1
ErrorLogFileTruncateSize: Decimal 10 (MB)
ErrorLoggingDir: C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles

Then do : net stop HTTP
It will asks you to confirm another services also:
   Windows Remote Management (WS-Management)
   Windows Event Collector
   World Wide Web Publishing Service

Then do: net start HTTP
The HTTP Service service was started successfully.
Check the website, it will stop. Start HTTP again, but it said the HTTP service is already started!
So go to the services manager to start World Wide Web Publishing Service, then Windows Remote Management (WS-Management) and Windows Event Collector

Then test again and see the error log file with a record just shows a very simple error reason: URL. There's a breaking point setting called UrlSegmentMaxLength with 260 characters of course! I felt that brought about the issue in light of the fact that the full url with space name that worked when there's around 300 characters.  So go to regedit and add UrlSegmentMaxLength with 1000 characters value to the HTTP parameters and restart http, w3svc, winrm and wecsvc services again.

I ask why the MS didn't make it for an every particular site like the Maximum URL Segments and effectively to set. In any case we'll need to arrange in the Windows registry that requires to restart entire administrations and influence all sites.

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HostForLIFE.eu is European Windows Hosting Provider which focuses on Windows Platform only. We deliver on-demand hosting solutions including Shared hosting, Reseller Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Dedicated Servers, and IT as a Service for companies of all sizes. We have customers from around the globe, spread across every continent. We serve the hosting needs of the business and professional, government and nonprofit, entertainment and personal use market segments.

Yesterday I decided to install WordPress for my new blog, both because it seemed like good product for the job and also to get some experience in running it (and thus also PHP) on Windows Server 2012 with IIS 8 Hosting. There are some good resources scattered around the web, but none seemed up to date, so I decided to share my notes from the install on here. I’m assuming you already have Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 installed.

IIS 8 CONFIGURATION
The configuration of IIS 8 is quite easy: you just enable the Web Server role through Server Manager. Just to be complete, the screenshot below shows the options I currently have installed, but keep in mind that I’m also running ASP.NET on my server.

Yesterday I decided to install WordPress for my new blog, both because it seemed like good product for the job and also to get some experience in running it (and thus also PHP) on Windows Server 2012 with IIS 8. There are some good resources scattered around the web, but none seemed up to date, so I decided to share my notes from the install on here. I’m assuming you already have Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 installed.

IIS 8 CONFIGURATION
The configuration of IIS 8 is quite easy: you just enable the Web Server role through Server Manager. Just to be complete, the screenshot below shows the options I currently have installed, but keep in mind that I’m also running ASP.NET on my server.I also highly recommend you install PHP Manager (http://phpmanager.codeplex.com/) as it will help us in enabling/disabling PHP extensions from within IIS Manager later on and provides an easy way to access php.ini as well.

PREREQUISITE INSTALLATION
To make things easy, you can install and configure PHP quite easily using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. When you run the Web Platform Installer (Web PI), you can do a quick search for “sql php” and it comes up a few results. When you select “Microsoft Drivers 3.0 for PHP v5.4 for SQL Server in IIS”, which is what we need, all other prerequisites will be automatically installed as well as dependencies (PHP and URL Rewrite for IIS).

After Web PI finishes, you will have PHP installed and configured for use in IIS. Time to do a little test to see if everything is running smoothly. Create a new file under C:\inetpub\wwwroot\ (or wherever your Default Web Site is pointing to) named test.php with the following content:
<?php echo phpinfo(); ?>

This will output information about your PHP configuration.

Time to try it out: navigate to the page (likely http://localhost/test.php). If you are greeted with a screen with purple blocks of information about your PHP configuration, you’re all set and you can skip ahead to the WORDPRESS INSTALLATION section. Chances are you’re going to be greeted with an IIS 403.1 error screen, however, which is due to the fact that the user account that IIS is currently using for the anonymous access to your site doesn’t have the proper privileges to access your wwwroot (or equivalent) folder on disk. This is solved quite easily by granting this user (called IUSR by default) access to the wwwroot folder through Windows Explorer or your other favorite method.

Retry and bask in the glory of the phpinfo() output.

WORDPRESS INSTALLATION

Now we can start downloading the actual WordPress files and start the installation. First off, grab the latest version (or the version of your choice) of WordPress. We will also need the WP Db Abstraction plugin. After downloading, unblock and unZIP both files in a folder under wwwroot (or your Web Site’s location). Installation of the WP Db Abstraction plugin is quite easy, just follow the steps outlined in the readme.txt:Upload wp-db-abstraction.php and the wp-db-abstraction directory to wp-content/mu-plugins. This should be parallel to your regular plugins directory. If the mu-plugins directory does not exist, you must create it.

Put the db.php file from inside the wp-db-abstraction.php directory to wp-content/db.php
Visit $your_wordpress_url/wp-content/mu-plugins/wp-db-abstraction/setup-config.php to generate your wp-config.php file

Before you perform the last step, though, go to IIS Manager and enter PHP Manager (it’s located on the Features page of your server under IIS). Scroll down and click the “Enable or disable an extension” link. You need to make sure that php_pdo_sqlsrv.dll and php_sqlsrv.dll are both enabled. You can also go ahead and disable the *mysql*.dll extensions. Here’s my list of enabled extensions:

Now we can visit the setup-config.php page as outlined above. The steps here are quite straightforward, so I’m not going to walk you through them. You will need to create a user on your SQL Server 2012 installation with SQL Server authentication that has access to a database that you also need to create to use for your WordPress installation.

One note about this process: I had some issues when choosing the default selected “SQL Server using MS PHP driver” and went with the “PDO SqlSrv” option the second time to eliminate these issues.

If the wizard has trouble automatically creating the wp-config.php file, you can either choose to give IUSR write permissions on the folder you created to hold all your WordPress files or you can manually create the file under that folder and paste the output you see on screen in there (I chose the latter). After the wp-config.php file is created, you can start the installation of WordPress by clicking the link on the bottom of the page you’re on.

WORDPRESS CONFIGURATION

After the install, which should only take a minute tops, you are now ready to log in to your WordPress admin dashboard and start configuring it how you’d like. As you can see, there’s a sample post and comment already waiting for you. If your experience is anything like mine, you will notice that when you navigate to the Posts -> All Posts option on the top left of your dashboard you won’t actually see these posts in the list. It took some hunting around the web to figure this out, but apparently there’s a line in the translations.php file of the WP Db Abstraction plugin that’s causing this (thanks to tm3ister on http://sourceforge.net/projects/wp-sqlsrv/forums/forum/1124403/topic/5004241 for figuring this out!). The solution is to manually edit the translate_limit function in the mu-plugins/wp-db-abstraction/translations/sqlsrv/translations.php file:

Change

// Check for true offset
if ( (count($limit_matches) == 5  )  && $limit_matches[1] != '0' ) {
    $true_offset = true;
} elseif ( (count($limit_matches) == 5 )  && $limit_matches[1] == '0' ) {
    $limit_matches[1] = $limit_matches[4];
}

To

// Check for true offset
if ( (count($limit_matches) == 5  )  && $limit_matches[1] != '0' ) {
    $true_offset = true;
} elseif ( (count($limit_matches) >= 5 )  && $limit_matches[1] == '0' ) {
    $limit_matches[1] = $limit_matches[4];
}

And voila, your posts will now show up.

The last thing we’re going to configure is Permalinks (or pretty URLs) for our posts. When you navigate to Settings -> Permalinks on the admin dashboard, you’ll see some options to rewrite URLs to be more human and search engine friendly. For now, select Custom Structure and enter /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ in the text field and hit Save Changes. The last step is to create a web.config file in our WordPress folder to rewrite the URLs according to this scheme with IIS URL Rewrite. Create a new web.config file (if you don’t have one already) in the folder you installed WordPress to and copy in the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <rewrite>
      <rules>
        <rule name="wordpress" patternSyntax="Wildcard">
          <match url="*" />
          <conditions>
            <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />
            <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />
          </conditions>
          <action type="Rewrite" url="index.php"/>
        </rule>
      </rules>
    </rewrite>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

You’re now all set to use WordPress on Windows Server 2012 with IIS 8 and SQL Server 2012!

Now, I want to do the same thing, but this time, using PowerShell. We can easily achieve this with the help of PowerShell and typing a few simple commands.

Before we begin with DHCP installation process, first we need to make sure that it’s not installed in our Server 2016. We can verify this in two ways., which are given below.

• Using Server Manager.
• Using PowerShell.

As you can see below, I opened my Server Manager to check (Left side , under Dashboard), if DHCP is already installed, as we can see in the screenshot given below, DHCP Server roles are not installed yet.

Server Manager
Let’s verify this, using PowerShell. All you need to do is, just open your PowerShell and type the command given below.

Get-WindowsFeature

You can notice in the screenshot given above, install Sate for DHCP says “Available”, which means that it’s available for the installation and it’s not installed yet. Thus, we can continue with our installation process..

To install this DHCP server role using PowerShell, we need to use the command given below.

Install-WindowsFeature -Name ‘DHCP’
After installing this DHCP Server role, type the commands given below to install DHCP Management Tools.

We have successfully installed DHCP Server role and all the required tools to manage it. We can verify this in two ways. We can go back to Server Manager to see, if there is a DHCP Server role, the other way is suing PowerShell…Let’s first verify this, using Server Manager.

Go to —> Server Manager and check for DHCP under Roles and Server Groups (See the screenshot given below.)

We can also verify this using PowerShell, using the command given below.
Get-WindowsFeature.

HostForLIFE.eu IIS 8.0 Hosting
HostForLIFE.eu is European Windows Hosting Provider which focuses on Windows Platform only. We deliver on-demand hosting solutions including Shared hosting, Reseller Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Dedicated Servers, and IT as a Service for companies of all sizes. We have customers from around the globe, spread across every continent. We serve the hosting needs of the business and professional, government and nonprofit, entertainment and personal use market segments.

A customer was getting errror when utilizing PUT/POST/DELETE verbs on their web application as of late. The error looks like this:
<h2>405 - HTTP verb used to access this page is not allowed.</h2>
<h3>The page you are looking for cannot be displayed because an invalid method (HTTP verb) was used to attempt access</h3>

After some troubleshooting the error was disengaged to the way that WebDav was installed on the server and was catching those requests for its own service use.

Instead of removing Webdav from the server, we made a go at searching for an alternate solution. Thankfully somebody on Twitter comprehended the issue and gave an illustration of changes to make to the customer's web.config record with a specific end goal to disable (remove) the Webdav module for simply that particular webpage without requiring any requiring managerial activities on the server.

The code updates to make to your web.config record to intention this error are:
<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <handlers>
      <remove name="WebDAV" />
      <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_32bit" />
      <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_64bit" />
      <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0" />
      <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_32bit" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" modules="IsapiModule" scriptProcessor="%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_isapi.dll" preCondition="classicMode,runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness32" responseBufferLimit="0" />
      <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_64bit" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" modules="IsapiModule" scriptProcessor="%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_isapi.dll" preCondition="classicMode,runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness64" responseBufferLimit="0" />
      <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" type="System.Web.Handlers.TransferRequestHandler" preCondition="integratedMode,runtimeVersionv4.0" />
    </handlers>
    <modules>
      <remove name="WebDAVModule" />
    </modules>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

HostForLIFE.eu IIS 8.0 Hosting
HostForLIFE.eu is European Windows Hosting Provider which focuses on Windows Platform only. We deliver on-demand hosting solutions including Shared hosting, Reseller Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Dedicated Servers, and IT as a Service for companies of all sizes. We have customers from around the globe, spread across every continent. We serve the hosting needs of the business and professional, government and nonprofit, entertainment and personal use market segments.

Recently a colleague of mine wrote an article on setting up a CDN (Content Delivery Network). This made me experiment a bit with some IIS 8 settings. It is possible to set up IIS to rewrite all outgoing requests in such a way that your static content (e.g. images, style-sheets, etc) will be downloaded from a separate location. The main benefit of this method is (in my opinion) that it doesn’t requiren any adjustments on your target site. All it requires is some tweaking of your web.config and ofcourse a working CDN.

Outbound rewrite rules are a pretty powerful thing, when used properly. When used incorrectly, they can slow your site down to a screeching halt. Lucky for us, the outbound rewrite rules can be used to filter out specific requests. In this case we will use them to rewrite all outgoing HTML code. We want to search out all static content (in this example .jpg and .png files) and rewrite it on the fly to be downloaded from a CDN. So, first we want to set the proper precondition. Loads of data leaves a webserver, so let’s make sure we only look at the relevant parts of it. We start by setting up a precondition:

<preConditions>

      <preCondition name="CheckHTML"> 

           <add input="{RESPONSE_CONTENT_TYPE}" pattern="^text/html" /> 

      </preCondition> 

</preConditions> 

Now we’re looking at all HTML only it’s time to get even more specific. Outbound rules allow you to filter a tag you want to look for. In this case we assume all images are located in tags. So we can use the following filtering before actually matching it to a pattern:

<rule name="CDN"stopProcessing="false">  
      <match filterByTags="Img" pattern="(https?:\/\/www.(.*)\.(jpg|png))" />  
      <action type="Rewrite" value="http://cdn.{R:2}.{R:3}" />  
 </rule> 

Noticed the ugly regex I used there? Let’s take a look at it:

(https?:\/\/www.(.*)\.(jpg|png))

All this baby does is matching all url’s containing .jpg or .png on the end. So basically it makes sure we catch all outgoing image url’s before they reach the browser. This same regex gives us 3 backreferences. We only need two of them: {R:2} and {R:3}. These contain (in my case) the stripped url (no more http://www.) and the extension. We use these later on to rebuild the url for our CDN. You might want to adjust this regular expression to suit your specific needs.

For me: this one is all I need. Now it’s time for rewriting our url. I can use the backreferences that are given to re-assemble the image location to something that should be working on the CDN. How the data gets there is up to you. I’m only pointing out how you can redirect traffic there ;) After your done, the following can be used in your web.config:

<rewrite> 

      <outboundRules>

          <rule name="CDN" preCondition="CheckHTML" stopProcessing="false"> 

                <match filterByTags="Img" pattern="(https?:\/\/www.(.*)\.(jpg|png))" /> 

                <action type="Rewrite" value="http://cdn.{R:2}.{R:3}" /> 

           </rule> 

           <preConditions> 

                <preCondition name="CheckHTML"> 

                     <add input="{RESPONSE_CONTENT_TYPE}" pattern="^text/html" /> 

                </preCondition> 

          </preConditions> 

      </outboundRules>

</rewrite>