Recently in IIS Category

I was unable to log into an ftp site I setup with a specific user after setting the site up in isolation mode. I was getting 530 User username cannot log in, home directory inaccessible from the ftp prompt and event 13, User username failed to log on, could not access the home directory /.

It turns out that by following the instructions on converting an existing ftp site to isolate users mode it worked. The trick was to create a folder called LocalUser underneath the ftp root folder and then create a folder for the user underneath localuser.

Not sure why this worked but it did.

I tried my first web page in .net using the visual web developer beta 2 (why am I a sucker for trying out beta software?) and it didn't work - returning an error message http error 403 Forbidden. Oddly enough, if I opened the same page in Internet explorer it worked ok. From my experience with IIS I knew this was something to do with NTLM authentication but trying to find out where this was configured was rather bewildering. In the end, the post on the microsoft forums gives the answer - "Select the Solution Explorer view, and right click the very first element of the tree (the project itself). Choose property pages and select Start Options. On the Server section, clear the NTLM checkbox and save the configuration and it now works in firefox. MS's official response is that this is by design to ensure websites are secure. Personally I just wonder how many websites on the internet insist on using NTLM authentication.....not many I guess so I'm afraid this excuse doesn't ring true to me.
As a side note, I can't see how you are meant to permalink to the individual post in the forum - there doesn't seem to be any visible anchors to use. I had to use the WebDevelopers Extension to display the anchors. I've logged a bug in the forums on this point too.

Fixing "connection refused" when trying to ftp into iis, "the system cannot find the drive specified" when using the iis admin interface, "2148073487: object already exists" when trying to start the ftp service and "0x8009000F = Object Already Exists" when trying to reload IIS onto a w2k server. That should sort out the google search requests - for details read on.......

ok, so after posting about one vulnerability, here's another! The date on this post is the 5th October, but I've only just seen the one post so far that talks about the latest vulnerability in asp.net which is a problem in that you can bypass password protected pages by the use of canonicalization (using things like %5c instead of a / )
Update The patch is available here

According to KB 234429 - How to Manually Restore the Metabase When No Proper Backup Exists or When the MMC Does Not Start the solution if you have no metabase backup is to uninstall the WindowsNT Option pack, uninstall ie, delete the metabase and then reinstall ie and NT4 option pack. As far as I was aware NT4 option pack is not installed on w2k!
The annoying thing is that the metabase is not backed up with w2k as it is always in use, and a manual backup of the database wasn't created (which we'd then have been able to restore).

In the meantime I can't start/remove/stop/install IIS5 AND the scheduler service won't start - which I'm hoping/thinking is related.

Got the above error message on the mail server this afternoon which was a new one on me. Apparently it is caused by the lack of available memory on the server. We have 1.5GB of physical memory, the STORE.exe process was taking 900MB of that and there was a console message (not much use when I'm sitting at my desk!) mentioning that it had increased the virtual memory used. The eventlog had various error messages such as the one in the extended entry which explained the above. I had scheduled a reboot for 10pm tonight but then customers started ringing to say they couldn't get into our web front end so I had to reboot. This is the first time I've had this so I hope it doesn't start to become a regular problem.

Microsoft have kindly provided a stress test program for webservers . I'm not sure if its just IIS that it would be good for as I've not had a chance to play with it fully yet. Interestingly the original working name for the program was homer!