Tag Archives: IIS

I just picked up an old Dell Precision 690 workstation, which I intend to develop into a file server, a Windows IIS server, and an Ubuntu LAMP server. This monster was built in 2006, but it still has some neat specs and tons of capacity (7 PCI slots, 4 hard drive bays, etc…), should I want to expand further.

Dell Precision 690

Dell Precision 690 Workstation

The main specs

CPU: Dual Core Intel Xeon 5060 3.2GHz, 4M Cache, 1066 MHz FSB
RAM: 2GB DDR2 PC2-5300, CL=5, Fully Buffered, ECC, DDR2-667
HD: SAS Fujitsu MAX3073RC 73GB, 15000 RPM, 16MB Cache
Video: Nvidia Quadro NVS 285 PCI-Express, 128MB

This is not a normal tower

Right away, the size of this thing suggests it isn’t a normal tower. It’s about up to my knee and weights 70 lbs. It feels like it’s made with heavier gauge steel than the typical chassis, but that may be me projecting.

I immediately shopped around for more RAM, obviously. 2GB seems a little thin, even by 2006 standards, when considering the way everything else is high-end. The mainboard has 8 slots and supports up to 32GB, but I figure 6GB is a safe place to start.

The workstation has three enormous fans, like, big-as-your-hand big. Running it with the chassis open causes some sort of thermal protection system to kick in and it spins the fans up to the point that they were blowing stuff on the floor half-way across the room.

The CPU has a big, passive heat sink with six copper pipes and sits between two of those fans. I’m tempted to buy a second CPU, but I’ll hold off.

I’m still on the fence about the SCSI drive. It should be super fast, but I’m a little spoiled by the SSD in my machine at work, so it’s hard to get excited about a mechanical drive, even one running at 15k RPM.

The Nvidia Quadro card is also fanless, and has a bizarre DMS-59 connector. An adapter converts the DMS-59 connector into two DVI outputs.

Back in May of 2011, the Xbox.com forums were redesigned. The old forum’s content was transferred to a new subdomain at http://forumsarchive.xbox.com/ and left to rot.

What happened to all the stuff in the “old” forums?

For a limited time, all your posts from the previous version of the forums live on forumsarchive.xbox.com (will be available shortly after the new forums have gone live). They are available for you to go grab any FAQs, walkthroughs, and other valuable posts that you created, so you can repost them in the new forums.

http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/forum_faq/f/6/p/3058/19910.aspx

That isn’t quite true, as I’ve found links in posts on ardamis.com to at least one thread that I’d started on the old forum that is missing from the archive, so there has obviously been some culling happening.

I suspect that not only were countless useful threads simply abandoned or even deleted, but probably millions of inbound links to xbox.com were left to 404.

Instead of redirecting all of the links to the old forum threads, visitors following those links now see an ugly IIS server error message.

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.

The resource cannot be found.

Description: HTTP 404. The resource you are looking for (or one of its dependencies) could have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Please review the following URL and make sure that it is spelled correctly.

Requested URL: /31685953/ShowPost.aspx

It’s stunning, actually, how poorly this transition was handled, and I’m not alone in thinking that. There are even threads on the new forum about how much better the old one was. I cannot picture any metric by which improvement is measured that would indicate this change was successful. And I would love to know how the decision was made to let tons of inbound links 404. Who on earth would allow this to happen to their site?

One of my most popular articles at ardamis.com was a description of the slow death of my Xbox 360 at the hands of FFXIII, which thankfully didn’t link to the forum threads that it referenced for support. All those threads on how either a) Final Fantasy XIII broke dozens of Xbox 360s, or b) dozens of Xbox 360s just happened to break as people were playing Final Fantasy XIII, disappeared. But I’ve begun a new one, for posterity (and not because I still play the game, which I found to be a huge disappointment). So, to keep the flame of discontent burning, here’s the link to the new thread on Final Fantasy XIII freezing on Xbox 360.

On the upside, a quick look at the HTML of the new pages suggests that the links are not nofollowed, which is something else I found interesting about the old forums.

I have to look up how to implement a 301 redirect in ASP every few months, so I’m putting this up as a personal reference.

<%@ Language="VBScript" %>
<% 
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently" 
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://domain.com/page.asp" 
Response.End 
%>

It seems that the value of Location can be a relative path and the redirect will still function.

These are from my notes that I took when setting up IIS 7.5 on Windows 7. It’s not supposed to be a how-to, exactly. It’s just what I need to do to get my dev server up and running classic .ASP pages.

Install IIS via Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> “Turn Windows features on or off”.

Click the box next to Internet Information Services. It will become blocked, not checked, indicating some but not all features are installed. Click OK.

Once Windows has installed IIS, browse to http://localhost/ to confirm the server has started.

If you browse to an .asp page, though, you’ll get a Server Error:

HTTP Error 404.3 – Not Found
The page you are requesting cannot be served because of the extension configuration. If the page is a script, add a handler. If the file should be downloaded, add a MIME map.

To enable the server to run classic .ASP pages, go back to Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> “Turn Windows features on or off”, then expand Internet Information Services -> World Wide Web Services -> Application Development Features. Check the box next to ASP, then click OK.

Parent Paths is disabled by default on IIS 7.5. To enable it, run the following command as administrator:

%systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\APPCMD set config "Default Web Site" -section:system.webServer/asp /enableParentPaths:"True" /commit:apphost

Credit: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/566/classic-asp-parent-paths-are-disabled-by-default/

Classic ASP script error messages are no longer shown in the web browser by default on IIS 7.5. Misconfigurations are hard to troubleshoot, because IIS returns only:

An error occurred on the server when processing the URL. Please contact the system administrator.
If you are the system administrator please click here to find out more about this error.

To enable sending detailed ASP script error messages to the Web browser (as was the case in IIS 6), run the following command as administrator:

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config -section:asp -scriptErrorSentToBrowser:true

Credit: http://blogs.iis.net/bills/archive/2007/05/21/tips-for-classic-asp-developers-on-iis7.aspx

To start the default web site from the command line, run the following command as administrator:

%systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\APPCMD start site "Default Web Site"

To stop the default web site from the command line, run the following command as administrator:

%systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\APPCMD stop site "Default Web Site"

Even better, you can make shortcuts to batch files that contain those commands, and then set the shortcuts to always run as administrator.

The c:\inetpub\wwwroot directory is UAC-protected. If you are going to leave UAC on (and it’s recommended that you do), you will probably want to change the NTFS permissions on the wwwroot folder so that you don’t have to click through a prompt each time you change a file.

The IIS Manager app is located at Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.

I was installing PHP 5 on an IIS 6 server when I ran into what turns out to be a pretty common problem. PHP appeared to be installed correctly, but browsing to any page with a .php extension returned a 404 Page Not Found error. While the steps below fixed this for me, I had to piece them together from a few different sources, and a number of other suggestions (like copying the php.ini file to C:/WINDOWS/) didn’t work and were not necessary.

Open your IIS management console at C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\iis.msc.
Drill down to your web site, right-click and select Properties.
Select the Home Directory tab, then click on the Configuration button.
Select the Mappings tab. If you don’t see a .php extension listed, click the Add button. Browse to the PHP 5 DLL (which may be at C:\Program Files\PHP\php5isapi.dll). Type .php into the Extension field and leave everything else at the default values. Click OK. The extension and executable path will be filled out and under Verbs you should see “All”.

I should point out that I didn’t have anything listed under the ISAPI Filters tab.

Stop and restart your IIS server and browse to a .php file. (To restart your IIS server, open the IIS management console, right-click the local computer in the left pane, hover on All Tasks and choose Restart IIS.) Chances are, you’re no longer getting the 404 error, but are now seeing a 403.1 message, like:

The page cannot be displayed
You have attempted to execute a CGI, ISAPI, or other executable program from a directory that does not allow programs to be executed.

Please try the following:

* Contact the Web site administrator if you believe this directory should allow execute access.

HTTP Error 403.1 – Forbidden: Execute access is denied.
Internet Information Services (IIS)

Open iis.msc again, go back to the Home Directory tab, and select the “Scripts only” option from the Execute Permissions menu. Restart the server.

The server should now be correctly processing .php files.