Scott Forsyth's Blog
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DFS-R for Web Server Replication-Week 27
You can find this week’s video here.
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How to Setup an Active Directory Domain-Week 26
Today's lesson covers how to create an Active Directory domain and join a member server to it. This week's topic takes a slightly different turn from the normally IIS related topics, but this is key video to help setup either a test or production environment that requires Active Directory.
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Using IP Restrictions with URL Rewrite-Week 25
URL Rewrite offers tremendous flexibility for customizing rules to your environment. One area of functionality that is often desired for URL Rewrite is to allow a large list of approved or denied IP addresses and subnet ranges.
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Why You Shouldn’t Use Web Gardens in IIS-Week 24
IIS’s Web Gardens are a highly misunderstood feature in IIS ever since they were first introduced in IIS 6.0. This week’s lesson discusses why it’s rarely worth using Web Gardens and why using them is often detrimental to your server’s performance. This lesson is a type of anti-pattern on what to avoid, while also covering good theory and pointers to better practices that can be used instead.
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Securing IIS. Thwarting the Hacker-Week 23
This week's video covers the users used by IIS and how to lock down your web server.
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IIS’s ApplicationPoolIdentity Made Easy-Week 22
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.
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IIS 7.0/7.5’s Hidden Tool. Run-time page request performance data-Week 21
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.
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Process Monitor Made Easy-Week 20
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.
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Mastering IIS - Understanding the Schema-Week 19
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.
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Hacking IIS’s AppHost Directly-Week 18
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.