Rick Barber's Blog

As a server administrator, primarily focused on IIS, I like spending time in the IIS forums.  I frequently see questions related to URL Rewrite rules so I wanted to make a guide for the plethora of information that is available on the Internet.

I came across an issue today where a website had a dependency on the SQL Server Native Client 10.0, which is part of SQL Server 2008.  A recent upgrade to SQL Server 2012 caused SQL Server Native Client 11.0 to be installed and version 10.0 to be uninstalled.

From time to time I encounter a website that is maxing out the server’s CPU.  In previous versions of IIS, there were two basic options.  One, you could do nothing.  Or two, you could kill the worker process for a specified number of minutes.  

For the latest news and happenings in the IIS community over the past month, be sure to check out the February edition of the IIS Community Newsletter!

So you’ve written a new ASP.Net website, tested it locally in your development environment and you deploy it to your IIS server.  Now you’re getting the dreaded 500 – Internal server error.  What are you to do?

Sometimes you need to restrict traffic to your web site or reduce the impact from a rogue bot that is hitting it.  Often, the first thought is to restrict that traffic at the perimeter firewall.  While that is a good choice, the structure of your organization may prevent that from happening in a timely manner.  Or maybe you are frequently making changes to the restrictions making that a cumbersome chore.

Some time ago I was running a few tests in my lab environment against a current version of MySQL.  A few months later I needed to access it again but I forgot my root password so I wanted to start from scratch.  Easy enough, right?  Just go to Add/Remove programs in the Control Panel and uninstall MySQL.

I came across a situation today where I needed to monitor the number of files in the Microsoft SMTP queue from a web page.  While there are numerous ways I considered approaching this, I wanted it to be simple, portable, and easy to maintain.