Rick Barber's Blog

There is a lot of buzz in the Internet Information Services (IIS) community about IIS 8, the version of IIS that is included with Windows Server 2012.  While there are plenty of new features in IIS 8, for this writing I am going to focus on the memory improvements that you will see for the application pools.  Memory is a key resource on an IIS server as it is often the first limiting factor if you planned your CPU and disk requirements appropriately.

I continue to see questions and confusion about the configuration of Internet Information Services (IIS).  I hope to clear up some of the confusion by the time you have finished reading this post.

I came across an issue recently where someone was trying to email a document from a program and getting an error that a default mail program is not configured or that the mail program was unable to handle the request.

Occasionally I get questions on how to troubleshoot intermittent issues in IIS.  One example is an intermittent 500 status code and another example is a slow page load.  In IIS7 and later there is a simple module that you can install as part of IIS called Failed Request Tracing (FREB).

If you are running multiple web sites on your IIS web server you will eventually need to know which worker process is associated with a particular application pool.  It may be for baseline information or troubleshooting but at one point or another you will need to cross reference an application pool to a w3wp worker process.

I recently spent some time working with some coworkers to track down an Orchard performance issue.  We found it was caused by some memory restrictions on the application pool.  I wrote about it on another blog site where I am also a guest blogger.

A SQL Injection attack is a malicious technique used to attack databases through a website.  It adds portions of SQL statements into the URL from a page that accepts user input.  The attack is successful when there are vulnerabilities in a website where user input is not filtered and validated.

A question I see a lot has to do with running multiple websites on a single web server.  This is a relatively simple topic once you are able to grasp one concept:  website bindings.  Every website on a server needs to have a unique binding.  There are three parts to a website binding, the IP address, the port, and the host name.