Over the last couple of months among other things I’ve been working on a tool to automatically the logs and information in my team we usually ask at the beginning of a new Support Call: all standard things such as IIS logs, event logs, .config files etc… Not all of those files are necessary for every case (as usual it depends on the problem at hand), but experience tells me the more information we have about the environment, the more chances we have to spot small inconsistencies, configuration problems etc… that sometimes can lay unnoticed and interfere with our work. So, enter our guest: IDevDataCollector I tried to keep the UI as simple and organized as possible, utilization is very easy, just run it and click the “Collect” button, sit there a couple of minutes (how much exactly will depend on the logs collected) and you’re done ?. Please note that I’m still working on it, this is just a preview release but I’d love to have your feedback/bug reports/feature requests etc…, keeping in mind that the scope of this tool is to facilitate troubleshooting and data collection for IIS/ASP.NET related problems, I am not interested (and probably do not…
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IDEVDataCollector
Over the last couple of months among other things I’ve been working on a tool to automatically the logs and information in my team we usually ask at the beginning of a new Support Call: all standard things such as IIS logs, event logs, .config files etc… Not all of those files are necessary for every case (as usual it depends on the problem at hand), but experience tells me the more information we have about the environment, the more chances we have to spot small inconsistencies, configuration problems etc… that sometimes can lay unnoticed and interfere with our work. I tried to keep the UI as simple and organized as possible, utilization is very easy, just run it and click the “Collect” button, sit there a couple of minutes (how much exactly will depend on the logs collected) and you’re done. Please note that I’m still working on it, this is just a preview release but I’d love to have your feedback/bug reports/feature requests etc…, keeping in mind that the scope of this tool is to facilitate troubleshooting and data collection for IIS/ASP.NET related problems, I am not interested (and probably do not have the time) to build an…
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Internet Explorer wants to install Silverlight over and over and over again…
I just realized I have not posted anything here over the last couple of months which is definitely not a good thing to keep a blog alive… ? It’s been a busy period, I’ve been working on the Italian Developer Support Blog with my colleague Raffaele, of course working with our customers on Support Cases, working on a few internal organizational changes (still in progress) and I’ve also been working on a tool to automatically collect logs and information about IIS, ASP.NET and the server itself we’ll (hopefully ?) use in our everyday work when troubleshooting customer’s problems. One of the toughest problems I worked on in this period was actually on my machine… for some reason I could no longer use Silverlight on my office desktop, every time Internet Explorer proposed to install the component but either the setup failed with an error indicating that Silverlight was already installed on my machine (which it really was!) or some other error that inevitably lead to an aborted setup. This seemed to be a machine-wide setting (not just my account) because I got the same problem no matter which account I used to log-on to my machine. If you quickly need to…
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Missing ASP.NET Tab (this time on Windows 2000)
I already wrote a post on this matter some time ago, but this week worked on the same problem on a Windows 2000 Server, of course 32 bit. Running aspnet_regiis -i did not help so we tried to run the script Tom provides in his post, but we got the error here below: Line 41 is “Set objIIS = GetObject(“IIS://” & strComputer & “/W3SVC/AppPools”)”, this path does not exist in IIS 5 metabase, hence the error. To adapt it to IIS 5 we removed the script section that checks for Enable32BitAppOnWin64. We run the script again and got this message: PASS: The current value of Restrict_Run is: 0 PASS: Successfully registered mmcaspext.dll PASS: Successfully registered AspNetMMC Microsoft (R) .NET Framework Assembly Registration Utility 2.0.50727.1433 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1998-2004. All rights reserved. Types registered successfully Assembly exported to ‘C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\AspNetMMCExt.tlb’, and the type library was registered successfully PASS: Successfully registered Assembly Running aspmantst.exe to test the ASP.NET Tab snap-in Attempting to create the object as CLSCTX_LOCAL_SERVER. Create failed. hr: 80070005. QIhr: 80070005. GLE: 1008 Attempting to create the object as CLSCTX_REMOTE_SERVER to <machine_name>. Create failed. hr: 80070005. QIhr: 80070005. GLE: 1008 Attempting to create the object as CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER. Object created. Attempting…
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Input validation and another StackOverflow
Here’s another interesting crash problem I worked on a few days ago: the application pool was randomly crashing and the following errors were logged: Event Type: Error Event Source: .NET Runtime 2.0 Error Reporting Event Category: None Event ID: 1000 Date: 21/08/2009 Time: 12:23:12 User: N/A Computer: <computername> Description: Faulting application w3wp.exe, version 6.0.3790.3959, stamp 45d691cc, faulting module kernel32.dll, version 5.2.3790.4062, stamp 462643a7, debug? 0, fault address 0x0000000000027d8d. Event Type: Warning Event Source: W3SVC Event Category: None Event ID: 1011 Date: 21/08/2009 Time: 12:23:14 User: N/A Computer: <computername> Description: A process serving application pool <AppPoolName> suffered a fatal communication error with the World Wide Web Publishing Service. The process id was xxx. The data field contains the error number. Even if with some difficulties (we had to disable Error Reporting as described here) we managed to capture a coupe of dumps for this crash; dumping the exception was not very helpful: 0:027> !gle LastErrorValue: (Win32) 0x3f0 (1008) – An attempt was made to reference a token that does not exist. LastStatusValue: (NTSTATUS) 0xc000007c – An attempt was made to reference a token that doesn’t exist. This is typically done by referencing the token associated with a thread when the thread…
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New opening: Italian Dev Support blog
Yesterday my Italian colleagues in Developer Support and I officially inaugurated our new team blog: if you can read Italian then join us at http://blogs.msdn.com/itasupport ? Carlo Quote of the day: Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. – Carl Jung
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Hosting on a UNC share is not supported for the Windows XP Platform
If you have a complex solution, with a lot of folders and subfolders, and you are hosting and debugging it on a remote IIS server (not on your local machine), you may get an error similar to the following: An error occurred loading a configuration file: Failed to start monitoring changes to ‘<path>’ because the network BIOS command limit has been reached. For more information on this error, please refer to Microsoft knowledge base article 810886. Hosting on a UNC share is not supported for the Windows XP Platform The article mentioned in the error message (810886) suggests to change the MaxCmds and MaxMpxCt values, but when I had the chance to work on this problem this solution does not always work (anyway I suggest you to give it a try before discarding it). You may find another message in your event log, like the following: Event Type: Warning Event Source: Srv Event Category: None Event ID: 2021 Date: Time: User: N/A Computer: Description: The server was unable to allocate a work item x times in the last 60 seconds If you do, give the article 317249 a try (increase the MaxWorkItems value). The solution I find most useful is…
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An authentication error occurred while communicating with the web server
I’m back after the summer break (3 weeks spent trying to master the “Do It Yourself” art at home ?) and my second day in office I got an interesting problem with remote debugging: after installing the Service Pack 2 for .NET 2.0, when trying to debug our web application (hosted on a remote IIS) we were getting the following error: “Unable to start debugging on the web server. An authentication error occurred while communicating with the web server”. Note, you can get the same error if you install the Service Pack 1 for .NET 3.5: the reason is simple, if you install the SP1 for .NET 3.5 you’ll automatically get the SP2 for .NET 2.0. Another point: you are using host headers in your site. Anyway, the error is caused by a security change: in .NET 3.5 SP1 (and .NET 2.0 SP2) now defaults to specifying the host name used in the request URL in an SPN in the NTLM authentication package. The NTLM authentication process includes a challenge issued by the destination machine and sent back to the client machine. When Windows receives a challenge it generated itself, authentication will fail unless the connection is a loop back…
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Security advisory bulletin 973882 (July 28, 2009)
My colleague Feliciano has just made me aware of an extraordinary security bulletin we have just released for a new vulnerability discovered in ATL libraries which could allow remote code execution; here are the information I am aware of so far: Microsoft Security Advisory (973882) English Rilascio straordinario di sicurezza Microsoft del 28 luglio 2009: prime indicazioni e raccomandazioni (Feliciano’s post, if you can read Italian) The updates to install: MS09-034 MS09-035 (for developers, update for Visual Studio) Carlo Quote of the day: Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. – Edgar Allan Poe
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ASP.NET 1.1 not configurable in IIS Manager?
If you search the Internet you’ll likely find a good number of articles and blog posts about how to configure ASP.NET 1.1 on IIS 7, here are a couple of good examples: How to install ASP.NET 1.1 with IIS7 on Vista and Windows 2008 Workaround: Running ASP.NET 1.1 on Vista SP2/WS08 SP2 Thread: Running ASP.NET 1.1 with Windows 2008 64 bit and IIS 7.0 Something I have not found written elsewhere is why it is not possible configure ASP.NET properties from the IIS Manager interface? Even if you correctly configure the application pool (32 bit, Classic pipeline), use the workaround to avoid the error on applicationHost.config, add the IgnoreSectionHandler to avoid ASP.NET 1.1 runtime exceptions due to the not recognized IIS 7 configuration tags and finally the ASP.NET 1.1 pages works fine and are served correctly, you’ll not have the “ASP.NET” icon group in IIS Manager: As you can imagine, if you move the application to an application pool where you are running ASP.NET 2.0, the icon group appears where you expect it to be: Well, it turns out that ASP.NET 1.1 configuration is not supported by InetMgr.exe (the IIS Manager), you have to use appcmd.exe using /commit:machine (for machine.config)…