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  • Website hosting from home - IIS6

    - by Paul
    I'm wanting to host a few websites from home, primarily because I'm using some BETA Microsoft software (.NET 4 and EF) and don't want to install it on my production server which is hosted at eukhost.com. Basically, I'm completely new to this sort of thing. So far, here is what I've done: Registered the domain name at namecheap.com (let's call it mydomain.com) Gone to "Nameserver Registration" in the panel and entered my IP address for the NS1 and NS2 records (let's say the IP is 0.0.0.0). Gone to "Domain Name Server Setup" and entered ns1.mydomain.com & ns2.mydomain.com Forwarded requests from port 80 to my internal IP (let's say 192.168.1.254) Created the website in IIS (I'm just testing with a single website so far, so have not created any host header values) Now, if I type in the IP address (http://0.0.0.0) I get the site as expected. However, if I enter http://www.mydomain.com I get an error saying "DNS Error - Cannot find server". I'm aware that there is a service from DynDNS that will automatically change the IP if I have a dynamic address, however my IP has remained static since I installed the ISP (since October) so I don't need this. Is there any way that I can get the DNS to work just by configuring IIS or something in Windows? I don't really want to have to pay for any 3rd party service. Thanks,

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  • Eclipse on Ubuntu: Rectangles instead of Strings and some Java methods and classes

    - by Claus Hausberger
    after upgrading from Ubuntu 9.04. to 11.04 (new installation), I have weird problems with the Eclipse editor. With the Eclipse PyDev plugin, whenever I typ single quoted strings like 'bla', they appear as rectangles (both the quotes as well as the string). First I thought this was a problem with the PyDev plugin, but it also happens with Java and Scala Plugins. With Java, it happens, for example, when typing System.out.println("bla") and then "out" is shown as rectangles only. Weird is that for about half a second I see "System.out.println" and then the editor changes it to System.[][][].println (not really [] (here I used two brackets), it is shown as rectangles). This is very weird. I've never had this before with any Ubuntu, Java or Eclipse version. Currently, I use: Ubuntu 11.04. Eclipse 3.6 Java 1.6.0_25 The latest plugins for Python (2.1) and Scala (beta 5) where used. Eclipse and Ubuntu Terminal is set to UTF-8. The problem also happens when using KDE instead of Gnome. I doubt is has anything to do with Java as I use the same versions on older Ubuntu installations (10.04, 9.10, etc) at work. It does not happen with Netbeans. But I saw once error dialog message from the Update Manager where there were some rectangles in the error widget. Maybe this is the same problem Any ideas what could be wrong here and how to fix this? Eclipse is unusable but I need this for work and also for Scala and Python (the Eclipse plugins for those are very good now). Claus

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  • How do I keep the keyword.url setting in firefox to default when you restart the browser without del

    - by user34801
    I am on the latest version of Firefox (not beta or anything like that) and currently my keyword.url is stuck on search.google.com (which I don't remember setting even though the about:config says it's a user setting. Can someone tell me how to set it back to default and keep it at default when I reset my browser? I do not want to delete prefs.js as I do not want to go thru setting up all the extension settings I have just to have my location bar search google (if this is the only way then I'll stick with searching from the search bar instead). I've checked all my extensions that may effect the location bar but could not find anything that says it would change the default search engine for this. I've also tried to open the prefs.js in wordpad or notepad but it just ends up freezing when trying to edit it at all (yes the browser is closed at the time). I also deleted the prefs-1.js (along with 2 others) that were older (after trying to rename those to prefs.js and see if this corrects it. It might have but had such old extension settings I went back to my latest prefs.js with this one issue instead of the issue of setting back up a ton of extensions. I can give any other info if needed, someone please help me fix this issue if possible.

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  • ADUC Exchange tabs - Windows 7 & Exchange 2003

    - by John Gardeniers
    I have the admin tools install on a Win 7 64 bit machine but would like to see the Exchange tabs in ADUC. Googling shows this is a popular request and the most common solution (and the only one which appears to work to all) is to install Exchange Server Management for Vista using esmvista.msi /q. That may well have worked on beta versions of Win 7 but is definitely not working with my OEM copy of Win 7. Can this perhaps be made to work by installing from an Exchange 2007 CD (which I don't have at this time), bearing in mind that we have Exchange 2003 only? Can someone please offer a solution that works? I figure some of you must have solved this by now. Edit: I don't know if this is relevant or not but the Win 7 machine is also running Office 2010 Pro. About the bounty I had intended to award the bounty to gWaldo for having taken the extra steps to try to help me with this issue. However, as I was about to do so my screen started scrolling and I actually clicked on the answer posted by natxo asenjo, who's answer offended me, without realising it. Perhaps if I wasn't rushing I might have noticed but that's now history.

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  • How to enable IPv6 glue records (AAAA) in PowerDNS

    - by aef
    I'm running a PowerDNS 3.1 on a Debian Wheezy Beta 4 system. The zone data is accessed through a PostgreSQL database, the server answers to both IPv4 and IPv6 queries. If the DNS-Server knows the A record for one of the name servers referenced by NS records on a zone, it automatically return these A records as additional information to the response on an NS query for that zone. Now even if it knows the AAAA record for one of the name servers of the NS records, it currently does never return an AAAA record as additional information. How can I enable this? Or is there anything I could be doing wrong? Output of dig @ns.mydomain.tld NS mydomain.tld: ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;mydomain.tld. IN NS ;; ANSWER SECTION: mydomain.tld. 86400 IN NS ns3.nsprovider.de. mydomain.tld. 86400 IN NS ns2.nsprovider.de. mydomain.tld. 86400 IN NS ns.mydomain.tld. mydomain.tld. 86400 IN NS ns.nsprovider.de. ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: ns2.nsprovider.de. 86400 IN A 1.2.3.1 ns.nsprovider.de. 86400 IN A 1.2.3.2 ns.mydomain.tld. 600 IN A 192.0.2.194 ns3.nsprovider.de. 86400 IN A 1.2.3.3 Output of dig @ns.mydomain.tld A ns.mydomain.tld: ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;ns.mydomain.tld. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: ns.mydomain.tld. 600 IN A 192.0.2.194 Output of dig @ns.mydomain.tld AAAA ns.mydomain.tld: ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;ns.mydomain.tld. IN AAAA ;; ANSWER SECTION: ns.mydomain.tld. 86400 IN AAAA 2001:db8:100:3022:1::3

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  • Which CPU for XEN - LAMP testbed - Budget

    - by deploymonkey
    Dear serverfault knowledgeables, im in a decision dilemma right now, which I can't resolve due to lack of hands on experience. I need to build a testbed for basically virtualizing a LAMP application (os'ses not yet decided) including server side calculations. I'll opt for XEN since it seems better supported by cloud hosters at the moment. The hardware is for a proof of concept for a startup doing saas and might be used for closed live alpha/beta later on. After testing, the testbed might be a) deployed as a colocated white box server b) used as workstation Single socket is enough. We want to have ECC memory for reliability, this excludes most of the consumer line at intel. If intel CPU, then threaded cpu (HT) is preferred have at least 16 gig ram If justified by price and reliability is not too bad, a high quality desktop MB instead of a server MB would be worth a try It came down to the opteron 6128 vs. the xeon 5620 for me after a lot of research, but I don't necessarily have to be right. Which CPU is preferrable, concerning TCO (MB price, power requirements 24/7...) , Opteron 6128 or Xeon 5620? Which one offers better performance in real world applications? (Do You have any other suggestions I probably overlooked?) Thank You for Your consideration

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  • How to stop Firefox on an SSD from freezing when using the search box or submitting a form?

    - by sblair
    Firefox usually freezes for about a second whenever I search for something from the toolbar search box, when submitting a form, or when clearing the search box history. I suspect it has something to do with the auto-complete feature. Using Windows 7's Resource Monitor, the problem seems to be from the file: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile>\formhistory.sqlite-journal I believe this is a temporary file which caches database writes. The following screenshot shows the very high response times from six different searches, and that the queue length on drive C shoots off the scale: My Firefox profile is on an Intel X25-M G2 SSD. The problem doesn't seem to occur if I create a new profile on a hard disk drive. However, I'd like to know why the problem exists on the SSD in the first place (because it's an annoying problem which contradicts the reason I bought an SSD, and it might happen with other applications too), and how to prevent it. It still occurs if Firefox is started in safe mode, and with the recent beta versions. Updates: VACUUMing the Firefox profile databases does not help with this problem. The SSD Optimizer in the Intel SSD Toolbox does not help either.

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  • How to slow down audio files?

    - by verve
    I need a program (with an easy learning curve) that lets me slow down mp3 (at the very least this format) music and audiobook files. The software needs to be able to slow down the audio at the chosen speeds without altering the pitch and accuracy of the words being pronounced. Perhaps like the language software "Byki Deluxe's" "SlowSound" feature? I'm learning a foreign language (German) and I find the speeds at which the books are being read too fast. I need to hear the pronunciation of each word much more clearly to learn how to pronounce the words myself. Is there such a product out there? Now, I know you can slow down stuff in VLC but it sounds really artificial. I need something that slows down audio files without altering the accuracy of the words being pronounced. It doesn't have to be freeware; ease of use and quality is more important to me. Win 7 64-bit. IE 8. Edit: Are there any software-for-pay like Audacity? Only the beta works in Win 7. Also, I'd prefer to be able to slow down a file live and not have to create a new file to use the feature.

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  • Doesn't VirtualBox 4.0 support drag-drop file copy yet?

    - by Benjamin
    Version 4.0.0 will be new major release. The following major new features were added: -New settings/disk file layout for VM portability; see the manual for more information. -Open Virtualization Format Archive (OVA) support; see the manual for more information. -VMM: support more than 1.5/2 GB guest RAM on 32-bit hosts -Language bindings: uniform Java bindings for both local (COM/XPCOM) and remote (SOAP) -invocation APIs -Chipset: added support for the Intel ICH9 chipset with 3 PCI buses, PCI express and -Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI) -Audio: Intel HD Audio is now available as guest hardware, for better support with modern -guest operating systems (e.g. 64-bit Windows; bug #2785). -GUI: redesigned user interface with guest window preview -GUI: new display mode with downscaled guest display -Resource control: added support for limiting a VM's CPU time and IO bandwidth. -Storage: support asynchronous I/O for iSCSI, VMDK, VHD and Parallels images -Storage: support for resizing VDI and VHD images -Windows Additions: support for automatically updating the Guest Additions (requires -installed Windows Guest Additions 4.0 or later) -Guest Additions: support for copying files into the guest file system What does the last line mean? I thought this is a drag-drop file copy feature like VMWare. I tried that. But I couldn't copy by drag-drop, ctrl-c ctrl-v either. Edit: I mean VBox 4.0 beta, not 3.x The release note is here. Download link is here.

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  • Outlook 2007 panes keep moving when changing resolution

    - by SilverbackNet
    This problem is really bugging one of our users ever since he got a larger monitor. Now that the monitor has a different resolution than his laptop, every time he unplugs it to go home, the three Outlook panes get all jumbled up. The navigation is huge, the list is shoved over, and the reading pane is almost smushed out of existence, the the opposite when he comes back in and the reading pane fills the screen. He's sick of adjusting it every day. He always runs it maximized, for maximum reading area. Keeping the application within a 1024x768 window wouldn't really be an option for him. Is there any way built into Outlook to automatically adjust pane sizes when the resolution changes? If not, is there a third-party app that can help, or a way to script the changes into the registry somehow? (I can do running the script whenever the screen state changes.) If this is fixed in 2010 I might be able to convince the other admin that this is a good enough reason to allow it (which will require a new beta version of our archiving software).

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  • Performance experiences for running Windows 7 on a Thin-Client?

    - by Peter Bernier
    Has anyone else tried installing Windows 7 on thin-client hardware? I'd be very interested to hear about other people's experiences and what sort of hardware tweaks they had to do to get it to work. (Yes, I realize this is completely unsupported.. half the fun of playing with machines and beta/RC versions is trying out unsupported scenarios. :) ) I managed to get Windows 7 installed on a modified Wyse 9450 Thin-Client and while the performance isn't great, it is usable, particularly as an RDP workstation. Before installing 7, I added another 256Mb of ram (512 total), a 60G laptop hard-drive and a PCI videocard to the 9450 (this was in order to increase the supported screen resolution). I basically did this in order to see whether or not it was possible to get 7 installed on such minimal hardware, and see what the performance would be. For a 550Mhz processor, I was reasonably impressed. I've been using the machine for RDP for the last couple of days and it actually seems slightly snappier than the default Windows XP embedded install (although this is more likely the result of the extra hardware). I'll be running some more tests later on as I'm curious to see particularl whether the streaming video performance will improve. I'd love to hear about anyone's experiences getting 7 to work on extremely low-powered hardware. Particularly any sort of tweaks that you've discovered in order to increase performance..

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  • Debian Wheezy IPv6 isn't configured with ifup post-up hook

    - by aef
    We recently set up a server on Debian Wheezy Beta 3 (x86_64) which has a native IPv6 connection. We configured the eth0 interface to get the IPv6 configuration through some post-up hook commands in /etc/network/interfaces. The result is, that after the booting the system up, there is only IPv4 and an auto-configured link-local IPv6 address configured on the interface, as if the command has never been executed. When we additionally place the commands after the call to ifup -a inside the /etc/init.d/networking init script, everything works as expected and we have a fully configured interface after booting up. This is quite an ugly way to configure the interface. What are we doing wrong with the ifup post-up hooks? Or is this a bug? The section from /etc/network/interfaces looks like this (IP-addresses changed): allow-hotplug eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 1.2.3.1 netmask 255.255.255.192 network 1.2.3.0 broadcast 1.2.3.63 gateway 1.2.3.62 dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 dns-search mydomain.tld post-up ip -6 addr add 2001:db8:100:3022::2 dev eth0 post-up ip -6 route add fe80::1 dev eth0 post-up ip -6 route add default via fe80::1 dev eth0 I also tried it in this alternative way: auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 1.2.3.1 netmask 255.255.255.192 network 1.2.3.0 broadcast 1.2.3.63 gateway 1.2.3.62 dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 dns-search mydomain.tld iface eth0 inet6 static address 2001:db8:100:3022::2 netmask 64 gateway fe80::1 What we added to /etc/init.d/networking: … case "$1" in start) process_options check_ifstate if [ "$CONFIGURE_INTERFACES" = no ] then log_action_msg "Not configuring network interfaces, see /etc/default/networking" exit 0 fi set -f exclusions=$(process_exclusions) log_action_begin_msg "Configuring network interfaces" if ifup -a $exclusions $verbose && ifup_hotplug $exclusions $verbose # Our additions ip -6 addr add 2001:db8:100:3022::2 dev eth0 ip -6 route add fe80::1 dev eth0 ip -6 route add default via fe80::1 dev eth0 then log_action_end_msg $? else log_action_end_msg $? fi ;; …

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  • Linux will not activate wireless after device has been re-enabled

    - by XHR
    Using a Eee 900A netbook by Asus. By pressing Fn + F2, I can disable or enable the wireless chip on the netbook, a blue LED indicates the status. I've been able to connect to wireless networks just fine with this netbook. However, if the wireless chip ever becomes disabled, I have to reboot to get my network connection back. This generally happens when suspending. For some reason the LED will be off and I have to hit Fn + F2 for it to light up again. However, after doing so, Linux will not reconnect to the network. It simply changes the wireless status from "wireless is disabled" to "device not ready". Even worse, I've recently had issues with the chip being enabled at boot, thus making it nearly impossible to get connected. I've searched around on-line but haven't found much of anything useful on this. This happens on all kinds of different distros including Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook, EeeBuntu 4 beta, Jolicloud and Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook. Edit I noticed this question is getting a lot of views. To give a quick update, I never did resolve this issue with the given distro's. However, I'm currently running Ubuntu 10.10 netbook edition and this issue has gone away.

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  • Surround in Windows 7 with Soundmax

    - by Henri
    Hey guys, I have a asus m2n motherboard with a Soundmax 1988 chip on it. I want to have surround sound in windows 7, but i cant get it to work. I tried a lot of different drivers, including the latest beta for Win 7. The problem is that when I configure the speakers and i do a "Test" all speakers work. But whenever I want to play some video or mp3, only the front speakers work. In vista there was this option called "Surround Fill" that would fix this problem, however, I cant seem to find that in windows 7. (The enhancements tab is completely gone for the speakers, other output devices do have that tab). Anybody knows the fix? Edit: I got it now kind of working by using a trial version of SRS AudioSandbox. However, the quality is quite bad since the program tries to create a real 5.1 of stereo sound. I just want to have stereo over 4 speakers instead of fake 5.1 over 4 speakers.

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  • Configuring PAM with pam_mount; getting a dlopen() with an HX_Init error

    - by Jamie
    I'm trying to get automounting upon login working on Ubuntu 10.03 Beta 2. I didn't find a package for pam_mount, so I ended downloading it and building it. This required: sudo apt-get install build-essential pkg-config libxml2-dev libssl-dev libpam-dev Additionally, the libHX-dev is required but as of yesterday (23/4/2010) the package version provided (3.2) wasn't up to snuff (3.4) so I downloaded, compiled and installed that too. cd ./pam_mount-1.36/ && ./configure && make && sudo make install When I tried it (pam_mount) I got this in my auth log: Apr 23 12:18:02 ubuntu sshd[1195]: PAM unable to dlopen(/lib/security/pam_mount.so): /lib/security/pam_mount.so: undefined symbol: HX_init Apr 23 12:18:02 ubuntu sshd[1195]: PAM adding faulty module: /lib/security/pam_mount.so Apr 23 12:18:06 ubuntu sshd[1195]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=192.168.20.182 user=jrisk Apr 23 12:18:06 ubuntu sshd[1195]: pam_winbind(sshd:auth): getting password (0x00000388) Apr 23 12:18:06 ubuntu sshd[1195]: pam_winbind(sshd:auth): pam_get_item returned a password Apr 23 12:18:06 ubuntu sshd[1195]: pam_winbind(sshd:auth): user 'jrisk' granted access Apr 23 12:18:06 ubuntu sshd[1195]: Accepted password for jrisk from 192.168.20.182 port 4369 ssh2 Apr 23 12:18:06 ubuntu sshd[1195]: pam_unix(sshd:session): session opened for user jrisk by (uid=0) What do I need to do get HX_Init into the system? This is related to an answer I previously got here.

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  • Ubuntu 12.04 Very slow especially with Android Studio

    - by Nada
    I have an old laptop with the following specification: Memory: 485 MiB, Processor: Genuine intel CPU T2300 @ 1.66 GHz ×2, OS Type: 32 bit, Disk: 78.1 GB, I installed on it Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and I noticed that the overall system is very slow in responding. I tried to search about that in the internet and I found some articles talking about how to make Ubuntu 12.04 LTS run fast I applied all what they said including download LXDE desktop environment and then nothing different in the system response time. Then I need to develop some android applications so, I download Android Studio (Beta) 0.8.6. The problem became worse than before whenever I tried to open the Android Studio the screen is frozen for some minutes then it took time to download the projects and initialize the work space also, when I tried to move the cursor he is move very slowly. When I tried to run my first application on the AVD it took three hours and still not run yet. I delete the Android Studio and install it again several times, I was trying to solve the problem but still nothing change. Please if you have any suggestions that may help me make my laptop and Android Studio work faster I will appreciate it for you. Thank you in advance.

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  • Physical Debian to VMWare: vmware-converter, dd-image or otherwise?

    - by Dabu
    we have two debian Lenny production machines, both running larger commercial websites. Now these machines need to be moved, and in the process, they need to be virtualized to VMWare ESX. If you believe the internet information, there are several ways to accomplish this. The easiest for us would be to use our weekly dd backup where the whole disk, however, I have no experience with this kind of technology and if it is really possible. The second best way would be via an application on the source machine virtualizing it and generating an ESX compatible VM. However, the software is beta and unsupported, and after installation, nothing really works (the /etc/init.d/vmware-converter script doesn't actually do anything, start and stop reply with success messages, yet ps shows that there are no new processes). The worst way with the most work would be to install a new machine and set it up manually, copying files and databases as needed. This part is clear in it's execution, and my question(s) do not touch this. Is my 1st way possible? Has anyone done this yet, or better, has a page with instructions? Or is there a help page that explains how to correctly install, run and use the vmware-converter tool using a Debian installation (it's possible that I dod something wrong during installation already)? Thank you.

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  • Error at the end of APC install

    - by cinqoTimo
    I need to get APC running for a Drupal install of mine. I found a fairly concise guide at http://blog.4rev.net/2009-09/installing-apc-accelerator-into-php5-fedora-core-11/ for installing on FC11, only, I am using FC12. I figured I would give it a shot. I was able to run the following commands successfully - and yum installed fc12 versions of everything in the FC11 guide. yum install php-pear yum install php-devel httpd-devel yum groupinstall ‘Development Tools’ yum groupinstall ‘Development Libraries’ Then, I tried pecl install apc. Everything looked good until to got to the end, where it outputted the following error. /var/tmp/APC/php_apc.c: In function ‘zif_apc_compile_file’: /var/tmp/APC/php_apc.c:881: warning: unused variable ‘eg_class_table’ /var/tmp/APC/php_apc.c:881: warning: unused variable ‘eg_function_table’ /var/tmp/APC/php_apc.c: At top level: /var/tmp/APC/php_apc.c:959: error: duplicate ‘static’ make: *** [php_apc.lo] Error 1 ERROR: `make' failed Some people have had success with installing apc-beta, but that didn't work for me.. Any suggestions? Is there something I missed that is critical in the FC12 version?

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  • Outlook 2010 PST not indexing

    - by kellyllek
    I've had this problem for months: Outlook is unable to search recent items in the inbox. I was running Outlook 2010 Beta. I've just moved to the Trial version, hoping to solve the issue. I have tons of PST files but one central one I'm mainly concerned with. As of now it seems none of it is indexing. I've been through all the sites and made all the changes; rebuilt the index, changed the name of the PST files, run scanpst, stopped and started the search services, made sure the Windows features under programs and features has the indexing option checked, etc... Status now says 'zero items left to index', and 150,000 have been indexed. I think I have a lot more files than that, and also nothing is showing up on any search. I'm not sure what else to do? Side question. I'm going to be moving out of Outlook. However I have 10Gigs+ of PST files over the years. I want to merge them and make them search-able in the easiest way possible. Any idea on how to do that? Could I even move over to Thunderbird right now and be able to index and search my PST files? Also, Google Desktop won't index Outlook 2010 email either...

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  • JavaScript settings are on but I still have issues with web sites using JavaScript.

    - by Mike
    I have two computers that are the same at home except I have installed Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended on my main computer along with the 2010 Outlook (Beta). I have issues when I log into a website that uses pop up calendars to select the date. I pasted it below. I checked my other computer and it is fine. I've checked the Java setting and they are correct. I am at a loss. Any suggestions? Webpage error details User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; HPDTDF; OfficeLiveConnector.1.4; OfficeLivePatch.1.3; eMusic DLM/4; .NET4.0C) Timestamp: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:03:59 UTC Message: 'CalendarPopup' is undefined Line: 390 Char: 2 Code: 0 Message: 'CalendarPopup' is undefined Line: 410 Char: 2 Code: 0

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  • How to make Microsoft JVM work on Windows 7?

    - by rics
    I am struggling with the following problem. I cannot install MS JVM 3810 properly on Windows 7. When I start Interner Explorer 8 without starting any java 1.1 programs choosing Java custom settings under Internet options causes the crash of the browser. I have some Java 1.1 programs that work well in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP after the installation of MS JVM 3810. I know that it is not advised to use this old JVM but it is not a short-term option to port the programs in newer Java since it contains 3rd party components. Complete rewrite is a long-term plan. Strangely jview and appletviewer (jview /a) works from a console so the MS JVM 3810 is not completely busted just IE 8 does not like it. The problem with the appletviewer is that it cannot connect to the server even if both signed and unsigned content in Java custom settings have been set to Enable all. (Since Java custom settings was unreachable due to the crash the modifications - including My computer - were performed through the registry and pre-checked to behave correctly on Windows XP and Internet Explorer 8.) If jview was working then I could at least think of a workaround. Is there a way to configure MS JVM or jview properly on Windows 7? Another options would be: Checking Internet Explorer 9 Beta. Using virtualbox and Windows XP older IE in it. Delaying Windows 7 upgrade. ... Update Finally we have modified all the programs to work parallelly as applet and application as well. This way the programs can still be used from browser on older Windows versions. On Windows 7 the applications are started from the desktop. Installation to all user machine can easily be solved since they already have a large common application drive. The code update is fortunately only a few lines of modification: including a main method in the applet class. Furthermore instead of the starting html page a bat file is used to set the classpath before the startup with jview.

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  • Games on windows 8 in bootcamp lag even on lowest graphics

    - by Jackson Gariety
    I've been playing Crysis 2 and Skyrim on my Retina MacBookPro (10,1) for months now. The two games used to run super smoothly even on nearly maxed out settings. This laptop has an Nvidia GeForce GT 650M graphics card inside, it runs great. But I recently replaced my Windows 8 consumer preview with the retail copy, and since then, 3D games lag in this odd way, no matter what the graphics settings. Every second Skyrim and Crysis alternates between running smoothly and lagging. It's a cyclical lag that comes and goes like clockwork. I can turn the graphics down to 800x600 with no antialiasing and low texture quality, and it runs much smoother on the "up" motion of the cycle, but every second it moves back into this lag spike. I've tried installing beta graphics drivers, re installing the operating system, re installing the bootcamp support software, and freeing up space (I have about 20 GB free). I can't figure out what suddenly caused this other than some obscure difference between the consumer preview and the retail version. What can I try? Is my video card failing? Are there some other drivers I can install? This isn't normal lag from maxing out the card, it

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  • Several web applications on a single port

    - by Nevermind
    We're developing an online browser-based game. The game itself is a plugin in the web page, that uses TCP connection to a game server, and also sends http requests to "content server" web application. This makes 3 servers total: the site itself, game server and content server. Site and content server are IIS web applications, game server is a custom application communicating over TCP with proprietary protocol. While the game is in beta stage, all these servers are physically hosted on a single machine, and distinguished by ports. For example, website is game.example.com:80, game server is game.example.com:34285 and content server is game.example.com:50000. This works OK most of the time, but some of our players have ports other than 80 closed. Is there any way to make all these application work through port 80, while still having them one one physical server? Maybe using different sub-domains? There's probably a way to make IIS forward requests to different web applications based on URL alone, but that doesn't help with game server. Edit Server is Windows Server 2008, IIS 7

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  • Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Configuring SSL

    - by Simon Thorpe
    Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g index So far in this guide we have an IRM Server up and running, however I skipped over SSL configuration in the previous article because I wanted to focus in more detail now. You can, if you wish, not bother with setting up SSL, but considering this is a security technology it is worthwhile doing. Contents Setting up a one way, self signed SSL certificate in WebLogic Setting up an official SSL certificate in Apache 2.x Configuring Apache to proxy traffic to the IRM server There are two common scenarios in which an Oracle IRM server is configured. For a development or evaluation system, people usually communicate directly to the WebLogic Server running the IRM service. However in a production environment and for some proof of concept evaluations that require a setup reflecting a production system, the traffic to the IRM server travels via a web server proxy, commonly Apache. In this guide we are building an Oracle Enterprise Linux based IRM service and this article will go over the configuration of SSL in WebLogic and also in Apache. Like in the past articles, we are going to use two host names in the configuration below,irm.company.com will refer to the public Apache server irm.company.internal will refer to the internal WebLogic IRM server Setting up a one way, self signed SSL certificate in WebLogic First lets look at creating just a simple self signed SSL certificate to be used in WebLogic. This is a quick and easy way to get SSL working in your environment, however the downside is that no browsers are going to trust this certificate you create and you'll need to manually install the certificate onto any machine's communicating with the server. This is fine for development or when you have only a few users evaluating the system, but for any significant use it's usually better to have a fully trusted certificate in use and I explain that in the next section. But for now lets go through creating, installing and testing a self signed certificate. We use a library in Java to create the certificates, open a console and running the following commands. Note you should choose your own secure passwords whenever you see password below. [oracle@irm /] source /oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/bin/setWLSEnv.sh [oracle@irm /] cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/ [oracle@irm /] java utils.CertGen -selfsigned -certfile MyOwnSelfCA.cer -keyfile MyOwnSelfKey.key -keyfilepass password -cn "irm.oracle.demo" [oracle@irm /] java utils.ImportPrivateKey -keystore MyOwnIdentityStore.jks -storepass password -keypass password -alias trustself -certfile MyOwnSelfCA.cer.pem -keyfile MyOwnSelfKey.key.pem -keyfilepass password [oracle@irm /] keytool -import -trustcacerts -alias trustself -keystore TrustMyOwnSelf.jks -file MyOwnSelfCA.cer.der -keyalg RSA We now have two Java Key Stores, MyOwnIdentityStore.jks and TrustMyOwnSelf.jks. These contain keys and certificates which we will use in WebLogic Server. Now we need to tell the IRM server to use these stores when setting up SSL connections for incoming requests. Make sure the Admin server is running and login into the WebLogic Console at http://irm.company.intranet:7001/console and do the following; In the menu on the left, select the + next to Environment to expose the submenu, then click on Servers. You will see two servers in the list, AdminServer(admin) and IRM_server1. If the IRM server is running, shut it down either by hitting CONTROL + C in the console window it was started from, or you can switch to the CONTROL tab, select IRM_server1 and then select the Shutdown menu and then Force Shutdown Now. In the Configuration tab select IRM_server1 and switch to the Keystores tab. By default WebLogic Server uses it's own demo identity and trust. We are now going to switch to the self signed one's we've just created. So select the Change button and switch to Custom Identity and Custom Trust and hit save. Now we have to complete the resulting fields, the setting's i've used in my evaluation server are below. IdentityCustom Identity Keystore: /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/MyOwnIdentityStore.jks Custom Identity Keystore Type: JKS Custom Identity Keystore Passphrase: password Confirm Custom Identity Keystore Passphrase: password TrustCustom Trust Keystore: /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/TrustMyOwnSelf.jks Custom Trust Keystore Type: JKS Custom Trust Keystore Passphrase: password Confirm Custom Trust Keystore Passphrase: password Now click on the SSL tab for the IRM_server1 and enter in the alias and passphrase, in my demo here the details are; IdentityPrivate Key Alias: trustself Private Key Passphrase: password Confirm Private Key Passphrase: password And hit save. Now lets test a connection to the IRM server over HTTPS using SSL. Go back to a console window and start the IRM server, a quick reminder on how to do this is... [oracle@irm /] cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/bin [oracle@irm /] ./startManagedWeblogic IRM_server1 Once running, open a browser and head to the SSL port of the server. By default the IRM server will be listening on the URL https://irm.company.intranet:16101/irm_rights. Note in the example image on the right the port is 7002 because it's a system that has the IRM services installed on the Admin server, this isn't typical (or advisable). Your system is going to have a separate managed server which will be listening on port 16101. Once you open this address you will notice that your browser is going to complain that the server certificate is untrusted. The images on the right show how Firefox displays this error. You are going to be prompted every time you create a new SSL session with the server, both from the browser and more annoyingly from the IRM Desktop. If you plan on always using a self signed certificate, it is worth adding it to the Windows certificate store so that when you are accessing sealed content you do not keep being informed this certificate is not trusted. Follow these instructions (which are for Internet Explorer 8, they may vary for your version of IE.) Start Internet Explorer and open the URL to your IRM server over SSL, e.g. https://irm.company.intranet:16101/irm_rights. IE will complain that about the certificate, click on Continue to this website (not recommended). From the IE Tools menu select Internet Options and from the resulting dialog select Security and then click on Trusted Sites and then the Sites button. Add to the list of trusted sites a URL which mates the server you are accessing, e.g. https://irm.company.intranet/ and select OK. Now refresh the page you were accessing and next to the URL you should see a red cross and the words Certificate Error. Click on this button and select View Certificates. You will now see a dialog with the details of the self signed certificate and the Install Certificate... button should be enabled. Click on this to start the wizard. Click next and you'll be asked where you should install the certificate. Change the option to Place all certificates in the following store. Select browse and choose the Trusted Root Certification Authorities location and hit OK. You'll then be prompted to install the certificate and answer yes. You also need to import the root signed certificate into the same location, so once again select the red Certificate Error option and this time when viewing the certificate, switch to the Certification Path tab and you should see a CertGenCAB certificate. Select this and then click on View Certificate and go through the same process as above to import the certificate into the store. Finally close all instances of the IE browser and re-access the IRM server URL again, this time you should not receive any errors. Setting up an official SSL certificate in Apache 2.x At this point we now have an IRM server that you can communicate with over SSL. However this certificate isn't trusted by any browser because it's path of trust doesn't end in a recognized certificate authority (CA). Also you are communicating directly to the WebLogic Server over a non standard SSL port, 16101. In a production environment it is common to have another device handle the initial public internet traffic and then proxy this to the WebLogic server. The diagram below shows a very simplified view of this type of deployment. What i'm going to walk through next is configuring Apache to proxy traffic to a WebLogic server and also to use a real SSL certificate from an official CA. First step is to configure Apache to handle incoming requests over SSL. In this guide I am configuring the IRM service in Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 update 3 and Apache 2.2.3 which came with OpenSSL and mod_ssl components. Before I purchase an SSL certificate, I need to generate a certificate request from the server. Oracle.com uses Verisign and for my own personal needs I use cheaper certificates from GoDaddy. The following instructions are specific to Apache, but there are many references out there for other web servers. For Apache I have OpenSSL and the commands are; [oracle@irm /] cd /usr/bin [oracle@irm bin] openssl genrsa -des3 -out irm-apache-server.key 2048 Generating RSA private key, 2048 bit long modulus ............................+++ .........+++ e is 65537 (0x10001) Enter pass phrase for irm-apache-server.key: Verifying - Enter pass phrase for irm-apache-server.key: [oracle@irm bin] openssl req -new -key irm-apache-server.key -out irm-apache-server.csr Enter pass phrase for irm-apache-server.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [GB]:US State or Province Name (full name) [Berkshire]:CA Locality Name (eg, city) [Newbury]:San Francisco Organization Name (eg, company) [My Company Ltd]:Oracle Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:Security Common Name (eg, your name or your server's hostname) []:irm.company.com Email Address []:[email protected] Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []:testing An optional company name []: You must make sure to remember the pass phrase you used in the initial key generation, you will need this when later configuring Apache. In the /usr/bin directory there are now two new files. The irm-apache-server.csr contains our certificate request and is what you cut and paste, or upload, to your certificate authority when you purchase and validate your SSL certificate. In response you will typically get two files. Your server certificate and another certificate file that will likely contain a set of certificates from your CA which validate your certificate's trust. Next we need to configure Apache to use these files. Typically there is an ssl.conf file which is where all the SSL configuration is done. On my Oracle Enterprise Linux server this file is located in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf and i've added the following lines. <VirtualHost irm.company.com> # Setup SSL for irm.company.com ServerName irm.company.com SSLEngine On SSLCertificateFile /oracle/secure/irm.company.com.crt SSLCertificateKeyFile /oracle/secure/irm.company.com.key SSLCertificateChainFile /oracle/secure/gd_bundle.crt </VirtualHost> Restarting Apache (apachectl restart) and I can now attempt to connect to the Apache server in a web browser, https://irm.company.com/. If all is configured correctly I should now see an Apache test page delivered to me over HTTPS. Configuring Apache to proxy traffic to the IRM server Final piece in setting up SSL is to have Apache proxy requests for the IRM server but do so securely. So the requests to Apache will be over HTTPS using a legitimate certificate, but we can also configure Apache to proxy these requests internally across to the IRM server using SSL with the self signed certificate we generated at the start of this article. To do this proxying we use the WebLogic Web Server plugin for Apache which you can download here from Oracle. Download the zip file and extract onto the server. The file extraction reveals a set of zip files, each one specific to a supported web server. In my instance I am using Apache 2.2 32bit on an Oracle Enterprise Linux, 64 bit server. If you are not sure what version your Apache server is, run the command /usr/sbin/httpd -V and you'll see version and it its 32 or 64 bit. Mine is a 32bit server so I need to extract the file WLSPlugin1.1-Apache2.2-linux32-x86.zip. The from the resulting lib folder copy the file mod_wl.so into /usr/lib/httpd/modules/. First we want to test that the plug in will work for regular HTTP traffic. Edit the httpd.conf for Apache and add the following section at the bottom. LoadModule weblogic_module modules/mod_wl.so <IfModule mod_weblogic.c>    WebLogicHost irm.company.internal    WebLogicPort 16100    WLLogFile /tmp/wl-proxy.log </IfModule> <Location /irm_rights>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> <Location /irm_desktop>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> <Location /irm_sealing>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> <Location /irm_services>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> Now restart Apache again (apachectl restart) and now open a browser to http://irm.company.com/irm_rights. Apache will proxy the HTTP traffic from the port 80 of your Apache server to the IRM service listening on port 16100 of the WebLogic Managed server. Note above I have included all four of the Locations you might wish to proxy. http://irm.company.internalirm_rights is the URL to the management website, /irm_desktop is the URL used for the IRM Desktop to communicate. irm_sealing is for web services based document sealing and irm_services is for IRM server web services. The last two are typically only used when you have the IRM server integrated with another application and it is unlikely you'd be accessing these resources from the public facing Apache server. However, just in case, i've mentioned them above. Now let's enable SSL communication from Apache to WebLogic. In the ZIP file we extracted were some more modules we need to copy into the Apache folder. Looking back in the lib that we extracted, there are some more files. Copy the following into the /usr/lib/httpd/modules/ folder. libwlssl.so libnnz11.so libclntsh.so.11.1 Now the documentation states that should only need to do this, but I found that I also needed to create an environment variable called LD_LIBRARY_PATH and point this to the folder /usr/lib/httpd/modules/. If I didn't do this, starting Apache with the WebLogic module configured to SSL would throw the error. [crit] (20014)Internal error: WL SSL Init failed for server: (null) on 0 So I had to edit the file /etc/profile and add the following lines at the bottom. You may already have the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable defined, therefore simply add this path to it. LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/httpd/modules/ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH Now the WebLogic plug in uses an Oracle Wallet to store the required certificates.You'll need to copy the self signed certificate from the IRM server over to the Apache server. Copy over the MyOwnSelfCA.cer.der into the same folder where you are storing your public certificates, in my example this is /oracle/secure. It's worth mentioning these files should ONLY be readable by root (the user Apache runs as). Now lets create an Oracle Wallet and import the self signed certificate from the IRM server. The file orapki was included in the bin folder of the Apache 1.1 plugin zip you extracted. orapki wallet create -wallet /oracle/secure/my-wallet -auto_login_only orapki wallet add -wallet /oracle/secure/my-wallet -trusted_cert -cert MyOwnSelfCA.cer.der -auto_login_only Finally change the httpd.conf to reflect that we want the WebLogic Apache plug-in to use HTTPS/SSL and not just plain HTTP. <IfModule mod_weblogic.c>    WebLogicHost irm.company.internal    WebLogicPort 16101    SecureProxy ON    WLSSLWallet /oracle/secure/my-wallet    WLLogFile /tmp/wl-proxy.log </IfModule> Then restart Apache once more and you can go back to the browser to test the communication. Opening the URL https://irm.company.com/irm_rights will proxy your request to the WebLogic server at https://irm.company.internal:16101/irm_rights. At this point you have a fully functional Oracle IRM service, the next step is to create a sealed document and test the entire system.

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  • Use IIS Application Initialization for keeping ASP.NET Apps alive

    - by Rick Strahl
    I've been working quite a bit with Windows Services in the recent months, and well, it turns out that Windows Services are quite a bear to debug, deploy, update and maintain. The process of getting services set up,  debugged and updated is a major chore that has to be extensively documented and or automated specifically. On most projects when a service is built, people end up scrambling for the right 'process' to use for administration. Web app deployment and maintenance on the other hand are common and well understood today, as we are constantly dealing with Web apps. There's plenty of infrastructure and tooling built into Web Tools like Visual Studio to facilitate the process. By comparison Windows Services or anything self-hosted for that matter seems convoluted.In fact, in a recent blog post I mentioned that on a recent project I'd been using self-hosting for SignalR inside of a Windows service, because the application is in fact a 'service' that also needs to send out lots of messages via SignalR. But the reality is that it could just as well be an IIS application with a service component that runs in the background. Either way you look at it, it's either a Windows Service with a built in Web Server, or an IIS application running a Service application, neither of which follows the standard Service or Web App template.Personally I much prefer Web applications. Running inside of IIS I get all the benefits of the IIS platform including service lifetime management (crash and restart), controlled shutdowns, the whole security infrastructure including easy certificate support, hot-swapping of code and the the ability to publish directly to IIS from within Visual Studio with ease.Because of these benefits we set out to move from the self hosted service into an ASP.NET Web app instead.The Missing Link for ASP.NET as a Service: Auto-LoadingI've had moments in the past where I wanted to run a 'service like' application in ASP.NET because when you think about it, it's so much easier to control a Web application remotely. Services are locked into start/stop operations, but if you host inside of a Web app you can write your own ticket and control it from anywhere. In fact nearly 10 years ago I built a background scheduling application that ran inside of ASP.NET and it worked great and it's still running doing its job today.The tricky part for running an app as a service inside of IIS then and now, is how to get IIS and ASP.NET launched so your 'service' stays alive even after an Application Pool reset. 7 years ago I faked it by using a web monitor (my own West Wind Web Monitor app) I was running anyway to monitor my various web sites for uptime, and having the monitor ping my 'service' every 20 seconds to effectively keep ASP.NET alive or fire it back up after a reload. I used a simple scheduler class that also includes some logic for 'self-reloading'. Hacky for sure, but it worked reliably.Luckily today it's much easier and more integrated to get IIS to launch ASP.NET as soon as an Application Pool is started by using the Application Initialization Module. The Application Initialization Module basically allows you to turn on Preloading on the Application Pool and the Site/IIS App, which essentially fires a request through the IIS pipeline as soon as the Application Pool has been launched. This means that effectively your ASP.NET app becomes active immediately, Application_Start is fired making sure your app stays up and running at all times. All the other features like Application Pool recycling and auto-shutdown after idle time still work, but IIS will then always immediately re-launch the application.Getting started with Application InitializationAs of IIS 8 Application Initialization is part of the IIS feature set. For IIS 7 and 7.5 there's a separate download available via Web Platform Installer. Using IIS 8 Application Initialization is an optional install component in Windows or the Windows Server Role Manager: This is an optional component so make sure you explicitly select it.IIS Configuration for Application InitializationInitialization needs to be applied on the Application Pool as well as the IIS Application level. As of IIS 8 these settings can be made through the IIS Administration console.Start with the Application Pool:Here you need to set both the Start Automatically which is always set, and the StartMode which should be set to AlwaysRunning. Both have to be set - the Start Automatically flag is set true by default and controls the starting of the application pool itself while Always Running flag is required in order to launch the application. Without the latter flag set the site settings have no effect.Now on the Site/Application level you can specify whether the site should pre load: Set the Preload Enabled flag to true.At this point ASP.NET apps should auto-load. This is all that's needed to pre-load the site if all you want is to get your site launched automatically.If you want a little more control over the load process you can add a few more settings to your web.config file that allow you to show a static page while the App is starting up. This can be useful if startup is really slow, so rather than displaying blank screen while the user is fiddling their thumbs you can display a static HTML page instead: <system.webServer> <applicationInitialization remapManagedRequestsTo="Startup.htm" skipManagedModules="true"> <add initializationPage="ping.ashx" /> </applicationInitialization> </system.webServer>This allows you to specify a page to execute in a dry run. IIS basically fakes request and pushes it directly into the IIS pipeline without hitting the network. You specify a page and IIS will fake a request to that page in this case ping.ashx which just returns a simple OK string - ie. a fast pipeline request. This request is run immediately after Application Pool restart, and while this request is running and your app is warming up, IIS can display an alternate static page - Startup.htm above. So instead of showing users an empty loading page when clicking a link on your site you can optionally show some sort of static status page that says, "we'll be right back".  I'm not sure if that's such a brilliant idea since this can be pretty disruptive in some cases. Personally I think I prefer letting people wait, but at least get the response they were supposed to get back rather than a random page. But it's there if you need it.Note that the web.config stuff is optional. If you don't provide it IIS hits the default site link (/) and even if there's no matching request at the end of that request it'll still fire the request through the IIS pipeline. Ideally though you want to make sure that an ASP.NET endpoint is hit either with your default page, or by specify the initializationPage to ensure ASP.NET actually gets hit since it's possible for IIS fire unmanaged requests only for static pages (depending how your pipeline is configured).What about AppDomain Restarts?In addition to full Worker Process recycles at the IIS level, ASP.NET also has to deal with AppDomain shutdowns which can occur for a variety of reasons:Files are updated in the BIN folderWeb Deploy to your siteweb.config is changedHard application crashThese operations don't cause the worker process to restart, but they do cause ASP.NET to unload the current AppDomain and start up a new one. Because the features above only apply to Application Pool restarts, AppDomain restarts could also cause your 'ASP.NET service' to stop processing in the background.In order to keep the app running on AppDomain recycles, you can resort to a simple ping in the Application_End event:protected void Application_End() { var client = new WebClient(); var url = App.AdminConfiguration.MonitorHostUrl + "ping.aspx"; client.DownloadString(url); Trace.WriteLine("Application Shut Down Ping: " + url); }which fires any ASP.NET url to the current site at the very end of the pipeline shutdown which in turn ensures that the site immediately starts back up.Manual Configuration in ApplicationHost.configThe above UI corresponds to the following ApplicationHost.config settings. If you're using IIS 7, there's no UI for these flags so you'll have to manually edit them.When you install the Application Initialization component into IIS it should auto-configure the module into ApplicationHost.config. Unfortunately for me, with Mr. Murphy in his best form for me, the module registration did not occur and I had to manually add it.<globalModules> <add name="ApplicationInitializationModule" image="%windir%\System32\inetsrv\warmup.dll" /> </globalModules>Most likely you won't need ever need to add this, but if things are not working it's worth to check if the module is actually registered.Next you need to configure the ApplicationPool and the Web site. The following are the two relevant entries in ApplicationHost.config.<system.applicationHost> <applicationPools> <add name="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" autoStart="true" startMode="AlwaysRunning" managedRuntimeVersion="v4.0" managedPipelineMode="Integrated"> <processModel identityType="LocalSystem" setProfileEnvironment="true" /> </add> </applicationPools> <sites> <site name="Default Web Site" id="1"> <application path="/MPress.Workflow.WebQueueMessageManager" applicationPool="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" preloadEnabled="true"> <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="C:\Clients\…" /> </application> </site> </sites> </system.applicationHost>On the Application Pool make sure to set the autoStart and startMode flags to true and AlwaysRunning respectively. On the site make sure to set the preloadEnabled flag to true.And that's all you should need. You can still set the web.config settings described above as well.ASP.NET as a Service?In the particular application I'm working on currently, we have a queue manager that runs as standalone service that polls a database queue and picks out jobs and processes them on several threads. The service can spin up any number of threads and keep these threads alive in the background while IIS is running doing its own thing. These threads are newly created threads, so they sit completely outside of the IIS thread pool. In order for this service to work all it needs is a long running reference that keeps it alive for the life time of the application.In this particular app there are two components that run in the background on their own threads: A scheduler that runs various scheduled tasks and handles things like picking up emails to send out outside of IIS's scope and the QueueManager. Here's what this looks like in global.asax:public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication { private static ApplicationScheduler scheduler; private static ServiceLauncher launcher; protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Pings the service and ensures it stays alive scheduler = new ApplicationScheduler() { CheckFrequency = 600000 }; scheduler.Start(); launcher = new ServiceLauncher(); launcher.Start(); // register so shutdown is controlled HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(launcher); }}By keeping these objects around as static instances that are set only once on startup, they survive the lifetime of the application. The code in these classes is essentially unchanged from the Windows Service code except that I could remove the various overrides required for the Windows Service interface (OnStart,OnStop,OnResume etc.). Otherwise the behavior and operation is very similar.In this application ASP.NET serves two purposes: It acts as the host for SignalR and provides the administration interface which allows remote management of the 'service'. I can start and stop the service remotely by shutting down the ApplicationScheduler very easily. I can also very easily feed stats from the queue out directly via a couple of Web requests or (as we do now) through the SignalR service.Registering a Background Object with ASP.NETNotice also the use of the HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(). This function registers an object with ASP.NET to let it know that it's a background task that should be notified if the AppDomain shuts down. RegisterObject() requires an interface with a Stop() method that's fired and allows your code to respond to a shutdown request. Here's what the IRegisteredObject::Stop() method looks like on the launcher:public void Stop(bool immediate = false) { LogManager.Current.LogInfo("QueueManager Controller Stopped."); Controller.StopProcessing(); Controller.Dispose(); Thread.Sleep(1500); // give background threads some time HostingEnvironment.UnregisterObject(this); }Implementing IRegisterObject should help with reliability on AppDomain shutdowns. Thanks to Justin Van Patten for pointing this out to me on Twitter.RegisterObject() is not required but I would highly recommend implementing it on whatever object controls your background processing to all clean shutdowns when the AppDomain shuts down.Testing it outI'm still in the testing phase with this particular service to see if there are any side effects. But so far it doesn't look like it. With about 50 lines of code I was able to replace the Windows service startup to Web start up - everything else just worked as is. An honorable mention goes to SignalR 2.0's oWin hosting, because with the new oWin based hosting no code changes at all were required, merely a couple of configuration file settings and an assembly directive needed, to point at the SignalR startup class. Sweet!It also seems like SignalR is noticeably faster running inside of IIS compared to self-host. Startup feels faster because of the preload.Starting and Stopping the 'Service'Because the application is running as a Web Server, it's easy to have a Web interface for starting and stopping the services running inside of the service. For our queue manager the SignalR service and front monitoring app has a play and stop button for toggling the queue.If you want more administrative control and have it work more like a Windows Service you can also stop the application pool explicitly from the command line which would be equivalent to stopping and restarting a service.To start and stop from the command line you can use the IIS appCmd tool. To stop:> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd stop apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"and to start> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd start apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"Note that when you explicitly force the AppPool to stop running either in the UI (on the ApplicationPools page use Start/Stop) or via command line tools, the application pool will not auto-restart immediately. You have to manually start it back up.What's not to like?There are certainly a lot of benefits to running a background service in IIS, but… ASP.NET applications do have more overhead in terms of memory footprint and startup time is a little slower, but generally for server applications this is not a big deal. If the application is stable the service should fire up and stay running indefinitely. A lot of times this kind of service interface can simply be attached to an existing Web application, or if scalability requires be offloaded to its own Web server.Easier to work withBut the ultimate benefit here is that it's much easier to work with a Web app as opposed to a service. While developing I can simply turn off the auto-launch features and launch the service on demand through IIS simply by hitting a page on the site. If I want to shut down an IISRESET -stop will shut down the service easily enough. I can then attach a debugger anywhere I want and this works like any other ASP.NET application. Yes you end up on a background thread for debugging but Visual Studio handles that just fine and if you stay on a single thread this is no different than debugging any other code.SummaryUsing ASP.NET to run background service operations is probably not a super common scenario, but it probably should be something that is considered carefully when building services. Many applications have service like features and with the auto-start functionality of the Application Initialization module, it's easy to build this functionality into ASP.NET. Especially when combined with the notification features of SignalR it becomes very, very easy to create rich services that can also communicate their status easily to the outside world.Whether it's existing applications that need some background processing for scheduling related tasks, or whether you just create a separate site altogether just to host your service it's easy to do and you can leverage the same tool chain you're already using for other Web projects. If you have lots of service projects it's worth considering… give it some thought…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in ASP.NET  SignalR  IIS   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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