Stay up with your favorite IIS forum w/forum subscriptions feature @ forums.iis.net.

A majority of my geek time is spent at work, like most people.  It’s hard to keep up on technology coming out of Redmond.   In past years, I would subscribe to several ‘list-servs’ on various content, then review the data when I had some extra time.  It was a nice passive way to keep up on technology and pick up on some tidbits.  I still do this for some technologies.  With the popularity of Twitter, Facebook and other ways people are sharing information.  It’s not quite as easy IMO.  The group I followed are HUGE twitter users, I kind of find this noisy and hard to keep up.  Twitter has recently released ‘groups’ or ‘lists’ which you can group people.  I haven’t taken time to subscribe and group people.  Anywho! 


I recently wanted to start learning more about Microsoft URL Rewrite   As many as you know, I hang out answering questions on http://forums.iis.net.  URL Rewriting has been “one of those” technologies I’ve wanted to get better at.  I’ve not had a opportunity to go deep into this technology yet, so I wanted to passively see what kinds of posts come through.  The forums subscription option sends you an email when a question and replies are posted.  This is a pretty low volume way to keep up on a specific forum and learn something new.  PS  A lot of the Microsoft IIS Team hangs out in the forums so there is great information shared.


Here is how you sign-up.


1) Go to http://forums.iis.net


2) Sign-in with your live ID or custom user


3) Click Personalize


4) Under “shortcuts” (located on the right hand side)


5) Click Forum Subscriptions


6) The page will refresh, a column will show up and allow you to subscribe to a forum.  I selected the Powershell provider, URL Rewrite.


I hope you find this useful.  I have for certain.


Steve Schofield
Microsoft MVP – IIS

Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 ebook available for free!

I was surfing http://blogs.technet.com and came across a free ebook on Windows Server 2008 R2.   R2 is a minor upgrade of the OS with some major enhancements.  I’m not sure if it’s just me, but trying to keep up on technology coming out of Redmond seems next to impossible.  I keep up on my little corner of the world, IIS, Active Directory and a couple other technologies.  I feel for developers trying to keep up. ?


http://blogs.technet.com/jriemer/archive/2009/11/09/free-introducing-windows-2008-r2-e-book.aspx


Enjoy,


Steve Schofield
Microsoft MVP – IIS

ODBC Logging, IIS 7.5, SQL Server 2008

I wrote an article in 2007 how to setup ODBC Logging on IIS 7.0.   There was a post recently in the newsgroups someone wanted to setup and couldn’t get it working.  My article uses sql server 2005, IIS 7.0.  I was able to reproduce an issue on my test server (Windows Server 2008 R2, x64).  Here are some items I ran into. 




  • Can’t run the application pool can’t run in 32 bit.  This error came up

HTTP Error 500.0 – Internal Server Error


The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.



Detailed Error Information














Module CustomLoggingModule
Notification LogRequest
Handler StaticFile
Error Code 0x8007001f


















Requested URL http://localhost:8080/iisstart.htm
Physical Path c:inetpubwwwrootiisstart.htm
Logon Method Anonymous
Logon User Anonymous
Failed Request Tracing Log Directory C:inetpub



  • Can run the application pool using the ApplicationPoolIdentity (Default user)

Login errors show up in the SQL Log viewer applet. 





  • Named Pipes needs to be enabled on sql server




  • Application Pool runs as a domain user, which has access to the database.

 




  • When you setup your DSN, make sure to explicitly test connection with the user setup in the ODBC logging config

Additional Steps to follow besides the original article


1) Follow my original setup


http://weblogs.asp.net/steveschofield/archive/2007/12/20/iis7-post-57-how-to-setup-odbc-logging-in-iis-7-0.aspx


2) Create a domain user


3) Setup the application pool to run as the domain user


4) Add user to the IIS_IUSRS group


5) Log into SQL Server, grant DBO or DB-Reader, DB-Writer permissions on InternetDB database


After doing these additional steps, I was able to run ODBC Logging and track information.  As I mentioned in my previous article, ODBC logging is not meant to run on a busy website.  “Millage may vary”.


Hope this helps,


Steve Schofield
Microsoft MVP – IIS