IIS reset details - iis-6

What exactly happens when we do IISreset? What resources get released? We have an ASP.Net website (.net 1.1) which use Crystal reports 11. Lately, running reports are throwing several crystal report specific exceptions and then the users can't run reports anymore. Resetting IIS lets the users log back in and run the reports until it fails the next time. Knowing exactly what resources are released when IIS is reset will help us dig deeper to find the root cause. Any help?

Pretty much everything. All thread pools, asp, asp.net, shared memory, etc... will all be purged. Doing in IISReset is basically the same as going to Services->WWW Service->Restart. Also, it will affect SMTP and FTP if you are running these services as well.
To narrow your problem down slightly ( and to reduce impact ), you should try putting your website in its own App Pool. Then when it next hangs, see if restarting the app pool fixes the problem. Then you are limiting things to just one running web application, not completely taking down iis. If the problem persists and still requires an IISReset, you at least have one more datapoint to work with.
EDIT: In response to your additional comment, I would suggest you do as much logging as possible and see if the problem becomes obvious. http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/579/advanced-logging-for-iis-70---custom-logging/
Obviously, a quick run through Event Viewer is probably a good idea.

Related

Inherited a Silverlight/WCF application need to fix WindowsAuthentication

I've inherited a Silverlight/WCF application. (Having worked on .net MVC, and SPA for quite a while)
I tried switching the IIS website folder to see if a tweak to the code and a fresh build would work, it didn't work and I switched back and although the website is functional it has a number of faults.
For some reason the Windows authentication appears to have stopped working, this authorises a number of the admin functions. I think this is broken and so not enabling the functionality in the Silverlight app.
The server I've inherited has the applications as folders in the default website, which is new to me, and quite constraining. I've gone through IISAdmin videos, and learnt a lot, but not enough to fix the issue.
I am unable to get the software to run in VS2013, quite a bump after working on Single Page Applications.
I'm stumped as to how the same code put back no longer works; I've learnt my lesson, but I still need to fix the system. I am not sure whether IISReset would make a difference since the AppPool is recycled every 29 hours. I've found out what the harm in trying is, and so I am proceeding with caution.
So my main goal would be to get the Windows Authentication working again.

Ektron really slow to startup on local host, how to improve this?

We're developing a solution which uses Ektron. As part of our solution we all have local IIS instances (localhost) and deploy to this local instance as part of the development life cycle.
The problem is that after a deployment and once dll's are replaced IIS restarts and the app pool is recycled, this means that Ektron dll's need to reload themselves.
This process takes an extended amount of time.
Is there anyway to improve the loading time of "Ektron"
To some extent, this is the nature of a large app running as a website rather than a web application. Removing the workarea from your local environment is one way to get this compile time down, though this will naturally not work depending on your workflow, for example if you are not using a separate dev DB or if you are storing the workarea in source control.
I have seen some attempts to pre-complile the workarea and keep the working code in a separate project (http://dev.ektron.com/forum.aspx?g=posts&t=10996) but this approach will only speed up your builds, not the recompilation of individual pages that will occur after a build as a result of running as a web site.
The last (and least best-practice) solution is to simply avoid making code changes that cause a recompile, like modifying app_code. Apps running as websites are perfectly happy to recompile a single page's codebehind without regenerating DLLs, which is advantageous for productivity but ultimately discourages good practices like reusing code in libraries. Keep in mind that this is terrible advice, but if you have a deadline and are staring at an ektron page loading every 30 minutes it can be useful to know.
Same problem here. I found this: http://brianpereras.blogspot.com/2013/06/ektron-85-86-workarea-is-slow-compared.html
That says that the help documentation was moved to be retrieved from an online source (documentation.ektron.com). We're running Ektron 9, and I just made this change and it seems much faster on first load (after iisreset).
The solution is to set documentation.ektron.com to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file.
There is not, this is just how IIS works. Instead of running a local instance of Ektron it's a good idea just to point your web.config file to the database of your test database and copy the /workarea folder to your local PC. You can't edit ektron locally but you can change the data on your test server and it will show up locally.

ASP.MVC 4, Azure Caching: Error on both local and remote - "role discovery data is unavailable"

Whew...ok, been wrestling with this for a while and I can't figure out what is going on.
I am new to Azure caching, but at this point I have read a good bit and I think I have it setup right, but something is obviously wrong so what do I know?
Ok, so first I setup a dedicated caching web worker role using this fine tutorial: http://berniecook.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/distributed-caching-in-azure-cache-worker-role/
I have an ASP.net MVC 4 website that is supposed to be using it.
I have my solution set to multiple starting projects with my cloud caching project set to start first, but no matter what I do, I get the "role discovery data is unavailable".
Sometimes in my output log I get that the Role Environment failed to initialize, but not very often. Most of the time the output log says that is succeeds. Regardless of that, I still get the error above.
I was thinking that maybe the issue was because I was running on local azure storage and compute emulators, so I reconfigured and published the Cloud Service to Azure to see if that helped.
It didn't...
The fun part is that there have been exactly 2 times when it suddenly worked (both when I was working locally). 2 times about of about 100. I didn't do anything different...just ran the debugger and poof, it all worked. This at least lends a bit of credit that it is actually setup correctly.
Needless to say, this is putting a huge damper on my productivity so any advice would be appreciated.
Update
Ok, I have figured out a workaround of sorts...I have learned that the reason that it consistently failed was because the development web server was holding onto a file which prevented the caching server to launch correctly.
The workaround is to stop the web server each and every time I want to recompile and run the code. This is obviously not ideal, so any ways to make this more reliable would be appreciated.
Thanks,
David
I don't know if this helps but I find that if I don't shut down the both the storage and compute emulator, I get weird errors, so after doing an F5 and closing the browser down, I manually shut down both emulators

windows service works on XP but fails with error 1053 on w2k3 64 bit

Forgive me if this is a stupid question, I'm fairly new to writing services. I've written a service that runs a timer and the timer code runs some checks to ensure our systems are up and running. It's written in VB.Net, framework 1.1. I then install the service using "sc create". The service works beautifully on the XP Pro machine that I'm developing on. However, when I install the service on a Windows 2003 server 64 bit, the service fails with error 1053 immediately. I put some debugging in to write to a text file as the first line of code in the OnStart function but even that doesn't run, so there must be a problem in the program starting up. Finally in desperation I created a brand new Windows Service in a new VB project in Visual Studio 2003 and compiled an empty service that merely declares and sets the value of a string variable in the OnStart function as follows:
Dim strTmp As String
strTmp = "hello"
Even that failed on the W2K3 server, but works fine on the XP dev machine.
The server has .Net Framework 1.1 installed and working, we use it in our CMS (written in ASP.Net 1.1).
The service runs as the local system account. I tried enabling interaction with the desktop but that didn't help. I ran Process Monitor and there are no access denied events. I emptied the Application Event Log, still doesn't work. No other events to help me out in the logs. Definitely using the Release build of the application. Permissions on the exe file are full control for System and for Admins.
Any ideas anyone? It must be something simple, but I'm damned if I can figure it out!
Thanks in advance.
#DavidHi, many thanks for the suggestions. I donĀ“t think the first point is my problem, partly because the MS article is about stopping or pausing the service, mine fails on starting; but also because the service does not timeout, there is no 30 second wait, it fails immediately. Secondly, when you say add an exception handler to the service startup, do you mean the OnStart sub? I tried adding a debug file write in there, but I'll try adding an event log instead. Regarding the systems checks, it can't be that because the brand new empty test service I created shows the same behaviour and that does not do anything at all. You last point could be the key. My dev environment IS 32bit. I'll do some research on the corflags thing, or perhaps I can build a 64bit dev environment. Many thanks again, you've given me some new things to think about at least!
Ok, have found a workaround. I was putting my exe file in System32. When I put it in a different folder, created by myself, the service ran, albeit briefly. I then had to move the ini file and the log files that it reads/writes to that folder too, rather than System32, and all seems to work nicely. God knows why it doesn't like running from System32 but at least it works now! Thanks for the help guys.
This looks very similar to this question which might help you out:
Starting a windows service fails with error 1053
A couple of other things to look out for:
Make sure you don't have either of the following statements in your deployed service:
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break
You may need to run the service with an account other than Local System (depending upon the permissions required by your service).
The 1053 error is a timeout related to the service control manager waiting for the service to respond to your start request. There is a knowledgebase article that refers to managed service stop request issues specifically relating to Framework 1.1-based services, so it is not precisely describing your problem, but it may have relevance in your situation. The link is provided for your reference.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/839174
The other suggestion I would make to further diagnose the issue is to determine whether the Start is failing due to a "hidden" exception occurring in your service's startup code; the start call would not see the exception and could make you think it was merely timing out.
I would suggest you add an exception handler to your service startup that does nothing more than log a message to the event log with the particulars of the exception if one is caught. That would at least give you an idea that something is going wrong specifically within the service, and give you more information than you have right now.
One last thought: Does the service check the systems you describe over a network connection? If so, LocalSystem won't have sufficient privileges to perform network access.
Good luck!
EDIT One other possibility:
Is your development environment/execuable 32-bit? You mention your server is 64-bit, so you may need to use the "corflags" tool that forces 32bit operation on your executable
corflags /32bit+ YourServiceExectubable.exe
The source for this information was the following SO post:
32-bit Windows services in 64-bit environment
**Unfortunately, it appears corflags is applicable only for 2.0 assemblies, and was designed for specifically this type of problem. **

Silverlight Application gives 4004 error when trying to use RIA services

I have written a Silverlight application that is basically an account registration form. I have been able to successfully deploy this to one of our production servers running windows server 2008/IIS7. While this took some time to do, I was able to work through and solve the issues that came up fairly easily. Now I am trying to deploy the application on our main production server. This server is running windows 2003/IIS6 and this is where I have hit some problems.
I have solved most of the issues and now the silverlight application will load and I can see the form for a few seconds before it disappears. I believe during this time it is trying to load data from the database using the RIA services.
In IE I get the following error:
Webpage error details
Message: Unhandled Error in Silverlight Application
Code: 4004
Category: ManagedRuntimeError
Message: System.Windows.Markup.XamlParseException:
System.Windows.Markup.XamlParseException:
System.Windows.Markup.XamlParseException:
Cannot find a Resource with the Name/Key ApplicationResources [Line: 6 Position: 9]
I believe it must be a configuration issue in IIS6 because the app works fine on IIS7 but I am drawing a blank as to what to try. I have spent hours trying to find a solution to this particular problem and while others have mentioned getting this problem the answers always tend to be non-specific in nature.
This is what I have done so far:
Added New Application Pool for .NET 4.
Set the website to use .NET 4 on the ASP.NET tab (nearly had heart failure when this did an iisreset).
Added the MIME types for Silverlight .xaml, .xap, etc.
Unchecked Integrated Windows Authentication (was giving an error when checked).
Give Execute permissions to Scripts and Executables.
Recycled the application pool.
The one thing I have seen suggested but have not tried is an iisreset, and while I am not entirely convinced that doing this would solve the problem, we have scheduled this to be done tonight (if I cannot find a solution before then).
So basically I am wondering if anyone out there has seen this problem and knows how to solve it?
UPDATE 1: We tried an iisreset last night and as I expected this did not solve the problem.
Okay I have solved the problem. As suggested I did a WCF trace on the application. This highlighted the REAL problem straight away, which was 'The SELECT permission was denied on the object...'. Once I fixed this the application works as I expected. It turns out that a colleague of mine had already made this permission change on our other server (running IIS7) so that was why it worked there (this is bad - I know).
Also it didn't help that the javascript error I was receiving on the client side (shown in the question) had nothing to do with the underlying issue and led me well and truly up the garden path.