Dirk.Net

When using the Renew Option in IIS Manager>Server Certificates, a longish CSR (Certificate Signing Request) is created but when submitting it to your certificate authority it is rejected, as the CSR is invalid. Godaddy might give you a message like “Unable to extract CSR information”, so you this tool to check your CSR and the invalid parts are underlined in red. It seems IIS7 tries to generate a key with a length of 4096 bits even when renewing a 1024 bit certificate. This issue is likely a bug in IIS7, see this post and discussion for more info. It might be advisable to create a new 4096 bit certificate and next time the renewal might work, especially when Microsoft issues a fix.

It’s hard to google for this info as most results will be torrents of some kind, but the solution is obvious:

Simply add a mime type (application/x-bittorrent) for torrent files (.torrent):

That’s it. Hope it helps.

With the arrival of ASP.NET MVC and the complementary IIS7 file-extension-less request pipeline it’s finally possible to turn ugly “classic ASP.NET” query string URLs into pretty and orderly REST-style URLs, functionality that PHP had for ages. Out with http://mysite.com/catalog.aspx?category=1&product=100, here comes the more pleasing http://mysite.com/widgets&gadgets/the-useful-&-beautiful-widget

However, the ampersand in the latter will generate a “400 Bad Request” response with the default settings in IIS 7 because the ampersand (&) is not acceptable in the request for security reasons. As discussed here, it takes two measures to fix this and make the URL (I did not have to take the third measure quoted in the post, which is setting ValidateRequest=”false” in the ASP.NET MVC view page):

1. AllowRestrictedChars http://support.microsoft.com/kb/820129
2. Interestingly enough, enable VerificationCompatibility (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;826437), a measure designed for pre-SP1 ASP.NET 1.1, but necessary here even with ASP.NET 3.5 to get the ampersand URLs working.

Hope it helps.

Once you’ve followed these instructions to install PHP hosted on IIS7 using FastCGI (there’s also a video by Scott Hanselman), you’ll probably want to install MySQL and make it work with PHP. However, with your php.ini in its current state you’ll likely get an error message when you start a MySQL-based app, such as Wordpress:

Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress.

There’s a lot of information out there to fix this on Windows, and much advice involves copying and grabbing dlls and stuff. Much of it is superfluous, and it boils down to this with your current configuration:

• Edit your php.ini (in C:\PHP\ or wherever you installed php), and uncomment the following line:
  ;extension=php_mysql.dll
  hint: remove the semicolon
• Change this line:
  extension_dir = “./”
  to this:
  extension_dir = “C:\php\ext”
• Save php.ini and restart the web server in IIS Manager
• That’s all

Hope it helps.

If Windows Task manager shows excessive resource usage (CPU or memory, mostly) for an IIS 7 worker process (w3wp.exe), it’s helpful to identify which of your application pools consumes the resources. I haven’t found a way to accomplish this in IIS Manager so I proceeded like so:

At the command prompt:

net start WAS

Note: WAS is the Windows Process Activation Service (btw, pretty silly service name, as it’s nigh impossible to google for WAS).

Run appcmd list wp:

C:\Windows\system32>%windir%/system32/inetsrv/appcmd list wp
WP “5716″ (applicationPool:DefaultAppPool)
WP “968″ (applicationPool:MyOtherAppPool)
WP “5836″ (applicationPool:TheThirdAppPool)

The number in number in the results is the process ID in the results is the Windows process ID (PID).

Now in Windows Task Manager, after having enable the PID column in View>Select Columns… you can identify the offending w3wp.exe by its PID.

If you have an easier way to do this, please post in the comments.