Yesterday I decided to install WordPress for my new blog, both because it seemed like good product for the job and also to get some experience in running it (and thus also PHP) on Windows Server 2012 with IIS 8 Hosting. There are some good resources scattered around the web, but none seemed up to date, so I decided to share my notes from the install on here. I’m assuming you already have Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 installed.

IIS 8 CONFIGURATION
The configuration of IIS 8 is quite easy: you just enable the Web Server role through Server Manager. Just to be complete, the screenshot below shows the options I currently have installed, but keep in mind that I’m also running ASP.NET on my server.

Yesterday I decided to install WordPress for my new blog, both because it seemed like good product for the job and also to get some experience in running it (and thus also PHP) on Windows Server 2012 with IIS 8. There are some good resources scattered around the web, but none seemed up to date, so I decided to share my notes from the install on here. I’m assuming you already have Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 installed.

IIS 8 CONFIGURATION
The configuration of IIS 8 is quite easy: you just enable the Web Server role through Server Manager. Just to be complete, the screenshot below shows the options I currently have installed, but keep in mind that I’m also running ASP.NET on my server.I also highly recommend you install PHP Manager (http://phpmanager.codeplex.com/) as it will help us in enabling/disabling PHP extensions from within IIS Manager later on and provides an easy way to access php.ini as well.

PREREQUISITE INSTALLATION
To make things easy, you can install and configure PHP quite easily using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. When you run the Web Platform Installer (Web PI), you can do a quick search for “sql php” and it comes up a few results. When you select “Microsoft Drivers 3.0 for PHP v5.4 for SQL Server in IIS”, which is what we need, all other prerequisites will be automatically installed as well as dependencies (PHP and URL Rewrite for IIS).

After Web PI finishes, you will have PHP installed and configured for use in IIS. Time to do a little test to see if everything is running smoothly. Create a new file under C:\inetpub\wwwroot\ (or wherever your Default Web Site is pointing to) named test.php with the following content:
<?php echo phpinfo(); ?>

This will output information about your PHP configuration.

Time to try it out: navigate to the page (likely http://localhost/test.php). If you are greeted with a screen with purple blocks of information about your PHP configuration, you’re all set and you can skip ahead to the WORDPRESS INSTALLATION section. Chances are you’re going to be greeted with an IIS 403.1 error screen, however, which is due to the fact that the user account that IIS is currently using for the anonymous access to your site doesn’t have the proper privileges to access your wwwroot (or equivalent) folder on disk. This is solved quite easily by granting this user (called IUSR by default) access to the wwwroot folder through Windows Explorer or your other favorite method.

Retry and bask in the glory of the phpinfo() output.

WORDPRESS INSTALLATION

Now we can start downloading the actual WordPress files and start the installation. First off, grab the latest version (or the version of your choice) of WordPress. We will also need the WP Db Abstraction plugin. After downloading, unblock and unZIP both files in a folder under wwwroot (or your Web Site’s location). Installation of the WP Db Abstraction plugin is quite easy, just follow the steps outlined in the readme.txt:Upload wp-db-abstraction.php and the wp-db-abstraction directory to wp-content/mu-plugins. This should be parallel to your regular plugins directory. If the mu-plugins directory does not exist, you must create it.

Put the db.php file from inside the wp-db-abstraction.php directory to wp-content/db.php
Visit $your_wordpress_url/wp-content/mu-plugins/wp-db-abstraction/setup-config.php to generate your wp-config.php file

Before you perform the last step, though, go to IIS Manager and enter PHP Manager (it’s located on the Features page of your server under IIS). Scroll down and click the “Enable or disable an extension” link. You need to make sure that php_pdo_sqlsrv.dll and php_sqlsrv.dll are both enabled. You can also go ahead and disable the *mysql*.dll extensions. Here’s my list of enabled extensions:

Now we can visit the setup-config.php page as outlined above. The steps here are quite straightforward, so I’m not going to walk you through them. You will need to create a user on your SQL Server 2012 installation with SQL Server authentication that has access to a database that you also need to create to use for your WordPress installation.

One note about this process: I had some issues when choosing the default selected “SQL Server using MS PHP driver” and went with the “PDO SqlSrv” option the second time to eliminate these issues.

If the wizard has trouble automatically creating the wp-config.php file, you can either choose to give IUSR write permissions on the folder you created to hold all your WordPress files or you can manually create the file under that folder and paste the output you see on screen in there (I chose the latter). After the wp-config.php file is created, you can start the installation of WordPress by clicking the link on the bottom of the page you’re on.

WORDPRESS CONFIGURATION

After the install, which should only take a minute tops, you are now ready to log in to your WordPress admin dashboard and start configuring it how you’d like. As you can see, there’s a sample post and comment already waiting for you. If your experience is anything like mine, you will notice that when you navigate to the Posts -> All Posts option on the top left of your dashboard you won’t actually see these posts in the list. It took some hunting around the web to figure this out, but apparently there’s a line in the translations.php file of the WP Db Abstraction plugin that’s causing this (thanks to tm3ister on http://sourceforge.net/projects/wp-sqlsrv/forums/forum/1124403/topic/5004241 for figuring this out!). The solution is to manually edit the translate_limit function in the mu-plugins/wp-db-abstraction/translations/sqlsrv/translations.php file:

Change

// Check for true offset
if ( (count($limit_matches) == 5  )  && $limit_matches[1] != '0' ) {
    $true_offset = true;
} elseif ( (count($limit_matches) == 5 )  && $limit_matches[1] == '0' ) {
    $limit_matches[1] = $limit_matches[4];
}

To

// Check for true offset
if ( (count($limit_matches) == 5  )  && $limit_matches[1] != '0' ) {
    $true_offset = true;
} elseif ( (count($limit_matches) >= 5 )  && $limit_matches[1] == '0' ) {
    $limit_matches[1] = $limit_matches[4];
}

And voila, your posts will now show up.

The last thing we’re going to configure is Permalinks (or pretty URLs) for our posts. When you navigate to Settings -> Permalinks on the admin dashboard, you’ll see some options to rewrite URLs to be more human and search engine friendly. For now, select Custom Structure and enter /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ in the text field and hit Save Changes. The last step is to create a web.config file in our WordPress folder to rewrite the URLs according to this scheme with IIS URL Rewrite. Create a new web.config file (if you don’t have one already) in the folder you installed WordPress to and copy in the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <rewrite>
      <rules>
        <rule name="wordpress" patternSyntax="Wildcard">
          <match url="*" />
          <conditions>
            <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />
            <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />
          </conditions>
          <action type="Rewrite" url="index.php"/>
        </rule>
      </rules>
    </rewrite>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

You’re now all set to use WordPress on Windows Server 2012 with IIS 8 and SQL Server 2012!

IIS provides a new command-line tool, AppCmd.exe, to configure and query objects on your Web server, and to return output in text or XML. In this article, I will explain how to perform common IIS administrative tasks such as creating new sites, stopping/starting services, and viewing status of the site.

AppCmd.exe allows you to perform just about all the typical management functions you would want to perform using the CLI instead of the GUI. For example, here are some of the things that AppCmd.exe can do:

•     Start and stop IIS web sites
•     Create IIS websites, applications, application pools, and virtual directories
•     Show running IIS processes and list currently executing requests
•     Import, export, and search IIS ASP.NET configurations

Five ways that you can use AppCmd.exe to make your IIS website administration easier:

Sure, you can do just about everything in the IIS management MMC (GUI) that you can do with AppCmd.exe at the command line but GUI interfaces also have their disadvantages. To name a few, with a GUI you cannot do repetitive tasks quickly (like with a Windows Desktop Shortcut) nor can you use output from one AppCmd.exe output and send it to an AppCmd Action. Here are 5 ways that using AppCmd.exe can make your IIS website administration easier:

1. Start and Stop IIS websites from the command line

This is actually very simple. If you don’t know the name of your sites, just do:

Appcmd list sites

Now that you know what sites you have, you can start and stop your IIS web sites like this:
Appcmd start sites “Default Web Site” (or whatever site you want to start)

2. Add a new website

Adding a new website is easy. Just use:
Appcmd add sites /name:”Dave’s Site” /id:12 /bindings:http://mysite.com:80

Like this:

While this may add a new website, that website may not be as complete as a site added in the GUI unless all command options are added then an application is added for it. To get a more fully functioning IIS site, use the following two commands:
AppCmd add site /name:ddsite /id:99 /bindings:http/*:81: /physicalPath:C:\ddsite
AppCmd add app /site.name:DDSite /path:/ddapp /physicalPath:C:\sites\ddsite

3. Listing objects that meet certain information

Using the list command is easy. I showed you how to list our websites running on the server in #1, above. Notice in the output how you can see that the sites are running or not (the sites state). You can also list all objects (like sites) that meet certain criteria. For example, this command lists all sites that are stopped. Here is an example:

4. Backing up you IIS configuration

AppCmd.exe can backup your IIS configuration using the add backup command. You can also list your commands with the list backup command the and the restore backup can put your backup data back where it needs to go with the restore backup command.

Below, you see me backing up my IIS configuration then listing out what backups were available after that.

5. Report on IIS configurations

AppCmd has the power to report on your IIS configurations and export that configuration to a text file. To do this, just run:
Appcmd list site “sitename” /config
Here is what the output looks like:

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In this tutorial, I’ll explain how to install WCF in IIS 8.0. So in order to host our WCF Service in IIS, use the following simple step-by-step approach. First, Add a website to our solution. select the “ASP.NET Empty web Site” example. For web location, select “HTTP” rather than “File System” and provide the path and press the “OK” button.

Next step, add the Reference of the StudentService project to our web site, in other words StudentIISHost.

Next, Add a reference of System.ServiceModel to the web site. And then, Add a new .svc file to our web site project as.

Then write the following configuration for System.ServiceModel in the web.config :
<system.serviceModel> 
     <behaviors> 
           <serviceBehaviors> 
                  <behavior name=”StudentServiceBehavior”> 
                       <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled=”true”/> 
                       <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults=”false”/> 
                  </behavior> 
           </serviceBehaviors> 
      </behaviors> 
      <services> 
          <service behaviorConfiguration=”StudentServiceBehavior” name=”StudentService.StudentService”> 
           <endpoint address=”http://localhost/StudentIISHost/MyStudentHost.svc” 
                 binding=”wsHttpBinding” 
                 contract=”StudentService.IStudentService”> 
            <identity> 
                <dns value=”localhost”/> 
            </identity> 
          </endpoint> 
          <endpoint address=”mex” 
                binding=”mexHttpBinding” 
                contract=”IMetadataExchange”/> 
          </service> 
       </services> 
   </system.serviceModel> 

Finally, Access the hosted WCF Service, in other words StudentService using the following path.
http://localhost/StudentIISHost/MyStudentHost.svc

I hope this WCF Tutorial will help you to understand the implementation for hosting a WCF Service in Internet Information Services (IIS).

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In this post, let me tell you about how to configure IIS to require SSL on both Federation Servers. First step, open the Administrative Tools from the Start menu as shown on the following picture:

And then, in the Administrative Tools many options will be available, among these options one will be for IIS Manager. Double-click on this option to open it as shown on the below picture:

The IIS Manager Wizard will open. On the left hand side will be the Connections Pane.

Next step, expand the Server Name available under the Connection Pane, on expanding an option will appear named "Sites", again expand this option. This will bring the default Website under the IIS.

Click on this default Website, on clicking an option will come in the center Pane named SSL Settings, double-click on it to open it.

Now, check the "Require SSL" and then select on the "Accept Client Certificate".

Go to the Actions Pane and then select on the "Apply" button to apply the changes made.

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Now, I want to do the same thing, but this time, using PowerShell. We can easily achieve this with the help of PowerShell and typing a few simple commands.

Before we begin with DHCP installation process, first we need to make sure that it’s not installed in our Server 2016. We can verify this in two ways., which are given below.

• Using Server Manager.
• Using PowerShell.

As you can see below, I opened my Server Manager to check (Left side , under Dashboard), if DHCP is already installed, as we can see in the screenshot given below, DHCP Server roles are not installed yet.

Server Manager
Let’s verify this, using PowerShell. All you need to do is, just open your PowerShell and type the command given below.

Get-WindowsFeature

You can notice in the screenshot given above, install Sate for DHCP says “Available”, which means that it’s available for the installation and it’s not installed yet. Thus, we can continue with our installation process..

To install this DHCP server role using PowerShell, we need to use the command given below.

Install-WindowsFeature -Name ‘DHCP’
After installing this DHCP Server role, type the commands given below to install DHCP Management Tools.

We have successfully installed DHCP Server role and all the required tools to manage it. We can verify this in two ways. We can go back to Server Manager to see, if there is a DHCP Server role, the other way is suing PowerShell…Let’s first verify this, using Server Manager.

Go to —> Server Manager and check for DHCP under Roles and Server Groups (See the screenshot given below.)

We can also verify this using PowerShell, using the command given below.
Get-WindowsFeature.

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A customer was getting errror when utilizing PUT/POST/DELETE verbs on their web application as of late. The error looks like this:
<h2>405 - HTTP verb used to access this page is not allowed.</h2>
<h3>The page you are looking for cannot be displayed because an invalid method (HTTP verb) was used to attempt access</h3>

After some troubleshooting the error was disengaged to the way that WebDav was installed on the server and was catching those requests for its own service use.

Instead of removing Webdav from the server, we made a go at searching for an alternate solution. Thankfully somebody on Twitter comprehended the issue and gave an illustration of changes to make to the customer's web.config record with a specific end goal to disable (remove) the Webdav module for simply that particular webpage without requiring any requiring managerial activities on the server.

The code updates to make to your web.config record to intention this error are:
<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <handlers>
      <remove name="WebDAV" />
      <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_32bit" />
      <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_64bit" />
      <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0" />
      <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_32bit" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" modules="IsapiModule" scriptProcessor="%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_isapi.dll" preCondition="classicMode,runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness32" responseBufferLimit="0" />
      <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_64bit" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" modules="IsapiModule" scriptProcessor="%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_isapi.dll" preCondition="classicMode,runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness64" responseBufferLimit="0" />
      <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" type="System.Web.Handlers.TransferRequestHandler" preCondition="integratedMode,runtimeVersionv4.0" />
    </handlers>
    <modules>
      <remove name="WebDAVModule" />
    </modules>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

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I was working on a web application, and suddenly the application stopped running on the browser and I got this error message,

“Unable to connect to the configured development Web server. Failed to register URL http://localhost :57660/ for site “sandbox” application “/”. Error description: Access is denied. (0x80070005)”

I tried many things like restarting Visual Studio and running Visual Studio as administrator but nothing worked. Finally, after spending a few hours on it I got the solution, so here I am sharing the solution.

Open windows registry and browse parameters in HTTP where you can see what URLs are allowed to be bound to services without admin privileges. The parameter is called ListenOnlyList and it needs to be set to the address that exists on your machine.

You need to configure this parameter by running the following in the administrative command prompt:

 
Once IP address is successfully added, you can see ListenOnlyList added in the registry with correct value.

Now run your web application again. I hope that will resolve your problem.

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We saw as problems URL Canonicalization can be solved in a declarative means a component of IIS, called URL Rewrite Module, which can be configured by specifying the appropriate rules of web.config. Another typical requirement in the management of a website is to make sure that applications that involve sensitive data (such as a page for payment by credit card) are carried out using the HTTPS protocol. How can we manage, however, requests that are received incorrectly using HTTP? A first solution may be to set the flag RequireSSL IIS for the particular folder that we want to protect (or maybe of all the site), as shown below:

The effect of this setting is that if a user visits the page via HTTP, IIS will raise 403.4 HTTP status code (Forbidden), displaying the standard error (or a custom version, if specified):

An alternative certainly more pleasant for the user is that instead of automatically redirected to the HTTPS address and, for this purpose, we can exploit once again the URL Redirect Module, by setting a rule similar to the following:

<rule name="ToHttps" stopProcessing="true">
  <match url="(.*)" />
  <conditions>
    <add input="{URL}" pattern="(secure/.*)" />
    <add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="ON" negate="true" />
  </conditions>
  <action type="Redirect" url="https://{HTTP_HOST}/{R:1}" />
</rule>

It applies to all addresses in input:

• Pointing to a folder called secure
• They are not using HTTPS

Hopefully we can eliminate the first condition, if we want the rule applies to the entire website and not to a particular folder. The final effect, specified in the node Action, is to perform a Redirect to the same page, but with the correct protocol.

Sometimes you may also need the opposite, ie postponing from HTTPS to HTTP. A typical example is when the SSL certificate covers only a subdomain of our site (for example secure.miosito.com) and therefore we want all the other pages are open in HTTP. In this case the rule to be created is very similar to the previous one:

<rule name="ToHttp" stopProcessing="true">
  <match url="(.*)" />
  <conditions>
    <add input="{URL}" pattern="(secure/.*)" negate="true" />
    <add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="ON" />
  </conditions>
  <action type="Redirect" url="http://{HTTP_HOST}/{R:1}" />
</rule>

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Today, I will show you how to generate SSL certificate request (CSR) with Certreq. Certreq.exe is a command-line utility included on Windows Servers. It allows you to quickly generate a certificate request without having to use Windows's laborious GUI.

Step 1: Creating a config file

Open a text editor and paste the text below in the file:

;--- request.inf ---

[Version]
Signature="$Windows NT$"

[NewRequest]
; Replace Country with the 2-letter ISO code for your country
; Replace State with your state or province, without abbreviation
; Replace City with your city
; Replace Organization with your company
; Replace Organization_Unit with your department, or remove OU=Organizational_Unit entirely
; Replace www.example.com with the hostname you're requesting a certificate for
; For a wildcard SSL certificate, this would be *.example.com
Subject = "CN=www.example.com, OU=Organizational_Unit, O=Organization, L=City, S=State, C=Country"
; Key Exchange - for encryption
KeySpec = 1 
; 2048 bits minimum, 3072 or 4096 are valid too
KeyLength = 2048
; Needed if you need to export the certificate to another server
Exportable = TRUE
; Indicates a server certificate, not a user certificate
MachineKeySet = TRUE
SMIME = False
UserProtected = FALSE
; Generate a new private key
UseExistingKeySet = FALSE
; RSA key
ProviderName = "Microsoft RSA SChannel Cryptographic Provider"

ProviderType = 12
; Standard of CSR's
RequestType = PKCS10
; Digital signatures and encryption
KeyUsage = 0xa0

[EnhancedKeyUsageExtension]
; Server authentication
OID=1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.1

;------------------------------

Step 2: Generate a Certificate Request

Generate your CSR with the following command:

C:\>certreq -new request.inf request.csr

Open the .csr file, and copy its contents in Kinamo's CSR application form, including the BEGIN CERTIFICATE REQUEST and END CERTIFICATE REQUEST lines.

Step 3: Install an SSL certificate with Certreq

The .cer file you receive from the Certificate Authority can easily be installed by saving the file on the server you generated the CSR on, for instance as cert.cer, and by executing the following command at the prompt:

C:\>certreq -accept cert.cer

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In this post, I will tell you how to access a folder with no document in IIS. It's easy, just follow these steps:

Step 1

Create a folder called Original--IIS-Files

Step 2

Move all the files into folder Original-IIS-Files

Step 3

Navigate to your web server. By default, the Web Server will render the following message when the folder has no default documents.

And you're done! Simple, right?

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