Patrick's Place

Latest adventure with IIS 6.0

2007-02-11T20:19:00.001-06:00

Here's another good gotcha with that I discovered with IIS 6.0 recently. We had a process that was hitting our webservices IIS boxes pretty intensely, and we noticed that on one of the nodes in the load balanced cluster we would get 401 errors. When I looked at the logs I noticed that a "typical" request for the service would follow this pattern:

request -> response 401.5
request -> response 401.1
request (with credentials) - response 200 0

On the "bad" box, I would see just step 2 in the pattern, and nothing else, until later on when things would go back to normal. Very strange. Microsoft took a look at the logs and then at the metabases from the two webservers and noticed that the "bad" box was using "NTLM, Negotiate" for authentication, the "good" box was using "Negotiate, NTLM" (the default). So we switched the bad box to "Negotiate, NTLM" and viola, no more 401 errors!

Here are the links to the support docs:

How to configure IIS to support both the Kerberos protocol and the NTLM protocol for network authentication

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/215383/en-us

How to troubleshoot Kerberos-related issues in IIS

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326985/en-us

IIS May Return HTTP Status 401 Every 30 Days When You Use Kerberos Authentication

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318225/en-us

Kerberos authentication and troubleshooting delegation issues

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907272/en-us

Latest challenge with IIS & Windows Server 2003 SP1

2007-01-25T16:47:00.000-06:00

This one is a good one... Need to make sure I remember this.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=896861

You receive error 401.1 when you browse a Web site that uses Integrated Authentication and is hosted on IIS 5.1 or IIS 6

Free lectures on-line

2006-11-20T08:22:00.001-06:00

Cool collection of free on-line lectures: http://internet-tv-search-engine-swicki.eurekster.com/online+lectures/?=lectures

Cool releases from Microsoft

2006-11-12T20:51:00.000-06:00

If you haven't checked it out yet, take a look at the 3D views at http://local.live.com/. It's really impressive. I loved bringing up seattle and zooming around to all the different mountain peaks.
Also, check what they've done over at http://labs.live.com/photosynth/. Really cool stuff.

For all the latest MS stuff check out a new site they threw out there (3 developers in 5 weeks!) http://www.on10.net. I read somewhere that they are going to migrate http://channel9.msdn.com to the same platform they developed for On10.

That's it for now...
-pt

Adobe Flex 2.0

2006-10-24T13:05:00.000-05:00

I'm working with the latest Adobe Flex product today. Looks pretty cool... Here's a link to the product: http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/

And here's a tutorial from JDJ:
http://java.sys-con.com/read/210991.htm

Another innovation at Google

2006-10-13T09:34:00.001-05:00

If you haven't checked it out, go check out the new Google docs and spreadsheets. Pretty cool stuff.

IADsLargeInteger and conversion errors

2006-09-20T16:15:00.000-05:00

If you're working with the IADSLargeInteger to set accountExpires or any other date field in AD, you'll want to know about this bug with the IADsLargeInteger object.
The problem is with the conversion from long to int, if the lowPart is negative, you need to add 1 to the highPart. Otherwise there's a 7 minute, 9.5 second difference with the datetime.

Check here for a detailed explanation:
http://www.rlmueller.net/Integer8Attributes.htm

-pt

VS2005 and Web Site App_WebReferences

2006-09-20T13:20:00.000-05:00

I've had a problem with VS2005 that's bugged me for a while. I've been working on a web site that uses several web references (web services) and I needed to change where the web reference pointed to create the proxy class for the web site, but I could never figure out where VS2005 was saving the url to the web reference. I changed the web.config, the .disco, the .discomap, and the .wsdl, with no luck. When I would "update" the web reference, they would always revert back to the original URL.

But thankfully, a colleague of mine figured out how get the new URL to work. He updated the .discomap file of the web reference with the new URL, closed Visual Studio, opened it back up, "updated" the web reference, and viola it finally pulled the wsdl from the new URL.

Apparently, VS2005 caches the URL reference to the wsdl, and closing the IDE will clear this cached reference. Thanks Chris!

-pt