IIS 7

The polished turd that is Dell’s Gold Level Support department really isn’t all that supporting

If you follow me on twitter then you’ve heard bits and pieces of this already on my twitter stream.

In preparation for the onslaught of security patches which were released on October 14, 2009 I went ahead and patched all our severs the day before as it had been a couple of weeks since I had triggered patching and I wanted to get everything else installed so that there wouldn’t be any dependency issues with installing the new patches.  All of our servers, about 60 in all, patched correctly except for two of the three servers which host our web application which our customers use.  Now I say that two of the three servers didn’t patch correctly, but the third server wasn’t allowed to reboot so I don’t know if that one patched corrected or not at the time.  But with two machines of the three offline, I wasn’t willing to chance it. Continued »

IIS 7 and Session State

While working on moving my companies data center from Texas to California we ran across an issue with IIS 7 on Windows 2008 because we were using the ASPState database to handle session state.

If you’re like me you probably upgrade when you have the chance.  If you’re like my company you don’t run just one website per server.  In our case this cluster of web servers runs 6 different sites, and the session state for one of them keeps resetting just about every page view.

Apparently one of the values which is used to create the session id is the ID number of the website in IIS.  Up through IIS 6 this number was a hash of the name of the site, so as long as the sites all had the same name you were set.  In IIS 7 this ID number is now just a running number based on the order you create the websites in.  So if you create the websites in a different order on one or more machines then your ASPState information will keep expiring since the hash values don’t match correctly.

The good news is that you can change the ID number by clicking the Advanced Settings link on the right hand side.

Denny