'debug' is undefined with Microsoft AJAX release and TextChangedBehavior.js
Wednesday, August 08, 2007 5:20:47 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
As with my previous post, we upgraded the AJAX framework on the weekend which broke a few things, but one control in particular that broke was our TextChangedTextBox which is based on Pete Kellner's timed postback control. Since updating we were receiving a "'debug' is undefined" error on line 1409 (which was in one of the JavaScript include files).
Having had this issue before I updated the TextChangedBehavior.js but that didn't sort it, I have the latest version of the Futures on the server too so I was lost. Turns out I had an old version of the AJAX Futures DLL within the Bin folder of the project.
So as with my post on the ASP.Net forums before -make sure you update your AJAX Futures when updating your Microsoft AJAX framework!
Identify IIS Sites and Log File locations for WWW and FTP
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 3:18:42 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
When we got our own dedicated server we needed to start working out a fair number of processes and decide upon a structure that was replicable, scaleable and manageable on a large scale, although the solution we've ended up adopting may not be the best, it certainly works for us.
One thing that has been bugging me however is the location and folder naming convention of the log files -for both the web hits and FTP hits. Typically, shared hosting solutions place the log files under the same folder as the one your website's root is situated but as we had no plans on giving our clients access to these logs this was an unnecessary task so we left them collecting in the default folder.
Leaving the log files in the default folder meant downloading them was very simple, all I needed to do was point our download script at the main folder and that was it, all would be included, the catch however was that the folders weren't named logically* instead they seemed to include some form of ID that was relevant to and assigned by IIS i.e. W3SVC1.
*By this I mean human readable i.e. domainname.com
Until recently I've not worried about analysing the log files beyond one or two clients whom I could manage fairly easily but now with the inclusion of a host of other domains on the server I needed a way of quickly and easily identifying the folders and which domains they related to.
Historically when I needed to know which domain the log folder related to I would log onto the server, open IIS, open the properties of the domain, click on the log file properties and below the folder directory would be the folder name, that's fine if it's only a handful of domains but what when it's say 20? That's 2mins each (with cross referencing etc) so that's 40minutes. I needed an automated system!
As it turns out, Microsoft have been kind enough to provide us with an interface we can easily code against in .Net so after a little Google-ing I wrote a number of little helper applications.
This little console application simply loops through all the domain names on the server it's being run on (the default instance of IIS) and outputs the relevant log file and folder path into a handy text file. I'll post in another post about how I use this file.
For convenience's sake I have this run on a nightly basis and the text file output to the root of the log file directory, that way when I download the logs during the next day I get the latest update of log file locations and domain names :)
Download the IIS WWW and FTP log file location exporter.
ASP not running on Windows 2003 with ASP.Net installed
Monday, March 12, 2007 10:49:09 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Another post from Doug Setzer from 27Seconds.com :)
At my "day job", the systems guys are building new Windows 2003 servers to upgrade our aging Windows 2000 servers. The plan is to:
- Build the new Windows 2003 server
- Install IIS
- Install .NET
- Run the IIS migration tool from the old Win2k server
That all went as well as could go - little things got mixed up and had to be corrected. But, the server would let you request plain HTML files and ASPX files, but classic ASP pages were returned blank. In poking around Google and the server, we came to find that we had to enable ASP content via:
- IIS Manager
- Web Services Extensions
- Specifically allow Active Server Pages
But, we were still having the same issues. Stopping and restarting IIS didn't help. Nor did a server reboot.
I found a blog post that mentioned checking that the ASP ISAPI has the correct path. It tried a random thought that Microsoft has changed the default name of the "Windows"/"Winnt" folder -- Windows NT4, 2000, etc. all use "Winnt", where as Windows 2003 uses the "Windows" folder. Sure enough, double checking the path to the ASP ISAPI had the wrong path and fixing this path fixed our issues with classic ASP files.
Automatically delete old IIS log files
Saturday, February 10, 2007 4:23:10 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
This is a really useful little VBS script that I’ve been meaning to post for a while now (along with a couple of other little applications I’ve written for log file analysis). I don’t think I wrote this script but at the same time can’t recall where it came from.
It basically traverses the FSO finding files with the designated extension and assuming the match the standard IIS date format, checks whether they’re older than x days, if they are deletes them. Running it is simple, place somewhere obvious on the server and just double click it. Alternatively if you want to read the output, run it from CMD. For safety’s sake, the first time you run it I would leave it just printing out the files that will be deleted.
Personally I don’t schedule this script as although automation is great, I’ll probably have it delete the logs before I’ve had a chance to download them so what I tend to do is download the logs and then after that (or the next time I’m on RDC) I run it, I find that way I ensure I get all the log files i.e. if I go on holiday.
I’ve got two other applications that I’ll post shortly, one outputs the location of the log files for each domain name within IIS and the other combines the log files into one for analysis –it also takes the exported file/folder locations and names the combined log files with the domain’s name –saves a ton of time!
Download the VBS script as a ZIP file
Option ExplicitDim intDaysOld
, strObjTopFolderPath
, strLogFIleSuffix
, ObjFS
, ObjTopFolder
Dim ObjDomainFolder
, ObjW3SvcFolder
, ObjSubFolder
, ObjLogFile
, ObjFile
intDaysOld
= 5 'Number of days to retain on the serverstrObjTopFolderPath
= "" 'The location of your log filesstrLogFIleSuffix
= ".log" 'The suffix of your log filesSet ObjFS
= CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")Set ObjTopFolder
= ObjFS
.GetFolder(strObjTopFolderPath
)For Each ObjDomainFolder in ObjTopFolder
.SubFolders
WScript
.Echo("Folder: " & ObjDomainFolder
.name
) For Each ObjW3SvcFolder in ObjDomainFolder
.SubFolders
WScript
.Echo(" Folder: " & ObjW3SvcFolder
.name
) Set ObjSubFolder
= ObjFS
.GetFolder(ObjW3SvcFolder
) For each ObjLogFile in ObjSubFolder
.files
Set ObjFile
= ObjFS
.GetFile(ObjLogFile
) If datediff
("d",ObjFile
.DateLastModified,Date()) > intDaysOld and lcase
(right
(ObjLogFile
,4))=strLogFIleSuffix then
'***************************************************** 'DON'T UNCOMMENT THIS UNTIL YOU KNOW IT WORKS PROPERLY!!! WScript
.Echo(" Will delete " & ObjSubFolder
.name &
"\" & ObjFile
.name
) 'WScript.Echo(" Deleted " & ObjSubFolder.name & "\" & ObjFile.name) 'ObjFile.Delete '***************************************************** End If Set ObjFile
= nothing
Next Set ObjSubFolder
= nothing
NextNextSet ObjTopFolder
= nothing
Set ObjFS
= nothing
Parsing Apache Log files
Wednesday, November 01, 2006 5:21:16 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
This is a useful Regex that Craig wrote today, it pulls out various info from an apache log file.
private static Regex __Regex
= null;
internal static Regex _Regex
{...}
{
get
{...} 
{
if (__Regex
== null)
{...} {
__Regex
= new Regex(
@"(?<remoteHost>[^\ ]+?)\ (?<remoteIdent>[^\ ]+?)\ (?<remoteUs"
+ @"er>[^\ ]+?)\ \[(?<requestTime>[^\]]+?)\]\ \""(?<request>(?<r"
+ @"equestMethod>[^\ ]+?)?\ ?(?<requestPath>[^\ ]+?)?\ ?(?<reque"
+ @"stProtocol>[^\ ]+?)?)\""\ (?<statusCode>[^\ ]+?)\ (?<sizeByt"
+ @"es>[^\ ]+?)\ \""(?<referer>[^\""]*?)\""\ \""(?<userAgent>[^\""]"
+ @"+?)\""\r?\n?",
RegexOptions
.Compiled & RegexOptions
.IgnoreCase & RegexOptions
.IgnorePatternWhitespace & RegexOptions
.CultureInvariant);
}
__Regex;
}
}
Update: Craig's finally started writing about it, you can read the article here: Apache Log Fun
Custom 404 Error Pages
Friday, June 16, 2006 8:48:54 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I made an interesting discovery this morning. A few weeks ago I was doing a little SEO on The Wargame Company (Devon) and thought I would look into utilising Google SiteMaps. After creating the XML file with the correct format it's just a matter of having Google approve it. They do this by accessing a random page i.e. www.domain.com/GooglesWonderfulPageddmmyyyyhhmmssmmm (which clearly should return a 404) and check the response code -I guess to ensure that you're not trying to spoof the pages in some way.
"What's the problem? I've got custom 404 pages" I hear you cry! Well, if like us you've written some fancy page to handle the error and email you/log it to a database, it turns out that you're not returning a 404 error at all!
What I discovered was that if you configure IIS to handle 404 error pages with a URL you're actually returning a response code of 200. After a little thinking, the only conclusion we could come to was that when setting it as a URL in IIS you're actually redirecting the request which is either a 301 or perhaps a 307 (see http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec6.html for more information on response codes) and then the final page the user hit's returns a 200 (Response Status "OK") rather than the desired 404 -clearly not what we want!
After a little more investigation we also found that the same thing happened when using ASP.Net's built in handlers and the same thing happens, the only time it doesn't is when you handle the 404 with a File in IIS rather than a URL.
"What can I do about it?" Well that's simple, if you're going to use a URL to handle your 404 errors, make sure you change the Response Status Codes to the correct code, i.e. 404, this is pretty simple to do:
ASP.Net 2.0: Page.Response.StatusCode = 404;
ASP.Net 1.1 (I think): Response.StatusCode = 404;
ASP: Response.Status = "404 You are Unauthorized"
I hope that helps someone out there!
Tim
Update: I've just run fiddler on The Wargame Company (Devon) and and can confirm you get a Response Status Code of 301 before the 200.