Unable to host large files on IIS webserver - iis

I'm running IIS 8 on Windows Server 2012R2, and I'm having an issue. I'd like to be able to host large files, but it's causing problems. If I put anything over ~400MB on it, then when I try to access that file from a browser I get a "404 file not found" error.
I should note that smaller files work fine. Any thoughts?

The problem could be that your MIME types need to be modified. From https://serverfault.com/a/78526/12894:
What is probably happening is that your server doesn't know that .war
is a type of file that needs to be downloaded rather than executed. It
then is run through your allowed Web Service Extensions for any
matches. If it doesn't find one, it throws a 404 error even though the
file does in fact exist.
If you set a MIME type for war files of type application/octet-stream,
that should resolve your issue.
See also the Microsoft article Requests for static files return 404 error (IIS 6.0)

Have you tried looking at the Web.config file for the maxrequestlength tag? The problem in this case is not the upload, but rather the request for the file, when the page is loaded. Look for the following line:
<httpruntime maxrequestlength="51200" executiontimeout="7200"/>
Where I set the second number to 2 hours (just a random timeout time) and the first number is the maximum file size that a page that needs the file can request. In this case, you can have 500Mb of upload size. This may fix it, however, there's also another section that you can edit, added in for security purposes:
<security>
<requestFiltering>
<requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength="524288000"/>
</requestFiltering>
</security>
Here, again you have 1024x1024*500=500Mb. This is edited in the session properties - you can do that through the Management Interface or through writing your own scripts. Have a look at MSDN here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725820(v=ws.10).aspx

Related

Write requests to log file in IIS

I have a cabinet which consists of several servers, handling quite a bit of traffic.
I need to construct a system to keep statistics - and I struggle to find out if it's possible or makes sense to make a null-request to a server? That is, calling something like http://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX?objectid=9563828&sreq=2854&nc=29291947829 and letting IIS do nothing with it, except adding the request in the log.
As mentioned, my servers handle a lot of traffic - and every bit of CPU-power and byte I can save, counts in the long run = save money.
At the moment, my plan is to make IIS return nothing on 404-errors, but I'm not sure if this is the best approach. And are all requests logged (having caching in mind)?
Theories or suggestions, please?
Solved - it is possible by adding
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<httpErrors existingResponse="PassThrough" />
</system.webServer>
</configuration>
in the configuration file. The reason I didn't succeed, is that this command is apparently only supported from IIS 7.0 and later and I was testing it on a version 6.5

How to display an error page for static files when using existingResponse="PassThrough" in IIS 7

To be able to get my application (Umbraco CMS) to handle 404 errors, I need to have following setting in my web.config:
<httpErrors existingResponse="PassThrough" />
It works well for displaying a custom 404 error page from Umbraco, but it doesn't work for displaying a 404 error page when a static file cant be found.
For example http://www.example.com/non-existing-file.png returns a 404 status code, but respons is blank. That fits with this description of the PassThrough mode:
PassThrough – If existingResponse is seen as “PassThrough”, custom
error module will always pass through responses from modules. This
setting will make custom error module return blank response if modules
don’t set any text.
(http://blogs.iis.net/ksingla/archive/2008/02/18/what-to-expect-from-iis7-custom-error-module.aspx)
What is the "custom error module"? And how do I get it to return a non blank response?
Update
After stepping through the request handling routines in Umbraco (with a debugger), I have a better understanding of the problem space. As written in the citation above, when existingResponse="PassThrough" then all handling of http errors is done in the custom modules. So to answer my own question, a "custom error module" is in this instance the "UmbracoModule".
One way to solve this problem would be to create a new custom module that will check for the existence of the static files on the disk. It can be done quite nice, I read the list of static files from IIS and read the configuration of customErrors or httpErrors elements from the web.config to get a custom error page. But I kind of think this is crude solution. I would much rather pass the responsibility back to IIS.
Any ideas?
You're correct. For the benefit of anyone else looking for help with this, here's some extra information on 404 handling.
Old Umbraco wiki page - describes your solution using the file /config/umbracoSettings.config
404 for files - works for Umbraco 7 and describes the use of the tag <httpErrors/>
IIS version 6 fix - fixing on IIS6 and how it compares with IIS7

Dotless File Yields 404 Error in IIS

I've been successfully using .less files in my dev Cassini server (with dotless) for a few weeks but when I publish to my local IIS server they yield 404 errors. Attaching my debugger to IIS yields no exceptions. I've restarted my IIS app pool and server as well.
Any ideas?
Looks like you're missing a mime type on IIS.
For IIS7 add the following to your web.config:
<system.webServer>
<staticContent>
<mimeMap fileExtension=".less" mimeType="text/css" />
</staticContent>
</system.webServer>
For IIS6 you can do (presuming you have administrator RDP access):
cscript adsutil.vbs set W3SVC/1/Root/MimeMap ".less, text/css"
Where /1/ is the IIS number of the site.
Just adding (quite late, I realize) my two bits to this discussion.
I just ran into the same symptoms and the previously mentioned fix did not work for me. I did however end up finding another reason for these symptoms and a solution for this.
The 404 response in my case contained the following message in the body of the response:
/* Error Occurred. Consult log or view on local machine. */
This seems to be an indicator that the less file was indeed found and the request was being processed by dotLess (the message can be found in dotLess's source code), but a FileNotFoundException occurred during processing the request.
I tracked down the problem to an #import statement that referred to a .less file that was mysteriously not present on the IIS server, even though it was present under the development server.
It turned out that the build action for this problematic .less file was set to None, not to Content, like all the other .less files in my project.
So the next logical question was why on earth was the Build Action incorrect?
Well, I had added the file as a .css file, then decided to import it into a .less file and thus renamed it to .less (since .css is a subset of .less, but less does not import css files). I repeated the process with a new .css file and found that the problem was reproducable.
It seems that Visual Studio changes the build action from Content to None behind the scenes as an unexpected side-effect of renaming .css to .less. Thus the renamed .less file does not get published to the IIS server.

IIS7.5 OutputCacheModule kernel caching 'public' ignoring URL

Have some strange behaviour regarding output caching in an ASP.NET 4 application on IIS 7.5. I've been able to repeat the problem simply on other empty setups, I'm certain this is a bug, but unsure how to report it to Microsoft.
A site in IIS responds to more than 1 domain, the .NET application examins the hostname, and produces content accordingly. For example, it may print the name of the request URL in a blank page. Eg, www.first-domain.com, and www.second-domain.com
The web.config has the appropriate caching, urlCompression, and httpCompression all turned OFF under the system.webServer node.
The aspx page sets the cache-control header for public, with either a future date for expires, or a max-age value.
Visiting www.first-domain.com outputs the page that successfully writes 'www.first-domain.com'.
However, visiting www.second-domain.com outputs a page that writes 'www.first-domain.com'.
Examining the failed-request-traces, System.Web.Caching.OutputCacheModule has found the cached output (even though the .config files have turned the function off), the cache has matched even though the request URL hostname are different, and thus the second request will output the results of the first request to the different domain for as long as the max-age/expiry was set for, before the correct page for the second-domain will appear.
Either setting cache-control to private, or removing the 'OutputCache' module in the web.config solves the problem, while maintaining the correct cache-control headers sent to the browser, but obviously, I can't take advantage of kernel caching when I need it.
I can't find any MSDN documentation on how the OutputCacheModule is configured.
Has anyone else experienced this issue, how can I go about enabling kernel caching and let it take into account URL Hostname (without separating the application to different sites in IIS).
Thanks.
Update:
Adding SetSlidingExpiration has no effect, as the kernal cache still caches the output regardless of the request hostname. The only scenario now is to either disable output caching, or run a duplicate instance of the app on each domain it will run - considering the drop in server performance this would result in vs. the increase of performance gained in using output caching, we decided to disable output caching for this app.
No answer has been provided after 9 months, and no solution has been found, only a workaround, perhaps this will be fixed in the next version of IIS greater than 7.5...
--
Adding SetSlidingExpiration has no effect, as the kernal cache still caches the output regardless of the request hostname. The only scenario now is to either disable output caching, or run a duplicate instance of the app on each domain it will run - considering the drop in server performance this would result in vs. the increase of performance gained in using output caching, we decided to disable output caching for this app.
I was having a very similar problem and no solutions here helped me.
TLDR: Forcefully removing the OutputCache module on the Web.config was the only solution I found.
My scenario was a little bit different.
I have CORS set up in Application_BeginRequest, answering Access-Control-Allow-Origin for specific hosts that call me (setting it to * has not been reliable).
My Controller also sets Cache-control: public for it's responses.
What I found
Whenever I set Cache-control: public, IIS forcefully caches the response. Breakpoints on either Application_BeginRequest or my Controller were never hit a second time.
Disabling output and kernel caching via IIS Manager as seen below would have me hitting the Application_BeginRequest breakpoints, but never got me into the Controller. Something was still caching responses.
This article suggested removing the OutputCache module from IIS would help.
<system.webServer>
<modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">
<remove name="OutputCache" />
</modules>
</system.webServer>
Doing so allowed me to hit my Controller, finally.
What would help even more
If someone from MS or not could shine a light whether there is a way to change this behavior. OutputCache could be useful in some parts of an application and unnecessary in others.
Beware
Maybe I'm(we're?) solving the wrong problem here.
Maybe IIS was taking over caching in this scenario because it should. Maybe proxies along the way between my server and the user would behave just like that in that exact scenario, and if that's the case then working around this on IIS is wrong. I'll have to figure that out and maybe you should too.
I have similar problem. I use custom url rewriter. I have pages example.com/articles and example.com/art-ANY_ID.html. Both url map to articles.aspx (in second example as articles.aspx?id=ANY_ID). It worked fine with ASP.NET 2.0 and Classic pipeline mode. After we have changed it to ASP.NET 4 and integrated mode, we have got strange behaviour: both url return identically output. It was any page like example.com/art-ANY_ID.html.
Now we removed <add extension=".html" policy="CacheUntilChange" kernelCachePolicy="CacheUntilChange" /> from section <caching enabled="true" enableKernelCache="true"> and it fine works. I not understand why http.sys cache it.
Have you find any explanations?

404 error with IIS 7.0

I have a text file that I am trying to browse to using the browser http://files.mydomain.com/test.txt and I get a:
HTTP Error 404.0 - Not found
I double checked and the text file does exist. When I add a test.htm file, I have no issues.
Can someone help? Something tells me it's security issue.
Have you checked the following:
Your DNS 'A' record for 'files' is pointing to the correct IP address
If your server is using a shared IP address across multiple sites have you configured a HTTP host header?
Is there a mime type set for the .txt extension?
Have you made any changes to the Handler Mappings for the site? e.g. mapped the .htm extension to say the ASP ISAPI filter and accidentally removed the StaticFile handler?
Can you serve other static content such as .jpg, .gif, .pdf etc?
Kev has covered most of the possible problems, but for reference there is another possibility.
Confirm that in Request Filtering you either
have .txt as an Allowed extension, or
have Allow unlisted file name extensions ticked in Edit Request Filtering Settings
The same effect can be achieved with the following web.config section:
<system.webServer>
<security>
<requestFiltering>
<fileExtensions>
<add fileExtension=".txt" allowed="true" />
</fileExtensions>
</requestFiltering>
</security>
</system.webServer>
Also make sure also that the website is started. I was getting 404 and then realized that the Default Website was stopped because another website (Sharepoint) was using port 80. Sometimes the obvious is what gets you.
Add the MIME-Typ by going to ...
features / Mime-type
right click,
add,
put in the file extension ".txt"
and the mime-type "text/plain"
ok
et voila
I know this is an old post, but this might still help somebody out. I ran into this problem with my Asp.Net Core application. In my case it turned out that static files are served from a subdirectory called 'wwwroot' by default. Creating that subdirectory and moving the file in their solved it for me:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/fundamentals/index?view=aspnetcore-2.2&tabs=windows#web-root

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