I'm making some changes to a legacy classic ASP application. I've made the changes locally, and now I want to copy the changed files to the server. At the same time, I need to download the Access database, add some fields to some tables, and upload it again. For this reason, I need to be able to stop visitors from modifying the database while this is happening.
My main question is, what is the best way to setup a quick "Down for Maintenance" page that will be shown immediately and no matter which page the visitor requests. The application is already established, so I'd rather an answer that didn't require me to rework the application's architecture.
My second question (maybe this should be a separate question):
Is there a better way to add fields to a db table than to copy it down, modify, and stick it up again? Please forgive if that's a dumb question - I'm new to ASP - new to Windows too.
I only have FTP access to the remote server.
Thanks.
two ways:
1
if you do a server-side include in every asp page you can do a response.redirect in that include to /upgrading.html
2
in global.asa you can do a response.redirect in the session on start event. THis is probably the best way. Will only work for .asp pages, not if the client comes to a .html page.
Do you have any control panel access to the site at all?
When I used to run a number of ASP Classic sites I often turned them off for the five minutes required to do what I needed.
Rude to do to your visitors I know.
As others have said you could redirect to a page, but that won't stop people visiting static content in html pages, but then that probably won't matter, at least it stops them making changes to the mdb whilst you download it.
It's a pity that ASP.net's app_offline.htm doesn't work for ASP classic.
Another option I used to use was to create a default.htm file that had the offline message, and the way IIS was setup default.htm overrode default.asp, so simply uploading default.htm changed the homepage. This of course doesn't stop anyone using any of the other .asp pages.
So no real answer! Sorry.
If you have just FTP access to the server (and no control over the IIS) just insert a response.redirect to the "down for maintenace" page in top of all the asp pages, and remove it when the update is completed.
The changes to the database can be performed with the ALTER TABLE statement.
With regards to the "Down Maintanance" page issue you can and taking mapache's idea a step further if there is an included file (for a header) in each of the pages you can put the Response.Redirect in that one file and upload that in place. This will avoid making changes to all pages.
Another option is to upload a temp html file which will be found first by IIS. In IIS you can set which page name.ext are looked for in a domain/folder. For example when you browse to www.example.com you don't specify the page you are looking for so it could load index.html or index.htm for example depending on setup. It will depend on your hosts configuration setup, but a bit of trial and error I'm sure you can find out which one they use. Common ones for IIS are default.htm, default.html, index.html and index.htm. You can then put it in each of the folders in the website (not ideal I know) and then carry out your maintenance.
When updating databases you can run a migration script, written in sql, to update the schema and data of the db. As you only have FTP access this will require some sort of page you can paste the sql into and run. This however opens security issues so downloading the db, making the changes and then uploading again is probably easier. In addition to doing it this way you can also save the file and you'll have a backup :-)
Hope this helps.
Better than an include file, just use the Global.asa.
In the Global.asa's Application_onStart, add
Application("Offline")= True
at the top of all of your ASP files, add
If VarType(Application("Offline")) = vbBoolean Then If Application("Offline") Then Response.Redirect "App_Offline.htm"
(The double-if gets around the lack of VBScript's short-circuit operators, and therefore any data type errors.)
You could even set the Global.asa code to
Set fso= Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Application("Offline")= fso.FileExists(Server.MapPath("App_Offline.htm"))
Set fso= Nothing
Which would enable the offline page if it exists, like ASP.NET. However, the application start code is only reparsed when the server is reset (using iisreset), or when the Global.asa file is modified, merely adding the App_Offline.htm will not be enough.
Add below code in web.config
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" />
</system.webServer>
</configuration>
And place app_offline under root folder. This will work.
Related
I want to secure static files (images, .txt files) from unauthenticated users. How can I implement the user authentication to the website so that the static files in specific folder also get secured? I have used simple authentication in a login.asp file and started a session for authenticated user and I check the session value for protected .asp files. But I have no idea how to secure static content on Classic ASP website.
The website is hosted on IIS 7 with Integrated pipeline mode.
You already asked this, and I answered it, and I will give you the same answer.
You will need to use BASIC AUTHENTICATION to restrict access on static files in IIS (Classic ASP). Otherwise, you need to save the static content in another format and encrypt it and only make it viewable by people authenticated by your program.
Please don't ask this again, the answers will not be different.
If using Basic Authentification is not your cup of tea, one possibility would be to replace your static files with an ASP file that upon authorization, will output the correct file. If necessary, you can set the ContentType of the Response to the appropriate type. The link http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/173308 show you how to do that with an image stored inside a database but of course, you can take whatever you want as the source of the file. In the case of .TXT files, you can even directly take the file and simply add a small section of ASP code at the beginning for doing the check.
All of this required extra work. There is no way to simply activate some sort of protection with the session state for static files without extra work.
Old question but -- Most MS servers with Classic Asp installed have several default folders which cannot be accessed except via ASP. they are /bin /app_code /app_data and there may be others. It depends on your hosting company. Windows 10 IIS (their cut down dev & test suite) locks these by default. Using ASP code to retrieve and display text and html is very easy but I'm not sure how to do images. If you have very low traffic, one way would be to copy the image file to an unlocked folder and give it a random name, then access it normally in an IMG tag, then delete it after use. (I came here looking for a better method).
Update: The answer to loading images via ASP is here -- displaying images from sql database with classic asp ... see bottom answer by "HeavenCore" and, instead of Response.BinaryWrite rs("ImageBlob"), get the binary of the image into Your variable, eg: BinaryImageData and do Response.BinaryWrite BinaryImageData
I hope you can help me, I have a website and constantly the .htaccess file is hacked to redirect to another page, every time I delete that file, when I check the file after 5 minutes, again the file is written to redirect to a page with malware, I changed passwords of sftp, the page itself and the database several times from different computers with windows and linux but this file is constantly changed in the main page and creating hacked .htaccess in the subdirectories, Why does this keep happening? HELP
The web page is hosted in Dreamhost.
If the permissions on your .htaccess file are set so that only you can modify it, then you will find one of the following:
An entry in your FTP access log showing .htaccess being uploaded
An entry in the control panel access log showing the .htaccess being edited
An entry in your HTTP access log at the time that the modification happens (often a POST, but not necessarily). This is often to a generalised backdoor process of some sort.
A crontab entry that makes this modification
Additionally, you will find that your site was hacked somehow - e.g. insecure version of JCE editor, poor passwords, nonumber extensions, flash uploader, failure to update for known security problems, or similar. It's all in the logs. You will also find that there are a stack of little PHP files or an extra admin account which will let the attacker back once you sort out the obvious part of the problem.
Recently we moved our server from testing to production.
We had an issue with caching some referenced scripts so we needed to edit site.master and put some artificial query parameters on our referenced scripts.
From what I thought you wouldn't need to restart IIS simply modifying a .master page, but the other day I tried uploading a handful .master pages because we eliminated some code on them, and the site went down until we restarted IIS.
Any insight to the way IIS and MASTER pages work would be stellar.
Thank You for your help.
Generally speaking you wouldn't necessarily need to restart your website for a change in your master page. However, if you modify the code-behind you need to compile the site, because Sitefinity is a Web Application Project, not a Web Site Project. This means the full site is compiled to a DLL, so any changes in the code require a new compile to be run and pushed to your site.
In addition, Sitefinity makes use of caching to improve performance, so you might need to restart the site to clear the cache for any changes to things like master pages or user control (ascx) files as well.
I hope this is helpful!
I have a folder that contains log files. They're not super critical, but I don't want total strangers looking through them. I'd like to put a password on that one folder. The folder and its contents are served straight up from IIS, so I'm not looking for a coding solution.
With Apache I'd use a .htaccess file.
With IIS it's possible to use multiple Web.config files at various levels to control this kind of thing.
So, what goes in the Web.config file that allows me to require a password when accessing this folder?
I'm happy for the password to pop up in a dialog like old-school websites used to do (not sure what this is called -- I think it is digest authentication) and so avoid any loginUrl redirection stuff
I'm happy to put the password in the Web.config file in plain text if it's easier
The application is internet facing and running on shared hosting, so I don't have much control over the box beyond what I can configure in Web.config.
You can achieve this using the <location path="..."/> element of web.config file.
Check this link for step-by-step instructions..
What is the handler mapping needed in IIS 7.x to produce CAPTCHA images? The only one that works seems to be the wildcard, which is ridiculous from a security point of view. In tightening the security of ColdFusion according to the lock-down guide at http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/whitepapers/pdf/91025512_cf9_ lockdownguide_wp_ue.pdf, they recommend to remove this wildcard mapping, but that seems to break captcha.
Not sure what the setting is but you could try: Save the image to a web-accessible folder using the destination attribute. Use img src to display it. Add a scheduled task that every hour/day would delete images older than that time period.