If you activate Windows and change "SkipRearm" to 1 before you sysprep you won't have to reactive your new image.

http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/vista/vista_activation_hack_skiprearm.htm

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc721973%28WS.10%29.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766514%28WS.10%29.aspx

keepalive type ssl - SSL HELLO keepalives for this service. Use this keepalive for all backend services supporting SSL. The CSS sends a client HELLO to connect the SSL server. After the CSS receives a HELLO from the server, the CSS closes the connection with a TCP RST.

keepalive type tcp - A TCP session that determines service viability (3-way handshake and reset (RST)). By default and in compliance with RFC 1122, the CSS sends a RST to close the socket on a server port for TCP keepalives. A RST is faster than a FIN, because a RST requires only one packet, while a FIN can take up to four packets. If your servers require a graceful closing of a socket using a FIN, you can use a script keepalive.

Use the advanced-balance command to specify an advanced load-balancing method for a content rule that includes stickiness. A content rule is “sticky” when additional sessions from the same user or client are sent to the same service as the first connection, overriding normal load balancing. By default, the advanced balancing method is disabled.

source:

http://theether.net/kb/100005

1362 days, 12 hours, 16 minutes of uptime!

Windows Server 2003 with no Service Packs.

Yes... although the saying goes... if it isn't broke don't fix it, we are going to patch it

Thankfully there is a great tool that many of you are familiar with, Process Explorer.

1. DRAC or get console access to the server
2. go to http://live.sysinternals.com and download procexp.exe
3. open process explorer

4. open the "View" menu and click on, "Select Columns" and choose "Command Line"

5. sort by "Process" and look for the "svchost.exe".  If you expand the "Command Line" column, you will see a line *"svchost.exe -k termsvcs"

6. End this "svchost.exe" process by right clicking and "Kill Process".

7. Now you can just go to "services.msc" and restart Terminal Services!

note: In 2008 you will have to start procexp.exe with "Administrator rights" in order to kill processes.

80070776: The object exporter specified was not found

80070776: The object exporter specified was not found

While capturing TCP dumps using Wireshark i was noticing that in the traffic the server being monitored was sending its server name to my monitoring server for some reason.  I thought this was quite odd, so I added the shortname of "server" and NOT the FQDN name to my HOST file along with the public ip addresses of the server and this worked like charm!

The answer isn't what you think... read on.

Ok why does Windows Server only go up to 128GB in 32bit

The big daddy of the server version, Windows Server Datacenter, only supports up to 128GB on 32bit.  This is because, in order for the server to be able to map that much physical memory to virtual the OS has a subsystem called Memory Manager that use a PFN database.  In the PFN database, the Memory Manager keeps track of all of the pages in memory and keeps this loaded in virtual memory for performance reasons.  So this PFN database resides in Kernel mode and takes up, out of the 2GB, almost 930MB!  This means the Kernel is only left with 1GB for everything else, such as drivers, cache and more!  Now this isn't the same as using the /3GB switch as after you get above 16GB of installed physical RAM the OS ignores the /3GB swtich as it needs more than 1GB of kernel memory to map anything larger.

Window Server supports up to 2TB, WOW!

Now i know what your saying... what server needs 2TB!?  Well, remember we once thought this back in the good old days, and i'm sure we will one day get ther.  So the truth is, when the Windows team was releasing the OS, there simply wasn't anything out there that they couldn't find anything above 2TB.  So, since Microsoft can't support something they can't test, they had to put in this cap.  Expect this to raise as more hardware comes out.  Anyone say... Windows 2008 R2?

Ok, well can i please get more memory on my workstation!

All 32-bit Windows clients including Windows Vista, Windows XP and Windows 2000 Professional, support a maximum of 4GB of physical memory.  Now why is this do you think?  We know Server 2003/2008 can support more memory with the use of the /PAE switch right?  I mean in Windows XP2 the /PAE switch comes enabled by default as a requirement for /DEP, so what gives?

What they found was that many of the systems would crash, hang, or become unbootable because some device drivers, commonly those for video and audio devices that are found typically on clients but not servers, were not programmed to expect physical addresses larger than 4GB. As a result, the drivers truncated such addresses, resulting in memory corruptions and corruption side effects. Server systems commonly have more generic devices and with simpler and more stable drivers, and therefore hadn't generally surfaced these problems.  So.. thats why they capped it.

But wait.... I have 4GB of RAM in my awesomes liquid cooled neon glowing desktop at home and I still can't see 4GB of ram that I saved up all my money to buy!  What gives?

On the client OS, we know that 4GB is the limit for physical RAM.  This may show up lower as not only the OS uses this memory, but it is also shared with device memory.   Because of what we learned earlier, everything is mapped below the 4GB limit to maintain backwards compatibility.  So devices like your big bad video cards, sound, and network cards take up... say 500MB then you'll only be left with, 3.5GB in System Properties.  Take a look at the "msinfo32" application to see installed RAM and what the OS can actually use.

Windows xp and vista 64 bit does not have this issue.

Well guys, I hope this answers some questions, and if you want more info there is an excellent article, by the one and only, Mark Russinovich: http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/07/21/3092070.aspx

So I'm writing this article to shed some light to the black sheep of IIS and to give you a good understanding on why you would even think of running one.

Grow a Web Garden

To increase performance, especially if you have some latency in the backend, have memory constraints, or a leaky app, is to create a Web Garden.

Yes, They're Benefits to Web Gardens

First, resource contention.  Now, what does this mean?  Well say your experiencing an issue where your ASP.NET application is running out of memory.  For instance, if you are on a x32 bit OS then your Worker Process can only grow up to 2GB.  If you are unable to go to a x64 bit OS and recycling your Application Pool is not an option (I'll get to this problem later in this doc), then a Web Garden is a great alternative.

Second, if a Web app causes the WP to hang or jump into a endless loop, then the other worker processes can keep servicing requests. This is important because you may be facing an application that is poorly written (yea, i know, its never the developers code) and the Worker Process’s threads may be in a hung state waiting for information from a database. By having multiple Worker Processes, this will have 2 (or more) different processes, operating independently, to the back end database. The result is you will not be limited to the threads in an Application Pool not hanging, and therefore more reliable.
Worker Processes don't receive requests. Worker Processes take them from a queue dedicated to their app pool implemented inside HTTP.SYS.

If the worker process is unhealthy at the point it's not taking requests from the app pool's queue, then the requests will start queuing up and that's exactly why we have a recycle rule which can be configured based on the number of requests queued (I believe by default it will recycle if the queue reaches 4000 requests).

If we have a web garden scenario then the queuing effect will likely not happen because the other worker processes from the garden will keep taking requests from the queue, however that specific unhealthy worker process will still be shutdown when W3SVC realizes it's not responding to the ping...

What about Session State?!

First, lets go into what happens when you recycle a Worker Process:

When a worker process requests a recycle, the WWW service initiates an overlapped recycle, creating a new worker process to replace the old one. While the new worker process is starting, the old process continues to serve requests. After the new process starts and initializes successfully, the WWW service instructs the old worker process to shut down. At this point, the old worker process stops accepting new requests from HTTP.sys and begins to shut down. The WWW service allows the old worker process a configured time period in which to finish processing its requests before the worker process is shut down. The WWW service terminates the worker process if it fails to shut down within the configured time.

You can configure how long the WWW server waits for the old Worker Process to shutdown before it terminates the WP by changing the "Shutdown Time Limit" in the "Health" tab in the Application Pool's properties within IIS.

Periodic recycling of your application pools is recommended. It helps to clean up memory fragmentation, memory leaks, abandoned threads and other clutter.

So the one of the biggest reasons why people don't like the idea of recycling an App Pool, is because you will loose Session State information while between the old and new WP starts up.  Examples of this, are your users complaining that they have to start over while completing a long form or having to relogin to your application.

Saving Session State data outside of the Application Pool

So... how do you do it.

There are 5 Different Session-State Modes:

1. InProc mode, which stores session state in memory on the Web server. This is the default.
2. StateServer mode, which stores session state in a separate process called the ASP.NET state service. This ensures that session state is preserved if the Web application is restarted and also makes session state available to multiple Web servers in a Web farm.
3. SQLServer mode stores session state in a SQL Server database. This ensures that session state is preserved if the Web application is restarted and also makes session state available to multiple Web servers in a Web farm.
4. Custom mode, which enables you to specify a custom storage provider.
5. Off mode, which disables session state.

Be Careful

Before you can use an out-of-process state method for managing and storing session state, you must ensure that the objects defined by and used by your ASP.NET application are serializable. Making an object serializable is usually a matter of adding the object class with the Serializable attribute. Consult with the ASP.NET application developer to ensure that all of the objects stored in session state by your ASP.NET applications are serializable.

So 'InProc" mode (default) stores the information inside the W3WP.exe process.  This is why, when you recycle the App Pool, all of your users session data goes with it.  So if your going to run multiple App Pools under one server, you can simply use the "StateServer" mode.  You could also use this mode if you were going to setup a Web Farm (not covered here), but I suggest use the "SQLServer" mode instead.

To configure an ASP.NET application to use StateServer mode, in the application's Web.config file do the following:

Set the stateConnectionString attribute to tcpip=serverName:42424.

The following example shows a configuration setting for StateServer mode where session state is stored on a remote computer named SampleStateServer:

Set the mode attribute of the sessionState element to StateServer.

<configuration>
<system.web>
<sessionState mode="StateServer"
stateConnectionString="tcpip=SampleStateServer:42424"
cookieless="false"
timeout="20"/>
</system.web>
</configuration>

That's all that needs to be done.  Now you can, hopefully, know the benefits of having a Web Garden, and examples on why you would want to use one.  As you can see, there are some reasons at why you would want to use web gardens in some scenario but they won't cure the world of hunger

References:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/24e3c22e-79a9-4f07-a407-dbd0e7f35432.mspx?mfr=true

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/f11b8294-cc42-4e9c-8482-6257bf3b80f2.mspx?mfr=true

ASP.NET

Session-State Modes

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178586.aspx

Some of our web applications require .NET framework 1.1 while others require framework 2.When we tried to migrate our applications from the old server to new server, we encountered the issue that 64-bit IIS can not run 32-bit ASP.NET v1.1, without running IIS in 32-bit mode.

We followed the solution described at the following link:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894435

Though this seems to work but this has made ASP.NET tab on website properties disappear.

I did some searching around and it seems this is a known issue. Here is a link from a msdn blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/pmanchan/archive/2007/02/13/asp-net-tab-is-missing-in-the-iis-mmc-in-the-web-server-running-windows-xp-pro-x64-edition-with-net-framework-2-0-wow64.aspx

It seems that the only work around is the following:
"To configure the virtual directories to use specifc ASP.NET versions, you will have to use the command line tool.

aspnet_regiis -s <path of the application>
(Install scriptmaps for this version at the specified path, recursively. Existing
scriptmaps of lower version are upgraded to this version.)
E.g. aspnet_regiis.exe -s W3SVC/1/ROOT/SampleApp1

OR

aspnet_regiis -sn <path of the application>
(Install scriptmaps for this version at the specified path, non-recursively.
Existing scriptmaps of lower version are upgraded to this version.)"

After some research and troubleshooting, I was able to get to the
desktop by disabling the Computer Browser service and the DCOM Server
Process Launcher service. By doing so several applications no longer
work.

In the Event Log you see errors such as:
Event Type: Error
Event Source: DCOM
Event Category: None
Event ID: 10010
Date: 7/22/2008
Time: 2:30:35 PM
User: N/A
Computer: 168612-TS1
Description:
The server

did not register with DCOM within the required timeout.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

If you go to http://live.sysinternals.com and download regmon.exe you are able to see that you have major problems in the registry with permissions!

It appears as some MS patch changed the permissions on the following
registry key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID

In order to resolve the problem, the following permissions were added

Registry Key: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID (and all child keys and values)

Permissions Added:

Authenticated users: Read access
Network Service: full control

MS Article (unrelated):
FIX: A COM+ application stops responding, and desktop icons and the taskbar may not appear as expected on a computer that is running Windows Server 2003
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/904388/en-us